skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Support for registered memory is another one.

I learned this the hard way when I bought a 2x16GB registered DDR3 kit, and then finding out my i5 won't boot with it. It was next to impossible to find unbuffered memory with 16GB per module last time I checked.
> Data is immutable...

But you don't need that at the VM level. Clojure does that on the JVM. Having that at the VM level makes a simple GC work reasonably well, but HotSpot has world-class GCs that perform better, even without the assumption of immutability.

> Everything is defined in modules.

Again, that's a language-level feature.

> Processes are an abstraction

You can get that on the JVM, too.

> Finally, everything is abstracted to the notion of nodes with in a cluster.

That's the runtime library's concern. Not the VM's.

> When you start thinking in terms of how structure you code for BEAM, you inherently get easy access to scalability.

All of that is great, but implementing those features at the language/library level and harnessing HotSpot's power would give you that same easy access to even greater scalability.
Oddly enough, one of the biggest benefits is going to be in the gpu. If you're doing 3d design, you're not going to be able to get support for Autocad, Solidworks, etc unless you have a supported platform. One of the benefits of Xeon graphics is the extensive testing done on the chips to the point where you can use the integrated graphics in CAD software. Up until now, if you wanted a mobile workstation to do cad, you had to get one with a mobile firepro or quadro, even if your needs were relatively modest.
London Tube Map in Git Network
> serial GC performance

HotSpot hardly ever uses a serial GC anymore. It's now parallel or parallel and concurrent.

> thread-segregated GC

You don't really want that if a shared-heap GC can buy you better performance because it's more mature and saves you all the copying.

> BEAM's trivial-cost threads

You can have that on the JVM.
afaik they have partnership with Google regarding mobile app distribution.

Anyways, it seems that the company didn't do that much last few years to grow really. I cant say I heard much of Opera lately besides Bemobi purchase.
Great to hear. Welcome back!
> Erlang automatically migrates processes between cores for maximum concurrent efficiency. It's basically coordinating N "tiny" Erlang VMs across all your cores and knows how to, ideally, optimally place your workload. You can even constrain the behavior to a per-core and per-scheduler level with VM options—not language options. See the +S and +SP and +SDcpu and +SDPcpu and +SDio and +sct options at http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erl.html

That's amazing, except that that's the work of Erlang's wrok-stealing scheduler, and as it happens, the JDK currently has the best work-stealing scheduler around.

> Our bottlenecks these days are programmer time and programmer thought correctness. Generating more work for programmers by making them write lower level code isn't the way forward even if the more work is slightly faster.

Why more work? I am for Erlang. Keep using Erlang. Just run it on the JVM. It's the same work with better results.
You mention markov chains and as a student of English literature I'd like to point out what I believe to be the main in-humanness in generated prose that makes it stray from "real" prose.

Some have mentioned pointless sentences, but I don't think that is such an issue for modern literature. Modern prose mostly has to do with what words come after each other on a small scale, such as a single phrase, or the associativity between words and between sentences, and at any given moment most words are only used for a few sentences, then replaced by other words.

The main problem is therefore large-scale structure, chapter to chapter. For one, the recurrence of a theme throughout several volumes of work is crucial to creating its emotional value and cohesiveness. None of which appears in Markov Chains.

And secondly, possibly the greatest shortfall of Markov Chains (ignoring performance) is in plot. They're just not very imaginative. Prose, let's say later than ancient epics, has interesting, recursive plot devices. Plot is what gives emotional power to sentences, and most markov chains are painfully incapable of creating any.

That being said, I don't think this problem is inherent to the problem of writing prose using Markov Chains. Right now it sounds like what you'd get with a crowd-sourced writing prompt, but Markov Chains can go beyond this - and literary criticism is what it will take to bring Markov Chains up to the standard of popular writers like Stephen King.

It's pretty clear that in the near future, we will laugh at the idea of reading something that someone hand-typed from their own thoughts, instead of simply reading the output of one-dimensional random walk. I hope if I have grandchildren who are as interested in modern literature as I am, their degree will be a bachelor of science, with the only work they have to do being to quantify and remove any remaining guesswork from the science of computer-generated writing. Even today, it is hard to understand why anyone still reads writing written by someone. It's as quaint as a telegram.
I'm pretty sure David Cope has passed that point already with his algorithmic techniques. However, the kind of formal double-blind that you suggest would be difficult to put together in a way that everyone agrees upon unanimously. It's also a problem that most of his algorithmically created music has never been performed and only exists as poor mock-ups of a performance.
No, not ironic or sarcastic at all! It really is wonderful.

We're starting to scale up our edge/commit server network in order to have teams iterate on 100+GB repositories across five+ locations in North America and Europe and it mostly just works.
So if we want to get pedantic, "random chord" is undefined here, which means that all the methods presented in the article as well as my sampling methods, and even the 0 and 1 case are all technically correct probabilities.

