skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read a lot of posts like this where someone makes a mistake (stupid or not) and ends up in a jail cell for extended periods of time. Aside from the notoriously inhuman behavior of US border security (I'm an American and am treated better at foreign border crossings than at my own country's), the facilities should not be humiliating and scary.

I understand that they can't be admitted to the nearest best western, because the could be a flight risk or a security threat (in some very unlikely scenario). But there's no reason why an airport holding area can't both a) look like a spartan hostel dorm room † and b) be secure. Families with children should stay together, if possible. Separating couples by gender isn't so scary if both partners arrive in a nice dorm room, they know their partner is safe. Dim lighting at night means that people could still be monitored, if truly necessary, and get a good nights sleep. Only dangerous, unruly, or mentally unstable detainees should be kept in jail-level security conditions. Lying on a visa application does not warrant prison treatment.

I know someone has to pay for this, but as someone who travels internationally I'm happy to have my taxes spent in this way... there's a reciprocal quality: I may make a mistake on a form or apply for the wrong visa, and I want to be treated with dignity when that happens.

† http://aspiringbackpacker.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hos...
given that one uses specifically a bytecode interpreter and not a JIT is generally the sign that the interpreter is to be used on multiple platforms.

Well, you could JIT the bytecode. Or you could use a meta-tracer (see e.g. [1]). Both (kind-of / sort-of) circumvent the platform dependency problem.

[1] http://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/bolz_tratt__the_i...
If it is related, someone screwed up badly. I didn't receive such an email; and I'm seeing the same error rate with IPs I resolved 5 minutes ago.
> You can definitely not provide any guarantee for arbitrary DSLs implemented in your system, but claim you do.

No, I never claimed so. It's a responsibility of a DSL developer, although it is very easy, because of the small size of any practical DSL implementation.

> I can't find any code here that would suggest you're interfacing with a theorem prover

I did not publish yet a large chunk of work which contains a statically typed version of the host language with an ACL2-like inference engine. It's still quite experimental, but I did many mechanical proofs manually in the past (mostly in the hardware-related DSLs).

> much less the incredibly amount of machinery that must be involved in taking two correctness proofs and producing a correctness proof for their combination.

I still cannot understand your point. Why exactly a combination of DSLs is going to introduce any additional complexity?

I demonstrated in my examples that mixing the DSLs is exactly the same thing as using them. There is a dataflow dependency between various semantic realms, but it is really hard to break any constraints by merely feeding valid data in and getting a valid data out.

So, yes, no existing language workbench enforce language soundness, it's up to the designer to ensure the correctness. But, can you name a single general purpose language with an enforced soundness, CompCert aside?

> get inter-leaved in unexpected ways

Mind providing any examples of this? I cannot think of any interesting case, due to the very nature of this approach, there is no difference between using the languages in a "normal" way and targetting them in code generation.

> guarantee that the writer of DSL2 worked hard to achieve

What does this guarantee worth if it can be broken by merely using this language?

I see that you're more on a bondage&discipline side of the PL research. In this case we have to agree to disagree, my decades of Lisp experience are forcing me to lean the other way. I'm all for the formal proofs and I'm doing them a lot when it is really necessary (e.g., in hardware, where the cost of error is huge and verification capabilities are limited), but besides that, having a hacking and permissive language allows experimentation, while b&d languages inhibit innovative designs.

I only built a b&d, non-Turing-complete (total functional), strictly typed version of my language workbench after years of experimenting on a dynamic, unrestricted codebase.

So, my claims are:

1) It's dead simple to implement eDSLs using metaprogramming, if you've got the right tools (features for dealing with ASTs and their transforms; examples: Nanopass framwork, Racket in general)

2) If you have a hierarchy of ready-made DSLs, then with the above approach you can easily mix arbitrarily selected properties of all of your existing languages into a new DSL.

3) PEG and GLR are great. The others are inferior. All hail the lexerless parsing!

And, btw., my framework is not any different from the other metaprogramming-based language workbenches. You can achieve this ease of development and robustness with any other framework.
I just remember taking thermodynamics for the first time. It was very hard to wrap me small brain around it. I also remember reading Feynman's short intro to quantum mechanics to dummies, and again it was hard to wrap my brain around it. Brass tax some subjects the human brain doesn't grasp very easily based on common education, experience and perception. Understanding some subjects requires a lot of odd rewiring of the old monkey brain.

So yeah, Feynman's explanation seems legit, there is no lay explanation for magnets. He'd have to teach you quantum mechanics, at least enough to explain what's happening when you hold two magnets together. And it's not like he's unwilling, since teaching that it part of the way he made a living, it's just he can't do that in less than six months.

