skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> > I see however that people are certainly more satisfied with a bad answer

> Why do you assume I, or the interviewer, was looking for an easy answer?

I don't assume that. I wrote bad. Bad != easy.

As I watched the interview the first time, my first thought was also "he doesn't answer the question" (so "people (who) are certainly more satisfied" included me at that moment!) but then as I've concentrated on what he said, I was glad that he did it that way.
And sadly, such a wasted opportunity with such a terrific author. Of all the interesting question the columnist could have asked, sigh.
Yeah. Which makes the objections even more mystifying.
Apple really have worked out the importance of a consistent platform with regular updates.

Google really stuffed up by not ensuring from day one that all Android devices MUST update from a central, Google controlled resource.

Android shouldn't be fragmented but googles poor decisions mean it is. The outcome is that when disastrous security flaws are revealed, the best Google can do is say "errr, please, phone vendors, we'd like it if you considered maybe offering an optional critical security update." The phone vendors say "what, we've got better things to do." Royal fuck up.
Desalination would also work well with (future) cheap photovoltaic generated electricity. It'd be a perfect use for overproduction of electricity since the desalinated water can be stored easily.
Basic Income.
Generate table width dynamic json Data (jQuery)
Thank you, that's refreshing and I hadn't heard about it. Something constructive after this onslaught of wrong assumptions, disguised ad hominems and judgemental comments!
You can look at Cochrane collaborations. These show that exercise alone doesn't do much for weight loss. Most people who exercise and who need to lose weight overestimate the calories they lose from exercise and underestimate the calories they get from food, and so they end up not doing enough exercise and then thinking they can have a food treat.

Exercise is almost always a good idea. It just shouldn't be pushed as something primarily for weight loss.
The $12 Trillion Fat Finger
> I think it's because ordinary everyday English language doesn't have a good way to tell someone that their question is wrong

Many people have a tendency to get defensive when it's pointed out that they're wrong about something in general. They have difficulty separating an attack on, say, a logical falsehood, from an attack on their character or themselves. This is doubly true if the other party seems frustrated, which Feynman seems like he might have been - if only a little, and no matter how understandably - because even if you can convince yourself rationally of the difference, you're now dealing with emotions, and convincing yourself emotionally of the difference is a whole different - and I believe more difficult - challenge.

Especially because they're not always separated. If someone criticizes everything you ever do, it's likely because they're critical of you.

I can read "all your code sucks, it's terrible, you suck at writing code" and interpret it as a generalized self-deprecating comment about human fallibility in the context of programming, the tongue-in-cheek rationale about why we should all use static typing, unit tests, fuzzing, LISP, or whatever. However, I've had the advantage of decades of dealing with this stuff, of dealing with my own mistakes and the mistakes of others, and being frustrated by it, and enjoying the benefits of being corrected. Were such corrections a controlled substance, I'd be addicted or dead from overdose at this point. I've come to value them, and I can appreciate the truth of the in-joke.

Yet if I repeat it to my mother - without carefully bracketing it in explanations - it'll just be extremely rude. Not because she can't or doesn't appreciate the knowledge, or the fundamental point, but because in her experience, "you suck" is a personal attack - it hasn't been twisted into some kind of fundamental greek tragedy of programming like it has in mine.

But returning to Feynman - to me, and I believe to you - he comes across as someone willing to explain to us in great detail things in ways we'll understand. We value that highly, and if he expresses a little impatience or frustration, we look past that as a completely natural, a place we've all been, and don't take it personally. If anything, we might appreciate that he doesn't feel the need to coddle us.

To others, that he can't even be bothered to hide his impatience or frustration with us, as social etiquette might demand, is rude - not something to be appreciated. He puts on a grand show of how even the interviewer's question is flawed, raising himself at the expense of the interviewer. There's a higher sensitivity to social cohesion - likely quite reasonably, as their day jobs value that social cohesion more. It's at odds with the more... militant style of pursuing the truth, of cutting straight to the point and making it clear without sugarcoating it in niceties.

That he has a point only means we can begrudgingly appreciate it instead of just being offended.
> How does the train stay on the tracks?

Since you picked that example: which necessary concepts do you think he mentioned, left unexplained, and aren't familiar from everyday life?
> Voters never see the effects of the immigration laws the politicians write.

