skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. I do know that some BPUs can disable branch prediction if it fails a few times (to say, given i % 2 == 0, it would disable branch prediction on the third or fourth iteration). I wasn't aware that they would actually go and find continuity in non-continuous branch behavior based on modulo alone, which isn't that common.

So let's run an experiment, shall we. Given Count = x.Length = 10000000 in C# (.NET, but the GC will never run):

Code:

for (var i = 0; i < Count; i += 1)
if (i % 2 == 0)
x[i] = 0;
else x[i] = 1;

Time: 55-80 milliseconds

Now the same functionality in two non-branching loops:

for (var i = 0; i < Count; i += 2)
x[i] = 0;
for (var i = 1; i < Count; i += 2)
x[i] = 1;

About 25-28 milliseconds. Now, to make it interesting, we do zero for the first half and one for the second half:

for (var i = 0; i < Count; i += 1)
if (i < Count / 2)
x[i] = 0;
else x[i] = 1;

40-42 milliseconds. Definitely, a coherent branch is much faster than an incoherent one, while no branching wins the day as always. (ok, not true, see edit).

Edit: so I was probably running into some jitter problems. Running the tests 20 times gives me 41 for the first, 21 for the second, and 39 for the last. So the first and last are comparable in time. Sorry for the sloppy benchmarking!

Edit 2: so if I take the Count/2 out of the loop, my numbers for the third test become fast again: 42 for the first, 19 for the second, 26 for the third (average time milliseconds for doing the loops 10 times). The comparison is still hardly fair since I'm not lifting the modulo out of the first loop, however. If I use a boolean that is continuously negated instead the modulo, the results are 29 for the first, which is much closer to the third.
Startups getting trashed
Try NeoOffice (www.neooffice.org). We love it on our Macs.
This reminds me a lot of a previous article: "I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss" http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-hel... . HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714985 (205 points, 56 days ago, 60 comments)
This is what good government does, creates a framework that forces the right behaviour through artificial controls to preempt the problem.

I hope we get to limiting co2 emissions soon.

I hope we get a gradual tax on gas and push that back into infrastructure.
coca cola is simply funding the merchants of doubt
in this case the Global Energy Balance Network

great book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
ok doc: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3675568/
That makes a lot of sense. I guess work is never done since iOS is always being updated.
This deserves more than an upvote.
Choosing between two evils is still evil... How about xylitol with stevia, which has fewer calories, while still having some (not screwing with receptors as much) and combining the two actually curbs the less desirable flavors of both.

I've been using this combination for kool-aid for a while, Generally about 25% of the calories in a pitcher vs sugar. Though I don't do it that often.... sometimes I just want some grape (or black cherry) koolaid.
Yeah. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the provisioning stuff.
It's Billionaires Business: Top World Richest Tech Entrepreneurs in 2015
It would make more sense to sell the water from those desalination plants on the coast than to pipe it that far uphill. But perhaps Las Vegas could trade it with California somehow and actually take the water from the Colorado.

I'd guess there are a lot of water laws in the way of that sort of financial innovation.
The primary author is the central driver behind his own Rippe Lifestyle Institute [http://www.rippehealth.com/] who, turns out, partners directly with Coca-Cola [http://www.rippehealth.com/partners/index.htm], including "outreach" and "coordinat[ing] a number of symposia", which in all likelihood means paid speaking engagements. He and Coca-Cola may have honorable intentions, or he may be paid to advance their agenda. We don't know either way, but what we do know is they are connected to each other.
It's accuracy but not free
Are these high signal-to-noise?
Just sugar, not carbohydrates in general. You can do it by avoiding refined foods, but you can still eat, for example 100g of oats which you wouldn't do on an atkins-style diet.
Modern CPUs also depend on coherent branching behavior, and conditions like this throw it off. I bet most of the 15X slowdown that the author is experiencing is not from the extra conditions, but from thrashing in the BPU (branch prediction unit)!

You might be underestimating the efficiency of branch prediction on modern CPUs. It's getting close to the point where if you (the human) can easily predict the pattern based on past history, the CPU will perfectly predict it as well. Manufacturers are usually a little cagey about the exact specifications, so one is often limited to empirical testing, but a simple pattern like one in the example is going to be predicted perfectly after the first couple iterations of training. Here's what one authority who's done lots of testing has to say about Haswell, the CPU the post is concerned with:

The Haswell is able to predict very long repetitive jump
patterns with few or no mispredictions. I found no specific
limit to the length of jump patterns that could be
predicted. Loops are successfully predicted up to a count
of 32 or a little more. Nested loops and branches inside
loops are predicted reasonably well.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf
> Okay, well, other experts like Robert Lustig think they're not very different.

Eh? http://foodidentitytheft.com/obesity-expert-dr-robert-lustig...

