skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone thought that apes couldn't control their breathing well enough to vocalize? Really? All mammals have pretty advanced control over their airways, otherwise we would be constantly inhaling nasty things. Carnivores need control to sniff (see wolves) and herbivores need to hold their breath to be quiet enough to hear the wolves (see deer).

I'm about ready to say that all animal and human science from the 30s through the 50s should be tossed. From all birds mating for life, belly-dragging dinos, to apes that cannot hold their breath ... were they just making stuff up?
Traders in general dont proved any service to the market except liquidity, so I never pay attention the old guard whine about HFT stealing their profit.

Markets don't owe traders anything. A futures commodity market (very highly traded) really exists so that companies can hedge risk. Its why Burger King can survive beef price jumps. They dont care about HFT, they just are happy that their orders get filled when they place them.

So we have to tolerate someone providing liquidity in the market. And in order to do that we have to allow leveraging and margin trading so that its worth it for those traders. Old style trading, or anything that's not high frequency is too crude to make profits without making extremely leveraged bets and thats bad for the market in general.

What happens when markets start to look unsettled and everyone is leveraged? Margins (amount on money needed to hold position) go up. Firms realize that they cant put down money for margins so they try to dump their positions. But everyone is doing that so the bottom falls out of the market and margins go up even higher.

And this is caused by everyday hedgefunds on the SIP, since in order to be profitable with their rather crude tools they have to leverage more.

So I'm not defending HFT, I just think that everyone wants to see them as the bad guy, but its not like traders themselves are heroes. We just need to see the problem as "who can provide liquidity and stability to a market" rather than "who has an unfair advantage"
> There are thousands of examples of middlemen and industries that provide values to themselves only.

Care to name a few? These are great startup opportunities.
"He's a gorilla, of course he knows what he's doing! Just sell off all our assets, I'm sure nothing will go wrong!"
They also greatly increase the likelihood that your startup will go bankrupt, and decrease the likelihood that it will be moderately successful.

Thus they do not hedge your financial risk they increase your risk.

VC only makes sense if you are bound and determined to make a billion dollar, or at least 100 million dollar company.

They do not give you access to networks IP or make things happen, they give you money and then they double dip on the backend.

The romanticized view of VCs present on this site is not reflective of reality... or my nearly 30 years of dealign with them.
"Learn Python the Hard Way" is what I'm using now and it's been pretty awesome at making me figure out where my scripts/programs went wrong so I can fix them myself and learn from my mistakes. They also have a bunch of other languages such as Ruby if Python isn't your thing.
Not necessarily. For example a L-1A visa is a non-immigrant visa for intra-company executive or manager transferees. Spouses of L-1A visas are in L2 status, which allows them to apply for work authorization.
So why were the researchers willing to publish a redacted version now, but were not willing to publish the redacted version 3 years ago when they were researching the issue?

I am actually curious because this is the only part of this whole thing that does not make sense to me. Even if I disagree with Volkswagon's decision to not notify existing owners that there was a vulnerability known or eventually provide them with a fix, the decision at least makes sense because it probably was deemed more profitable for VW.

"The scientists wanted to publish their paper at the well-respected Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC in August, but the court has imposed an interim injunction. Volkswagen had asked the scientists to publish a redacted version of their paper – Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser – without the codes, but they declined."

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/26/scientist-...
Could Boombox.fm Be the Next Spotify, or Is It Just Adding to the Noise?
I'm not saying that he shouldn't be held responsible if all of those documents were to leak. He did, however, specifically select journalists who already experienced heavy surveillance from state actors and had at least some knowledge of proper OpSec and encryption to mitigate this risk to some degree. He acknowledged that it could leak, but still thought it's a risk worth taking (I can't remember his exact words, I think it was brought up in an interview.)
It appears that it was a chemical storage warehouse, which contained calcium carbide (among other hazardous chemicals). A fire broke out in the warehouse and firefighters were fighting the fire with water. When calcium carbide reacts with water it produces acetylene gas, which is highly explosive.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/14/china-experts-focus-on-chemic...
As dayjob C coder, I just find the way types are written in C complete nonsense (especially when you start declaring pointers to functions), and no modern language should force that horror upon developers.

Go types syntax is well done, IMO, even though I'm not into Go language that much (I rather Rust).
And what is your far easier fix (compared to building a few skyscrapers) for shifting demand to other areas?

Call in army, put a gun to Larry Page's head and say "relocate to Ohio, or else"?