For example one of the most relatable alternative probabilities for me are, now thinking about it, actually the 0 or 1 cases: spinning a compass will generate a randomly oriented chord inside the face. What is the probability that the chord is of length > sqrt3? 1. Is this result informative or useful? no.

The result is that there are different generating functions with different biases which may or may not be useful. The three sources of randomness in the article correspond to physical stories that are possibly useful, and as such relatable. Otherwise they are no more legitimate than my absurdist examples.
First thought: "Wait, there's NO way ColdFusion can still be around today!"

Looks online "OMG!"

Although I think Adobe is still supporting Director, but alas my paying CD-ROM gigs ended in the 90s...
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
> avoiding the bullseye currently on Java.

That bullseye exists only in the minds of some HNers. Here is a very (very!) partial list of companies running primarily or largely on the JVM: Google, Twitter, Netflix, LinkedIn, Box, IBM, SAP, Amazon, eBay.

> They just want easy scaling, distribution, and fault-tolerance.

... So they write chunks of their code in C. That would be completely unnecessary if they'd just run Erlang on the JVM.
You could write one pretty simply on top of something like Ringpop:

https://github.com/uber/ringpop

There's also a Go implementation of Ringpop coming right around the corner too.
My take on death is since there is no way to be certain what happens after death, all possibilities are, well, possible. Death can be extremely good, extremely bad, neutral or anywhere in between.

Yes, I'm talking about life after death here. I think it's relevant to the OP's comment because what happens after death (good, bad, nothing) logically effects the valuation of death.

Since it is inherently very difficult if not impossible to scientifically evaluate what the probabilities are in terms of life after death, it's pretty much a crap shoot and what we choose to believe about it is based on faith (in nothing, God, etc). Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
As an Eastern European programmer I'm actually offended by your 'argument'.
I am wondering if the BC government is going to start cracking down on this sub-contractor situation. A common situation that I am seeing is a company will hire a recruiter. Then recruiter will rent out their "contractor" to the company. The recruiting company will not call their contractor an employee and include any of the stability or rights associated with that, but they will give them all the tools and other things they need for their job barring them from claiming any of the contractor tax breaks.
I think the "die doing what you love" cliché is less about the how the person died and more about the how the person lived. She was taking a risk every time she pushed her limits diving. But, apart from the last one, each of those times added to the enjoyment of her life that she wouldn't have experienced if she hadn't been willing to risk death. It's entirely plausible to think that the 53 years of life she had were more enjoyable than 80-something would have been without the enjoyment of diving. It's why people who take on these risky sports choose to do so.
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation has a fairly complete list of Wikimedia's Post Mortems.
Unfortunately, I'm kinda really doubting it. Gut instinct is saying that the AVX-512 thing is Intel trying to keep companies doing high end data crunching buying their many-cored xeons. Given the performance boost that the features are going to give, it's not inconceivable that Intel doesn't want people buying their cheap quad core chips instead of a pair of their more expensive 8+ core Xeons.
> you need to manage the pool. You also could try to implement green threads in JVM, as they are in Erlang, but you would need an entirely new compiler to insert yield points at appropriate places.

I am talking about a new compiler. An Erlang compiler. The JVM is a virtual machine. Erlang is a language. We've already proven you can run Erlang on the JVM quite well, and that was before many pertinent improvements to the JVM and its ecosystem.
Definitely a must-read. Also: Why Nations Fail, and Violence and Social Orders. People in tech would be well-served by a deeper understanding of the systems we operate in and hope to change.
What The Wire has taught me about business
Starting with classical music is far too ambitious. Music can be viewed as having five major attributes:

- Melody

- Harmony

- Timbre

- Rhythm

- Form/structure

In classical music typically all five are important. I think it would be better to start with techno (the dance music subgenre, not electronic music in general), where only rhythm and timbre are important. I think this has much better chances of generating something enjoyable to listen to.
Yes, it looks good.

Aside, we started emailing Lenovo 2 years ago, when they ruined the touchpad & keyboard, to express our discontent. Seems that they will finally get back on track: http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-misce...

They might even support Coreboot. This is good. As a developer, I hate bad quality hardware. Apple is good quality, but some stuff is too consumer oriented: glossy screens and fragile alu+glass. And since Tiger I dislike their software.
What benefits does ECC provide to consumer use cases?
Ng-chartist.js – Angular directive for Chartist.js
Would like to know how I could make this post more valuable to readers like HN community. (writer)
I clicked solely because of the subject given by the title (i will help a friend of mine publish a web-based book). Don't care at all about typography, but ended up impressed by the author's opinion about the web. I respect and am grateful for his inteligence, even though I think his suffering a little bit from analysis paralysis on the monetization. He could be testing strategies aligned with his terms. And not spending a whole month on this
Angular-swing – AngularJS directive for swipe-left/swipe-right
Learn Chapel in Y minutes
I was disappointed at the lack of really good, in depth Chapel tutorials that weren't also the spec, so I wrote my own.
Looking for feedback on what could make this a better read.