I can't find the actual papers but it seems like his opinion is not exactly conclusive and his wiki page suggests something along those lines as well.

> The thing you have to watch out for is that lots of people want to find the "good" form of sugar.

> Nonetheless I think it would be easy for someone reading your comment to take away the idea that HFCS is the big problem and sucrose is okay, because people want to do that.

I literally said that they both bad. They can takeaway whatever they want but I can't really be blamed for that.
Ursula K. Le Guin: By the Book
I will think about it, it seems like a good advice, thank you.
There's a huge problem with risk models: probabilities. What's the probability of data disclosure via FREAK, and how does that compare with the potential loss of data via RAID6 failure?

I.e. how much should I and my manager worry about a given vulnerability, and how do I balance addressing vulns with the core business need to serve customers?
Hahaha, this is too funny. I was wondering if I could find some info suggesting that they are being paid off but I didn't think of looking for it on their site. Good detective work.
so how badly does your presto opera fail the ssl client test?
If I didn't have so much code in objective-c - I'd welcome the passing. Until then - I've built a project to migrate objective-c code > swift en masse.
check out http://objc2swift.io for hockeyapp download.
If the function of the pill is solely to mimic exercise, then it does not offer any new treatment. Obesity and diabetes can be treated just as well right now, and the treatment is exercise.
Heck I don't even care if they get the same sentence, I just demand they be held accountable. Which doesn't seem to happen anywhere.
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaki
I was looking for something like this (esp to store and server images) for our new application. Looks interesting, thanks for the work.
What makes you think people want to be fat?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to build the desalination plants on the coast and sell it to California cities/famers in exchange for water that usually goes down the Colorado River from Nevada to California. Pumping it upstream seems like a waste of energy and infrastructure when the cities in Southern California already want and need the water for their residents.

The problem isn't that there isn't enough water for Vegas passing through Lake Mead. Its that legally they are obligated to send it downstream. Nevada gets a meager 4% of the lower basin of the river, while California gets 58.7% [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact
You might want to think through if that pattern isn't really on the list of the one terabyte of passwords and phrases that a good password cracker might build to filter through his GPU rack.

That is to say, I would venture that passwords by this or any other scheme is too easy to crack. Better have something like 1password generate them for you.
80% of people with type 2 diabetes are that way by choice. They chose to be obese. (Only 20% of type-2 diabetes isn't caused by obesity.)

99% of obese people are obese by choice. (The 1% that aren't are people who lack the mental ability to control their food intake.)

I hope we never spend the public's money on this.
Watch+Hidden+Camera+with+DVR
Fifth generation computer
> it has no effect in humans.

It certainly has documented effects on weight, blood pressure, insulin, etc. What you mean to say is that while it's been amply proven in lower species to extend lifespan, lifespan extension has not been proven in humans as of now.
Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters – Don’t Trust Folklore
Thought the same thing too, saw a tl;dr somewhere once and it seemed like common sense
You might have been downvoted for stating that taste is subjective and then immediately declaring Coke Zero to be objectively good tasting, thus implying that people who dislike it are somehow wrong.
I think the answer here is to have a "base menu" that all applications start with instead of starting from zero and having developers fill in the blanks. The base menu knows where to put common special items (Preferences/Options and About for example) on each system, and developers build on top of this by adding their own custom items.

I'm not saying that it's possible for a cross-platform UI toolkit to be perfect, but it's certainly possible to get a lot closer to right than current toolkits do.
Ask HN: I will help your startup in exchange for food and a place to stay
Hello,

This my third and final time posting this post, first time it was labeled as spam and the second time someone suggested that i edit it and so i did.

I have 4 years remaining in my U.S visa, each visit i can stay 6 months, i don't want to break any U.S rules that's why i want to code for your startup for no money, just food and a place to live in transportation would be nice too but i am not going to take money from you and i am not going to ask your for health insurance or be your employee, i don't want to break any rules, i have +8 years of experience in JS, PHP, Ruby mainly as a full stack web developer i also do game development using Unity3D + C#, i'm a Musician since over 15 years at my free time and i can design sounds and soundtracks i work with many DAWs, i'm bilingual i speak fluent Arabic and English beside having many more skills.

I am doing this because i live in a war torn country, some issues happened and i've lost all my savings, I'm 31 years old and i don't want to spend the rest of my life in this place, i've been to California in 2014 and i loved it so much, i can't get an H1B visa because i don't have a university degree although i have a high school diploma and a college diploma in business management and e-commerce.

If you'd like to interview me please send me an e-mail to life.will.get.better.2016@gmail.com, thank you.

Thank you for reading my post.

ps: Please if you can't help me at least try not to be negative in the comments i already have enough negativity going on in my life and i could really really use some motivation, but after all you are free to write whatever you want of course and i appreciate it.