Politicians rarely do that either. I wish they all got a heavy accent, put on an agal and did a few trips for comparison.
From Hobby to Industry
US immigration is really terrible. My first time through I was shocked at how unfriendly and inefficient the system was. It made a big impact on how I viewed the country.
New “Social Media Backlash” App Highlights Sensitivity in Tech
Just to clarify, when I say Erlang should run on the JVM, I obviously mean Erlang +OTP.
Who in the World Would Donate USD700M to the Malaysian Prime Minister?
I assume 1. Get educated refers to the internet and the rise of things like Khan Academy but 25% of americans don't have any internet (that includes mobile) at home.

http://www.census.gov/history/pdf/2013computeruse.pdf
If you find out someone who has used your computer was involved in an act of terrorism, then delete evidence of their guilt, I'm not sure I understand why that would not be a crime.

This guy was not prosecuted for deleting his browser history, he was prosecuted for deleting information he knew was relevant to a criminal terrorism investigation.
Exactly. See The Paris Review's interview with Ursula K. Le Guin for a comparison: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fic...
"In the end, the only safe way to allow unprivileged mounts may be the filesystem in user space (FUSE) mechanism, which isolates the filesystem code into a separate user-space process."

Which is how QNX, the message-passing real-time OS, does it. All file systems are in user space. ZIP file systems were added easily, for example. QNX has a process which starts at boot time to manage pathname connections to "resource manager" programs. Programs can register for a portion of the pathname space.
Pathnames are a level of abstraction below file systems.

Linux keeps adding the ability to put more in user space, with interprocess message passing, drivers in user space, and file systems in user space. But the old in-kernel code for the same things never gets thrown out, and the bolted-on user space capabilities are slower than the kernel ones. Message passing support and CPU dispatching have to be tightly integrated for this to work fast, and because message passing is an afterthought in UNIX/Linux, it never is.
The "or the like" was the end of the list of ways in which you could model the divergence between Unix time and the number of SI seconds between January 1st 1970 UTC and the present.

One way of modelling it is as saying that seconds in Unix time all have the same length, that differs by some factor from SI seconds, though that factor changes every time a leap second is introduced.

Another way is to say that seconds don't all have constant length; some seconds have a different length than the rest of the seconds (like those in the hour or day leading up to a leap second, or even just that the one second before the leap second is twice as long as a regular second).

The "or the like" was just a hedge against other possible ways of describing this divergence that I hadn't described in that one quick sentence.

Pretending that leap seconds don't exist is all well and good if you have a completely closed system, but as soon as you try to synchronize with or compare timestamps with UTC, you'll start running into problems.
IMO Green's, Kaku's and by far most todays' popular physicist interviews aren't even in the same league as Feynman's. They all seem to hide behind platitudes that don't facilitate any deeper understanding, while Feynman tries to be truthful to science, i.e. he tries to not do any false statements just for the sake of simplifying the matter. He describes using simple words rather than to break it down.
It's a standard thing NYT does and it's pretty obvious that the questions are pre-written and sent as a batch.

http://www.nytimes.com/column/by-the-book
Given the downvotes, I'm curious. Does anyone care to dispute the correctness of any of the 4 claims?
F'en BS. You visit the "Midwest" twice a year and there's just people throwing out ethnic slurs all over the place? And the most "liberal" people you're talking to are far right fascists? Sorry, simply BS.

Stop making stuff up. You're not impressing anyone with your nonsense. I await your even more strongly worded rebuttal to being called out. I'm sure it will be super convincing.
"Colour scheme including use of contrast results in eye fatigue"

This would work better if it weren't written in a tiny, low-contrast grey font.
I love the "U.S. Immigration is harsh and mean" meme generally promoted by Canadian, West European and Aussie/NZ folks. Yet, it is interesting how those people conveniently ignore how ridiculous and politically motivated the UK system is. For example, allowing in radical Muslim clerics yet banning an American radio talk show host. Or limiting Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei's visa not because of anything intrinsic about him but because of Beijing's feelings. Ai Weiwei is being treated unequally compared to other Chinese visitors. UK immigration also has targeted certain nationalities for deportation to fill charter planes. Let's not forget about the bloody nonsense at Calais. Then we have Australian immigration policy as well.. This anti-US tripe is getting old. The original author's comparisons to Gitmo were also inappropriate. She wasn't getting water boarded and Jack Bauer wasn't sent to beat her. She was detained because of a visa irregularity that she herself was the cause of. It wasn't a clerical error; she knowingly attempted to enter the country under a false pretense: she wasn't a tourist and she knew it. Sorry for the harsh treatment but it doesn't compare at all to the treatment migrants receive in Calais or when they are captured at sea by the Italians. The fact is that all immigration situations are rather tough all over the world -- especially in countries with extremely high demand and histories of overstays, fraud and abuses.
Huh? I knew many illegal immigrants growing up with professional parents and comfortable middle class lives...immigration is more varied than the experience you see on TV although admittedly many immigrants are poor.