Full disclosure: I am currently an intern with the Chapel team at Cray, and I am no shame trying to sell this open source language to the masses. However this is not a product of the internship; one can get surprisingly bored in Seattle, and I wrote this on unoccupied weekends.
You really have to read the wikipedia page on ECC. There is the result of a large scale study by Google.
Beside that, if you use a workstation with ECC memory and regularly utilized a good portion of that RAM (I use 128GB for bioinformatics / genomics applications), there is a good chance of witnessing an ECC error / MCE (Machine check exception).

Here's the tl;dr
"(i.e. about 5 single bit errors in 8 Gigabytes of RAM per hour using the top-end error rate), and more than 8% of DIMM memory modules affected by errors per year."
Ask HN: Using Google adwords to snag consulting work
Let's say I have a lot of experience in a niche software environment and would like to get into a consulting or development work. Example would be a gcc toolchain for a specific DSP. In this case would a google ad (keywords of the chip manufacturer and model) help me bring in business ?
So someone is google searching for "YoYoDyne 6502" and would see my add for a toolchain or consulting.
Would this be cost effective ?
Automated Human Vulnerability Scanning with AVA
just awful. david cope has for years been computer-generating in-the-style-of (learning from scores) music that's actually decent (unless he's hoaxing us and just writing it himself). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PczDLl92vlc
> Opera Mobile Store will replace Nokia Store as the default app store for Nokia feature phones, Symbian and Nokia X smartphones, following an agreement between Opera Software and Microsoft.

> The announcement follows a separate agreement, announced in August 2014, which will see Opera become the default browser on Nokia-branded phones, including Series 30+, Series 40, Asha and Nokia X handsets.

http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/release-2...
Desktop Skylake was released a few days ago and the mobile version is rumored to be coming in less than two months. http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2015/2015052101_Launch_schedul...
What makes you think they could support Coreboot? That would be a huge differentiator, but would need unpredecented Intel cooperation.
Hey look, yet another critique of object-oriented programming. This one fails to define what it means by "object-oriented programming" (c.f. http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html), conflates object-oriented programming and object-oriented programming languages, provides no examples (not even contrived examples), and makes obviously bogus assertions (e.g. data cannot be abstracted, data cannot be versioned).
Implementing a Sticky Input Field in iOS
Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level.

...

As a unit it often is called something else to appeal more to students and is more often mixed in with other biology fields.

Which is it?
Sorry! I never really spent much time in the physical sciences, so I didn't know that. You would obviously not want to pick Joules as a fundamental unit.
Xeon in my phone plz.
Try it and see. I can't imagine the keywords for "gcc" would be very high. (especially something open source, and very niche). Other thoughts, rather than adwords, would be to create banners and place them on niche specific blogs for cheap $50/mo, and that could drive traffic too. Also, you could try cold emails or calls from job ads, etc. This is 1% of the pie of ways you can drive business.
You should take a look at its source code. You'll see that the path you're taking is not the path that library takes.
Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a new Butterick book. I bought Typography for Lawyers a few years ago and learned more than I expected to learn about en/em dashes and quote usage; information that probably ought to be part of any middle school keyboarding class curriculum.
Two 4K monitors?
Running Go as a companion process in AWS lambda
> So from the article you have two things, you have 10mph for 12km
> (that is 1.2 hours of driving) and a recharge time of 90 minutes

Were we reading the same article?

10 km/hr for at least 12 km.

Recharge time of around 3 hours.
Its okay man i don't mind paying 80 bucks a month for 1 phone with 500min Voice (i don't talk to anyone) // Unlimited Text (not an android user) // and 4Gb of data..........

I feel bad for those poor poor Cell Phone service providers, I hear that they have to cram all of us into these cell towers, and theres not enough to go around to everyone. They also have SUPER large overhead charges from all these people wanting to join the 10 towers in the bay area. But thats okay though because they are supporting us with jobs, and this awesomely fast internet connection.
But there are Viable options to switch over too, if you wanted to get unlimited data THAT provider only has 1 tower, so their service is a little worse.