And then, you wouldn't be a lay person.
Yeah, like, let's meet at 1439193801. Quite nerdy though :)
same here. our s3 services are reporting similar 503's and network timeouts. a few of our partners are already down as well with their own 500s. another stormy night in the cloud.
I'm also getting problems with Cloudfront attached to an S3 bucket
How to Use Java Distributed Cache to Scale Java Applications?
Or you have run your own business or have been a self-employed freelancer.

Proving experience without employment contracts is really hard to impossible.
Seeing the same thing. Got back from vacation an hour ago, probably related. :)
Why do we need a substitute to a healthy, balanced life? I'm sure its an amazing piece of science, but how is this better than being physically active? As a person who exercises, am I supposed to be considering this instead of my current lifestyle? And if not - if it wouldn't be a better option for me - then how could it be a better option for anyone else?

I'm genuinely bewildered. What is this for?
TED infiltrated by the liberal left!
He'd still need a visa? EU citizens take it for granted, but it's actually rather hard to get a Schengen visa...
Same here, first it only affected some dev deployment (s3+cdn), now it spilled over to other buckets :-/
oh... seeing the same
> Data that’s harder for humans to inspect and verify is also more prone to errors, especially small passive errors that go unnoticed. Programmers who have to debug such data are humans. Harder for them means harder to debug, means more bugs that survive longer. QED.

This is apparently an argument against UTC, but I think it's an argument against local time instead - humans comparing times stored in different timezones causes a lot of errors.
Akka actors are multiplexed on real JVM threads. So they implement a cooperative model of threading (i.e. you'd better not block for long inside the body of an actor)
That's the devs talking amongst themselves.

If you look at how the money actually flowed, it went from the suckers to the premining pumpers who dumped it, and the devs will be paid another seven months before leaving the bagholders high and dry.

Note the irrelevance of the promised smart contract/distributed botnet functionality - which, as that post notes, at present rates won't be working properly for years - to the actual, observed flow of cash.

This is a repeat of Paycoin and Stellar. Totally standard premined altcoin pump and dump.
Can't speak for the US, but this is the case in Canada.

I sponsored s.o. for their permanent resident visa and we were told to wait until the status has been approved before any kind of work can be done. The immigration hotline mentioned that volunteer work would be possible during that time, but it would still require an application from the employer.
It took the employer a few days to get all the paperwork sorted out and 2 weeks later the application was denied, leaving everyone a bit disappointed & furious about all the wasted time and promised opportunities on both sides.

Generally speaking: even if you do work as a volunteer, the kind of work you're going to do is most likely s.th. that should either be paid for or could be done by a local resident/citizen. If the US system is anything like the Canadian one, then you'll still get in trouble if they figure out that you've been working, even if it's for free/volunteer work.
“Begin Private Key” search
I can only comment for Finland, but at least here it is not so common for people to have company credit cards. If you want to buy something for the company you then either need to find out the person who has the card or use your personal credit card. Both options are bit cumbersome.

Getting the person who has the card to enter the necessary card details to a web site is not always convenient. On the other hand passing the card number, cvc etc to many people in the company has certain risks associated with it. Using personal credit card is painful, especially with monthly fees, since you need to do all the paperwork to get money from company.

Usually the credit card invoices are not enough for the bookkeeping. You need to have more detailed record about what was purchased and about the VAT included in the price. With shared company credit cards somebody then ends up chasing the actual receipts, which happen to be in somebody's inbox.

In most cases it is just so much easier to handle things with invoicing. The invoices are handled electronically and usually companies have systems in place which allow the accounting department to just pass the incoming invoice to whoever for approval.

A quite good solution this would be a virtual credit card service where somebody could assign "virtual cards" to whoever on the company and put specific monthly/yearly limits on those. It would be pretty nice to add the collection of receipts to this one as well. So the person responsible for specific virtual card, would also upload the invoices that match to the payments made.
Graph still flat.

So, when do you predict it will start going up uP UP? Please make a checkable prediction as to this.
How is that possible if the foreigners need to get a Schengen visa? It seems that it's harder to get these days... I remember about a decade ago people getting Schengen visas to Hungary then going to Germany or anywhere else for work.
One aspect is that well into the 19th century, perhaps even in the early 20th century, people in the US could participate in the massive land grab in the west. Basically, whenever the social framework got too bad, people could leave and at least go farm somewhere, giving them a living standard not too much below, and perhaps even higher, than that in larger cities.

The land grab is over now, but attitudes take some time to catch up.

This is particular interesting in comparison to Europe, where land grabs of this style have not happened in the last 1000 years or so. When the social framework got too bad, some people might have left to the Americas, but the people who stayed fought to solve those social problems.