I have also had various family members overstay visas for very long periods of time and they weren't dirt poor. On the other hand, this kind of hiding in plain sight is hell when kids turn 18 and can't attend a university. That's the most sad part of the existence and a big reason for support of the DREAM act.
Then you are quite mistaken in your assumptions about me and should consider revising the basis on which you made them.
Alternative solution where they don't just try to piss off as many people as possible:

- automatically stop people from getting visa waivers if they applied for J-1

- save space in detention

- save the time by not dealing with such cases at the airport

- prevent people from getting treated badly

- prevent articles like this from being written

Or you know... keep throwing the book. That works very well as you can see.
Google's Project Fi cell phone service is simple, until it's not
With that remark I've fallen into the trap of separating the entire spectrum of views into two camps: progressive (liberal) and conservative. In reality this is not the case, but in general you can at least divide people into those that profess to care about inequality (and believe the government has a role in solving it, since politics is after all fundamentally about the government) and those who don't think it is a problem.

The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it.

Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.
Introduction to post-quantum cryptography (2009) [pdf]
Ha! Well, I'm sure you understood what I meant, and your assumptions about me can't be clearer. It's just tiring that people assume so much. It derails conversations.
The user interfaces on most wikis I've seen (including Wikipedia) are not really usable by casual non-technical users. Thus, wikis, if used in businesses, tend to be in places like software development groups, and those groups can easily set up their own wiki if they want one - there are dozens of free, open source wikis to choose from. (I set one up on my machine at work.)

At my company, the non-developers use software like Microsoft SharePoint rather than wikis.

Still, there are already a whole bunch of hosted wiki services. You can find a list on Wikipedia:

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

So you'd be competing with these established companies.
In these situations I like to ask: what other countries have solved this problem, and how? Are there any? If not, why not? Is it solvable? I never assume that every problem has a solution, and I definitely never assume that every problem has a government solution.
Besides the free online access to education, more americans have college degrees than ever before:

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

The local public library provides free internet access, lends out books for free, and sells their overstock for a buck a book. You can also get tech books from goodwill for very cheap (I've bought many that way).

It really never has been easier to get educated.
So nuance makes it better.

Also, I have to call bullshit. Unless you are hanging out at a Klan rally, or maybe your relatives live in a trailer park, the likelihood of hearing any of that is slim to non-existant.
The First Hand-Painted Films
While I somewhat agree with you, the real answer is assume nothing and profile. Always. But there's a catch. Things are getting a bit out of hand, there are just too many architectures and configurations.

I think modern consumer-oriented code should run at least well on Intel Nehalem - Skylake, AMD K10 - K12, ARM Cortex A7/A8/A9/A15/A53/A57/A72, Qualcomm Krait/Kryo.

Focus on 64-bit, but some attention should still be paid to 32-bit performance.

Number of actual targets is even worse, because cache and memory architecture vary so much. At least all those have 64-byte cache lines.

In high performance code, there's often the choice between memory and compute load balancing. What memory access patterns and layouts you're going to use - where do you want your bottlenecks? You can often reduce bandwidth requirements by computing more and vice versa.

Take Sandy Bridge for example:

While L1 and L2 cache sizes are fixed on Sandy Bridge, L3 cache varies between 1 - 20 MB.

Clock speeds vary between 1.0 to 3.6 GHz.

There are 1-4 memory channels, I believe they're usually arranged 64 byte granularity round robin. Say your access pattern is access every second 64-byte cache line vs. access every line. On 1 and 3 channel systems, both perform about same. When skipping 64 byte cache line on 2 channel system, effective memory bandwidth is equal to just 1 channel system. 4 channel system will behave like 2 channel one. The code might be bandwidth bottlenecked on 1-2 channel system and compute bound on 3-4 channel system.

Then you're going to hit DRAM page miss every... 1-8 kB? System dependant, of course.

To make the best choice for Sandy Bridge based systems, among other things, you need to know number of memory channels + their arrangement, amount of L3 cache and clock speed. On some Sandy Bridge CPUs you have a lot of time to do complicated data packing and unpacking, trying to just keep memory bandwidth usage down.

That was just one architecture. Now add all the other platforms in the mix. There are pretty many different instruction set extensions. If you don't use them properly, you can lose an order of magnitude of performance.