Korea will always think that they have it good over there, but they will never experience the truly awesome internet that we have here.
:D
Oh no, it exists in the form of CVE's and actual compromises. Java compromises were coming into my news feed at a higher rate than Windows despite all its native code. Got bad enough that Krebs on Security simply recommended taking Java off one's machine unless they absolutely need it. Nice that you named many top tech firms with smart, well-funded NOC's and security teams as the counter-example. Harder for individuals and smaller firms than simply installing what works and hardly anyone is attacking. ;)

On second point, Erlang on the JVM currently gives same scaling, real-time properties, easy distributed apps, and availability as BEAM? And without one of the commercial VM's you seem to be assuming (but not stating) for eg real-time? If so, you might have a strong argument on that end. You just need to demonstrate each with examples of real-world apps running in Erlang on each. More people would accept your claim if you demonstrated it.
I was wondering the same thing. That's a lot higher than I expected.
blogs are a good idea. thanks.
Yeah I enjoyed it too and it's quite hopeful. I like how the communities are essentially coming together to get themselves on the Internet's, Fast Lane.
Perhaps why I'm enjoying Ello these days and ad blocking usage will continue to rise.
I think I read somewhere that the Skylake chips will have support for the new xpoint 3d memory. I would be surprised if it became commercially available this soon, but it would be great to have a MBP with the new xeon and xpoint memory instead of the SSD. The xpoint memory is supposed to be as much as 1,000x faster than SSD while drawing less power and having a lot more write-cycles.
at 10 km/h (3 meters/second, 4-5 times faster than the average walking speed), it's plausible that you could to fall off, hit your head on the pavement and... die, yes.
> I have no idea how the Koreans do it, but they do it.

It helps when your country is ~40k square miles. That's about the size of Kentucky.
Related critique of RPC: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-May/035209...
>>What do you think (which of course will be "just what you think", as you say) are the qualifications for calling oneself a software engineer?
Are you asking me to find out what I think, or are you just asking in order to prove a point? It's unclear, as you've mentioned yet again how you have no particular interest in Ms. Wenger...
>> What is it that bothers you about people who have jobs coding calling themselves "software engineers" when you don't think they qualify?
I can't imagine that three months of experience makes anyone particularly qualified for anything but to learn that they like something, which is not necessarily bad. But why three months? Why not at least a year, like the Udacity Android developer programmer?

>>I think a survey of job postings would confirm that even entry-level job postings, for which someone with 3 months of training might qualify, are routinely advertised as 'software engineer' positions. So it may not be "just what I think".
Have you done a survey of entry-level postings? Given that reading comments in an article already constitute "research" to you, so I'm guess the answer is no. Thus it is indeed "just what you think" (And perhaps what some HR personnel think). It's just unfortunate that somewhere in the hiring process, people with a 3-month bootcamp experience can get hired but older software engineers/developers can't. Seems that the valley can't keep female CS/EECS/SEng grads in tech and can't hire older developers after age 30. But web bootcamps can certainly pop up and try to sell the myth that one can become a fully-contributing software engineer after three months.

Your only interesting point was the sharing of the accordion story and generosity of spirit. Thank you for that exchange.
I like how you put it into perspective nicely. :)
It's more than that and the article alludes to it. Vancouver doesn't yet have the critical mass of tech companies for employees to land at if the startup fails. For a senior executive with a family, that means relocating to another city if things don't work out. Thats a significant dis-incentive to join.
Australian Platypus Conservancy
The other factor is return on exits. In SF, exiting with 7+ figures means you turn around and start your own startup (or, if you were the founder, another startup). In most other countries, you take your cash and put it into property and other mid- to long-term investments. There are so few investments, successes, or exits that the idea of taking $10m and turning it back into another company is less appealing.

In SF, you can get a great idea implemented and exit via acquisition or acquihire before you've figured out how you're going to turn users into revenue. The money flows relatively freely in the right circumstances. In Canada, that feels far less likely, so even if I exit with $10m I still have to figure out not just how to make a great idea into a great product, but also how I'm going to make revenue from it, since I can't make any assumptions about being able to drum up external investment (since I don't have rich friends) or arrange an acquisition (unless I shop it around internationally).
where only rhythm and timbre are important.

The problem is, the fewer elements you have, the higher importance each is and the higher quality that is needed to sound "good". When you look at electronic music genres that focus only on timbre (often called sound design) people spend years perfecting their craft and whilst we have some broad notions of how to construct pleasing melodies and harmonies without first listening to them, I doubt anybody can construct new sounds and have them sound good fist go without a human ear to guide the process (which is what we are asking a program to do). Sound design simply doesn't have the depth of analysis and understanding that melody and harmony have currently.
There's BEP 44 which enables use of the bittorrent DHT for non-bittorrent applications.

http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html
Sort of like 'Finnegan's Wake' :)
> British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”

British socialism is the least comprehensible of all socialisms.
It would be interesting to hear what some of the sources are in the training set. My first impression was Goldberg variations meets ragtime.