One more thing, thank you "dang" for telling me about the spam filter and helping me.
You are, of course, correct. It's strange no one brought up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon... yet. In a very real sense, programmers are creating mathematical proofs!
> There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage.

The point (and title) of the essay is "change your name," not "make sure you get the .com."
For me it's Path finding (A)
I can understand the code, but not the mathematical equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm#Properties
> And what's the problem with soundness?

You can definitely not provide any guarantee for arbitrary DSLs implemented in your system, but claim you do.

> I can even derive formal proofs for simple DSLs when I have too.

Am I looking at the correct thing on GitHub? CombinatoryLogic? I can't find any code here that would suggest you're interfacing with a theorem prover, much less the incredibly amount of machinery that must be involved in taking two correctness proofs and producing a correctness proof for their combination.

> Then do not combine these things in the unsound ways. As simple as that.

I think this pretty much sums up the contribution here. It's a framework that doesn't face any problems with compositions because you've chosen not to write down things that don't compose well.

> If the source language is sound, each of the target languages are sound, and all the transforms in between are sound, then the result is sound and robust.

To repeat myself once again, your framework doesn't force any of these to be true. It's just as easy to write down unsound things as to write down sound things. The fact that you choose to write down sound things is nice I guess, but it's not a demonstration of the capacity of the framework or methodology to preserve soundness. It's just a demonstration of your own capabilities... we hope.

That works fine and well when DSLs don't get inter-leaved in unexpected ways and are only developed by a small set of developers. But then, we've known how to design DSLs in those cases for a long time. There's no REAL composition going on -- just the sort of combination that's always happened.

The actually interesting question is how to support an open world of DSLs. Where composing DSL1 with DSL2 won't break some guarantee that the writer of DSL2 worked hard to achieve. And where even changes to DSLA, which DSL2 depends on, also won't break those guarantees. And where the authors of all three languages never even know each other exist. And not just "if you don't write down the wrong thing", but "because the framework prohibits it". You don't solve this problem. In fact, I can't even figure out how to state some specification of a DSL, much less that it's preserved under a transformation...

Again, your framework might be a great setting for doing DSL engineering. And I don't doubt that you designed a tool that's useful for you. But you're making some pretty extreme and apparently over-stated claims beyond "nice framework solving a few practical implementation problems".

(Which is a shame because your tool seems nice, but your comments come across (to me) a bit snake-oily, so I'm not sure how seriously I should take the tool / approach. I think if you re-stated your claims so that they're a more accurate representation of the problems you do (and don't) solve, you might get a better reception.)
I just wasted two days trying to get bumblebee to work on Debian with my Optimus laptop. :( Ultimately had to switch to Ubuntu and the Nvidia drivers (which apparently default to 'Prime' there).
They have similarities, but awesome is a graphical tiling window manager, whereas tmux is only for terminal sessions.

/s
The fact that weight loss/gain is due to calorie deficit/surplus is true but useless.

The most difficult thing about weight management is willpower management. People (especially techies) love to ignore willpower. They'll say, if you want to lose weight, just eat less. Completely ignoring the fact that "just eat less" is an enormous challenge for many people.

By calling into question the importance of calories, Coke is basically undermining people's willpower, which is a precious resource even under optimal conditions. Promoting exercise as a substitute is useless. On its own, exercise will do nothing to help you lose weight, because the extra calorie burn will just make you hungrier!
I have one of these for electromagnetics sim:

http://www.microway.com/product/whisperstation-tesla/
This is awesome! I've been using tmux for years and didn't even know there were plugins.
I like this analogy when getting into the calories in/out discussion:

We don’t get fat because we over eat. Meaning that overeating isn’t the cause of obesity, it’s an effect. If a room has a maximum occupancy of 20 people and the fire marshal gets upset and wants to know why it happened – you’re not going to say “well, it’s because more people came into the room than left.” Well duh, that’s what happened but that’s not the cause, the reason for the overcrowding. Rooms get overcrowded when more come in than leave and I get fat when I eat more than I burn; but that isn’t the cause.

https://www.thebairs.net/series/ketogenic-soylent/

We get the thermodynamic argument, really we do... but if you're ignoring the metabolic effects of the insulin cycle upon weight gain in the modern diet, you're not really grasping the important details.
Looks like you guys are right, though I do have to execute the loop multiple times to find the same performance result. Weird.
First Platform for LoL Cash Tournaments
> 99% of obese people are obese by choice.

Are you willing to make the same claim about other addicts, smokers, alcoholics, drug users, sex addicts, and so on and so forth?

In all cases when you perform a behaviour your brain releases chemicals which make a person feel better, these chemicals which should be associated with behaviours which improve survival prospects can become addictive (in particular in a world where we have unnaturally high access to things which were scarce during our evolution, like rich foods).

Now in the cases of illegal drugs this is the intended effect, and without argument they're some of the most addictive substances we know of.