I think we'll need runtime code generation in the future. On system JIT/AOT also for traditionally compiled languages, such as C and C++.
I wonder if the people who read it that way haven't spent a lot of time around people from the East Coast. It's an attitude that isn't necessarily arrogant or aggressive, at all, but may come across that way to people from regions with a less straightforward presentation style.
adware is a type of malware.
Programming Excuses
This is rural MN and NW WI, but even then do you find it hard to believe? 45% of Americans believe in creationism and the u.s. has some of the worse race relations on the planet. What sort of bubble do you live in?
But getters and setters aren't inherently associated with IoC nor vice versa.
On a tangent: if people do accidentally find indecent images of children, or images of child sexual abuse, there are methods to report those images anonymously.

The Internet Watch foundation is one site. There are probably others for different countries. https://www.iwf.org.uk/

The IWF has just announced a collaboration with Google, Facebook, Twitter: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33844124
500 Startups doubles down on Europe, launches pre-accelerator in Oslo
How is Google's leap smear idea pretending like leap seconds don't exist? As per your link, "The solution we came up with came to be known as the “leap smear.” We modified our internal NTP servers to gradually add a couple of milliseconds to every update, varying over a time window before the moment when the leap second actually happens."
The mystery of particle generations
If a move from 28nm to 14nm FINFET plus HBM at the same time doesn't drastically increase performance, something is very wrong.
You live in a bubble. I can confidently say that you are ignorant.

http://www.rt.com/usa/majority-americans-racist-poll-378/
http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...
It looks like the NeXTcube: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/NeXTcube...
wtallis's reply is better than mine, but you asked me a question, so I owe you a response:

> Why are you so sure?

For several reasons. The best one is as follows:

Any video about science for a non-technical audience featuring a well-respected scientist and lecturer is incomplete without a section that explains that "Why" questions are often the most difficult to answer because of the inherent complexity of even the simplest seeming things.
Let’s Write Faster AngularJS App
Sure. Free wifi is everywhere, and tablets and smartphones are dirt-cheap. Not necessarily top-of-the-line devices, but units that are perfectly adequate for viewing Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg, the scads of free online college course materials...
@jpatokal, this is a seriously good article :)
> Completely ignoring the massive resources it would take to make the switch in the first place.

If I'm suggesting it, I obviously believe that the cost/benefit is worthwhile. I don think the effort required is massive.

> You say that it'll only keep improving

I say that it has already improved enough.

> Organizations for whom Erlang is out of reach simply because it doesn't use the JVM are absolutely petty

Not petty, but rational. Those organizations already have millions of lines of code, and lots of knowledge and experience on the JVM, and the reasons for choosing Erlang aren't compelling enough given the adoption cost. But if you lower those costs...

All I'm suggesting is simply lowering the adoption costs of an upcomer, rather niche tech with a small ecosystem (which would also, I'm convinced, considerably improve the tech).
This kind of post is something i usually read at Reddit when something related to fat people are being discussed. And of course, many of them appear to have "a metabolic disorder". A post with a whole bunch of undocumented claims is something i do not expect here at HN.

You lost weight, therefore you either reduced calorie intake, or you burned more calories. If you somehow broke the laws regarding energy, you have discovered some magic formula that will make you rich.I am going to assume that you did not discover the magic formula as there is none as per now.

No wonder people have issues figuring out how to loose weight when they find claims like:

- "foods that are known to screw with human biology"

- "My caloric intake has not really changed, yet the fat just melted right off."

-"... caloric intake doesn't fix obesity"

- "chronically low caloric intake .. makes your body think it's starving to death"

" unsafe caloric reduction for long periods may cause weight gain in some individuals ..."

" ...foods that promote the proper functioning of your body"

".. drop the ones that are known to cause chronic inflammation, metabolic disorders"
Does it matter if they don't have access at home? Do the poor no longer have access to public institutions with internet access like say libraries? When I was younger, I was homeless for a few months and that's what I relied on to stay connected. These days there are even more places like the Apple stores.

Looking at the data you've cited, two years is a really long time when it comes to the evolution of technology. Now we have even more resources to stay online cheaply with extremely inexpensive smartphones (many homeless people possess them) and even cheaper computers ($35 to even as low as $10); not to mention the advent of cheap or free municipal WiFi and special Internet plan rates for low income people from all the major carriers. Consequently it's a bit strange to me that people who want Internet, don't have it.

This is probably better for data.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/smartphone-penetration...

Looking at the data, (correct me if I'm wrong) I feel that the people who don't have internet are both elderly and poor. If you're not elderly, you'll probably have Internet access one way or another. I'm guessing, but I feel that a large portion of the geriatric population just doesn't care about the Internet.
Bravely we move towards the day where we can just eat, eat and eat all day while staying alive to eat more!

But why not start working on an implant that stimulates our pleasure centers directly, at the push of a button and omit the eating part altogether! We'd not even have to lift our arm to our mouths! Just get a Soylent drip feed!

The future looks bright!