I suspect that this is a large part of what drives the difference in perception of welfare spending between Europe and the US. It is also compatible with attitudes slowly shifting in the US to be more European.
At least it didn't happen while you where on vacation. :)
As someone from India, Its very nice to hear your thoughts. That's true, tech. companies exploit people, their salaries are too low. Mostly they hire us for cheap labour, not because they can't find talents in america and we are do at it :) I know 95% indian friends who is America or not technically good. They are just close to the management people. 5% of are good.

ps : I never visited aboard, don't want to travel aboard just because i'm a cheap labour :)
They must love you there :-). I lived in Belgium/W Flanders and some people were getting angry that I don't know Dutch...
> you just rewrite the critical parts in native code.

Rewrite critical parts of interpreter in native code? My point was there's no optimal native code anymore.

Pure interpreters are falling out of fashion anyways. For JITted systems, there's a significant cost for calling native code. At least until JITs actually inline natively called code, possibly even through dynamic library (.so, .dylib, .dll, etc.) call.

We need a lightweight, thin profile guided JIT/AOT engine. No standard library, memory management agnostic. Something that can target different architectures, memory & cache configurations and instruction set extensions that may have been unknown at design phase. A compilation target for some C/C++/Rust/etc. and a runtime that takes care of the architecture details.
What do you use instead of Maxmind?
Abiti Da Ballo Con Spacco Davanti Economici
> they end up not doing enough exercise and then thinking they can have a food treat

That's why for most people "diet and exercise" during weight loss, means eating less and exercising more, without any treats to balance out the exercise.
I wonder what it would take for amazon to show one of the yellow icons on their status page? Has it ever happened? Would a datacenter have to fall in the ocean?
> Why AMD is not all over this I'm not sure...

They're barely staying alive, and have been axing branches left and right to "focus". Like selling off their smartphone graphics branch a year after the iPhone was announced… it's now rather successful under Qualcomm (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon).
まだ直らないねえ
Can't launch instances in EC2 in US-East-1 at the moment.
Very nice. The parts that usually fail are the HD or the PSU in old kit, most of the rest of it should basically last forever, so long as you can craft replacements from modern components, you'll still be running that old box in 50 years.
> append ?resubmit=hn or something

Ok I thought HN was smart enough to re-open comments or something for old stories.

Personally I don't like this workaround. Because we now have several threads for the same article. And tools like Hacker News Sidebar [0] don't work anymore.

But granted for my original question this is probably the way to go.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sideba...
Broscience
Ya, it bothers me that their status messages for major outages are simply "elevated error rates".
They generally only use those icons in hindsight. As long as they're still "investigating" they stick to green with a note attached.
Could this be a reason why Heroku is misbehaving?
https://status.heroku.com/incidents/792K
I don't think that's fair. It's one of several standard types of interview, and legit in its own right, as long as one doesn't confuse it with the others. It's not like Ursula Le Guin hasn't done plenty of face-to-face interviews too.
No one I know of, from the last time I did check on this topic. However, it seems possible to plug ML on top of something like OpenFlow. PM me if interested to look this up further.
I'm sure "elevated error rates" is the first alarm which goes off. And once they've put that description onto the status page, they're probably more worried about getting it fixed than going back and changing the wording.
I broke the US rules. I worked on my student visa, got thrown around four different prisons throughout Pennsylvania and New York in the span of 30-something days and was finally deported (with airfare that I had to pay for). I was in my final year of my B.S. in mathematics program at university. I never finished my degree.

All of the above is absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, THE most fortunate thing that has happened to me and I owe all of my current success to this.

What I'm trying to say is - PLEASE get back your dignity. You're not a monkey, don't make any person, government or society make you think you are one.
This is and incredibly fascinating read! Thanks for posting.
Mice again. Maybe someone can answer my naive but serious question: How many cures that were tested on mice turn out to work in humans?
It appears EC2 is affected as well now:

12:51 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates for the EC2 APIs and launch failures for new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.
Even if you were correct about the midwest, it's not where most Americans live. It'd be like generalising about Europe from visiting Belarus.
Is there a reason that machine languages don't allow the programmer/compiler/runtime to explicitly control the CPU's cache & instruction pipeline?

Presumably they have access to much better information about the code's intent and future behaviour than the cpu does.
Wow down voted for that. Maybe the majority of HN reader need to pay.
OpenCL is slowly being supported by some of the main deep learning packages. The annoying part of Nvidia's GPUs are drivers and closed souce CUDA. Their CuDNN extension is a proprietary blob (with bugs) that boost up perfs but remains out of touch from scientists and developers. My hunch is that OpenCL will become the standard for deep learning, thus opening up to a larger set of hardware options.
Do not believe these linux + selinux / apparmor / LSM zealots. It is all lies and it has always been lies.