But it is utterly absurd to simply dismiss the mental health aspect (addiction, depression, etc) of obesity and call it a straightforward choice. It might be a choice to you and I, but by definition we aren't addicts. Just like with alcohol or sex, we can do it without the need or drive to OVER do it, addicts cannot...

I do find in recent years and completely against all evidence, bigotry has come out strongly against people struggling with food addiction. I legitimately feel like it is nothing more than attacking the mentally ill, nothing more.
I'm glad they went with ThingsWeStart. That was a much better name... I've already forgotten their other ones. Their previous favorite didn't sound as credible, either.

Plus, ThingsWeStart is probably not the Ukrainian word for an item of ladies' underwear or something.
Heck, even something like "ex" not to mention TECO or ed.
I'll try and answer your last three questions in order. I'm not an expert though, only a casual observer.

- What keeps people interested in a blockchain (and currency) once all of the easy mining is done eg, for people joining later?

What keeps me and many others interested is the utopian vision of traditional banks and currencies being disrupted, and bitcoin becoming the de facto global currency of choice.

- I see that transaction costs for bitcoin keep rising, is that related to the size of the blockchain?

Raising the transaction fee gives miners incentive to verify your transaction before others. It's not directly related to the size of the blockchain.

- I thought bitcoin was supposed to be decentralised – doesn’t a group of centralised developers have the ability to change everything about the currency?

It is decentralized. There is a group of developers overseeing the Bitcoin protocol, but for any change to be made, there must be consensus.
From the few I have read, I certainly know this is a great list. Am adding others to my queue. Question: Which all amongst these are NOT high on signal-to-noise ratio, if any?

E.g., I did not find Courant/Robbins as high density, though it is a very good book still.
Shouldn't that be tesla.edu rather than .com? Their current .org would also be more appropriate than a .com...
Footprints in the NW sand: Perhaps 13,000 years old
Kicked out of the US: 33 hours of hell
The system being what happens when your body processes sugars. Sugar by itself isn't too different from what your body easily converts into sugars (that being all carbs besides fiber), and glycemic index/load values for foods vary a lot.

My point is that what is advertised, subsidized and promoted by the government is lopsided from what's really ideal. The food industry is both part of the problem and responding to consumer demand. As to my body telling me something, that's another point.... That being that not everyone notices or feels the affect as significantly even though it's there.

It's not just sugar, it having too much starch/grains in our diet as well... mostly the heavily refined foods. People are also mislead into believing that some things are healthier when they really aren't... fruit snacks, smoothies, etc are just about as bad as the sugary stuff, or worse if you consider the deceptive marketing.

I don't think we should, as a society, ban any given food, but the marketing allowed, and the information distributed in education really needs to change.
The people who die in car crashes do so "by choice", but it would still be a good idea to reduce car crash deaths with driverless cars.
Algorithmic Trading: The Play-At-Home Version
Honestly, in times like these, it's so good to see someone talk about what government is good at. All we hear is the opposite, especially with things like TPP coming towards us. It's as if we've forgotten what government does. Yours are great examples.
Running the C equivalent of your first example under cachegrind with --branch-sim=yes, it shows 10,000,000 conditional branches at the if (i % 2 == 0) line, with 3 mispredicts.
Best of luck to you, friend! Hearing of all the things you have learned and have experience in leads me to believe that many startups would miss out if they overlooked you. You sound awesome.
we have used the free version of MaxMind for several years and upgraded to the paid version two years ago (the additional coverage provided by the paid version was the driver for us). I can highly recommend MaxMind.
Postcript: Svetlana Boym, 1959–2015
Weird I thought about this the other day. If I were sent to prison and there was a lot of alone 'thinking' time I would try and develop systems in my head. I would turn myself into a compiler :-).

My memory is bad because I rely a lot on technology and paper to remember things for me. One are I have improved is by learning Haskell using Vim and not having an IDE like I do for .NET I have found it has improved my memory. Also starting to learn another language has probably helped me.
Soylent (YC S12) Is Hiring Engineers – Python, Django, Postgres
If he has a problem with the tax code or legislation, he should work to change that. I think it's in bad taste for a politician to call out private individuals, whether they're journalists or leaders of industry.
Not trying to be negative, but my understanding has always been that U.S. immigrations doesn't care whether or not money exchanges hands. If you are doing work that a U.S. citizen would normally get paid for you are still technically "taking a job" from a local.

While I am sure there are conditions that will allow you to come and stay in the country, I would be careful what your arrangement is with any potential startup and how it is worded.

Perhaps another individual on HN has more insight into U.S. visa rules and can provide better guidance?

Good luck nonetheless!
Barcode Generation with Custom Width, Enhanced Code128 and QR Recognition Engines
More Dutch Cities Want to Give Their Residents a Basic Income