Grsec + PaX + gcc plugins will provide maximum security you can get on Linux. That is the holy grail.

If you want one more extra security try to run it on a sparc machine. That combination will make it really hard for an attacker (not impossible :-)).

Oh and try to run as little software as possible.
In Meekan we help schedule meetings based on time ranges, like "9am in the next 3 weeks".
We obviously store scheduled event times in UTC. However, that "in the next 3 weeks" day range could change offset in the middle, so we have to keep which timezone we're talking in. As kristiandupont said - timezones are great for future ones.

Also, when presenting times to users, knowing what timezone they're in, helps us display the dates with the correct offsets (without need to change it twice a year).

Timezone codes are useful. They're better in offsets in any way since they contain more data. It's one of those headaches for developers that save headaches to the users.
The 40 candidates for the new New Zealand flag
More appropriate to call it a questionnaire than an interview.
They should worry about that a lot. Amazon are notoriously bad at communicating during outages. They've gotten better, but they're big enough that it should have priority.
It sounds like the poster is on a B1 or B2 visa which allows 6 months max stay. It's essentially a tourist visa that is issued for up to 10 years with max stay of 6 months and no right to work.

It's highly likely that he will enter a few times with short stays outside the USA and then get denied entry, sent to secondary processing at an airport, questioned and be offered: A) the right to contest his case in court which will mean jail time until his case comes up or B) The option to withdraw his petition to enter the USA and catch the next plane back to his home country. Most people choose B for obvious reasons which leads to you being marched through the airport by security and put on a plane back home.

What I'd very strongly recommend is to not go around offering to work for free. If you do in fact live in a war torn country and have 'lost all your savings', do what many offshore folks do and get a US company to hire you for pay and just work wherever you are and get paid in your home country. Why the "work for free" offer and why the long story? It makes companies nervous. We like to pay people for their good work whether in the USA or outside the country, but legally and above board. You should get paid too.

Just posting a few data points regarding H1B stuff and immigration in general:

Time varies for visa processing and 10 years is not average for most immigrants (as has been mentioned). It took me 6 months from zero to green-card and 3 years from conditional residency (green card) to full citizenship. Not H1B. So it varies according to type of Visa, where you file and your country. Wait times can be found here:

https://egov.uscis.gov/cris/processTimesDisplayInit.do

Microsoft brings in H1B's at a rate of 2000 to 4000 people per year into the Redmond area.

http://visadoor.com/companies/microsoft-corporation

Google about the same numbers, mostly into Mountain View:

http://visadoor.com/companies/google-inc

I'm not sure I agree about H1B being indentured servitude. I'd also add that, if your intention is to become a citizen via H1B, make sure you understand how the process works before you even apply for H1B:

http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-US-citizenship-with-H1B-vi...
> It's one of several standard types of interview

Except it's not actually an interview. Call it a Q&A or something if you like, but "interview" implies back-and-forth conversation.
If you think 2055 looks like this, join me
Be aware of VPN, traveling users, and incorrect data. This kind of information should only be used to default preferences.
I think it a slightly different way. As a thinking person who is (somewhat) self-actualized I feel it is my duty to perform charity. The type and amount are my choice. And I feel that other thinking people should feel the same way. So I will remind them or attempt to persuade them if they are ignoring (what I feel is) their duty.
Off topic: How do most people on HN use tmux?

I was using it for a while but then realised I never used it over SSH and I rarely disconnected from sessions and opened them again. Are there other people in that camp?
I doubt schengen area is larger than US.

And not all countries are easy to live in because of the non-english languages. Yes, developers can do with english only. Yet, if you are going to live somewhere or settle somewhere, you need to know the language and be a part of that society.

Agree with your last point, Europe is pretty awesome.
In most cases the ad is not what they are looking for.
My card was part of this hack. I remember my confusion when I talked to my card being blocked and they refused to say why. I asked if there had been any suspicious charges or anything and they couldn't say. Finally got the advice to wipe my computer. Thinking I had a virus came as a chock to me and I wondered how I could have gotten it.

Got pretty pissed at Anonymous when I heard it was them behind the hack. Why would they release credit card info? I really thought they were above such stupidity. And now, to think FBI had a hand in it... quite hilarious to be honest.
Ask HN: Is HN's account creation CAPTCHA broken?
... or is it impossibly hard? I must have tried at least 10 times to complete the CAPTCHA without success.
... I owe all of my current success to this.

Can you elaborate? Sounds like an interesting story.
I agree. I was speculating, not trying to defend. :-)
I didn't realize it was scoped this way, that's a nice bonus.