There's a very simple reason all the programmers come here: because this is where all the jobs are.

There's a very simple reason all the companies come here: because this is where all the potential employees are.
Tesco in the UK got loads of criticism for labelling them a while ago.
RustCamp 2015(Videos)
A little disingenuous considering in that linked article Binney states that it was more the publishing of certain content he disagreed with and not Snowden's actions.

It looks like he still strongly supports what Snowden did.

I also think Binney's case is a bit different - when you don't leak the actual documents the intelligence agencies can (and do) just lie. If not an outright lie it'll be a carefully stated misleading truth ('not in this program'). Snowden's leak is a bigger deal to the intelligence agencies because he has the actual documents and they don't know what he took which makes it hard to influence the story (since it's easier to be definitively caught).

Putting Binney in prison would have likely attracted more attention than not.

John Kerry and other people requesting Snowden to come to the US to stand trial are ignoring that what he did isn't a question of whether it was legal (it wasn't), but if it was right. You won't win a trial on principle when it's the law that's the problem.
It's actually the Mixpanel tracker, which is unsurprising, since the entire website is Mixpanel.
Yes, it's mathematically superfluous. Real human communication is an evolved trait which often is logically or mathematically weird. Ask a person how many brownies to bake for a party and they might say "at least 10 to 20." The "to 20" is mathematically without meaning, but it seems to communicate something.
Hello HN,

I was learning JavaScript by completing challenges on CoderByte[0], where one of the hard challenges was to find the point where two lines intersect. The lines were defined by two sets of points, and you had to return your answers as rationals, not floats. The challenge isn't timed, so I got a little carried away: ended up making a Fraction class, Equation class, etc. This first iteration could only solve linear equations, but I decided to expand it out into a library that could solve higher order polynomials and manipulate expressions.

On a related note, solving cubics is actually kind of hard. This guy Cardano[1] figured it out[2] in the 1500s, but his solution was incomplete because he wasn't aware of imaginary numbers at the time. I then found you could solve cubics with some trig[3] and decided to go that route. Anyway, hope you enjoy, and of course I am interested in your feedback.

[0] http://coderbyte.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_function#Cardano.27s_met...

[3] http://www.nickalls.org/dick/papers/maths/cubic1993.pdf
That's very cool. I should definitely add functionality for solving a system of equations.
> "all women get catcalled"

Which one of these videos did that quote come from? I haven't watched them all, but I didn't see it in the few that I watched.

> So what about the women who have an entirely different kind of experience?

Just because some women have different experiences doesn't mean that there aren't real problems that other women face.

For instance, if I have never been a victim of mugging, that doesn't mean that mugging is still not a problem. And hey, I live in a city; so should I say that we should stop talking about problems with urban violence just because I haven't personally been subjected to it?
Mnemonic word list: For the hard problem of naming things
car dealers, real estate agents
Given the other glowing comments, maybe this would be a place to ask: should I bother with Upstart, or Systemd? I see Shuttleworth announced the move to systemd, but it's not available on Ubuntu 14.04 servers right now. I'm writing provisioning for our production fleet, what should I use?

The vagaries of the OS wars make something like Runit tempting.
The brain continues to fascinate. I wonder how the brain acts while under anesthesia or induced to sleep through sleep aids? Is it different than naturally falling asleep?

More particularly, it sounds like brain cells (At least in mice) shrink during sleep and then enlarge during wakeful consciousness. That shrinking mechanism may play a role in the cerebrospinal fluid recycling/cleaning process, which itself may play a role in ridding the brain of harmful plaques. Does an Alzheimer's patient not show the same level of growth and shrinkage? Could forced sleep improve their outcomes? (IE: Could forced sleep lead to a more normal growth/shrink cycle?)

I am, unfortunately, ignorant on most of the medical science at play here. Any biologists, doctors or hobbyists have any thoughts?
"subsidies [...] doesn't do a good job" seem pretty hand-waving to me. I can't even be sure what you mean, do you mean "rent control doesn't lower prices for everyone"? Which is true but also probably the biggest straw man in housing discussions.
Use minus instead of slash and you have ISO 8601: yyyy-mm-dd
True, I am not trying to provide the exact definitions for what qualifies as a PG or YC startup per se. But I believe you can quote PG as saying the "ideal exit" for any startup YC incubates is a public offering. Additionally the idea of "lifestyle" startups is well known in SV and the concept is also well known to be frowned upon by the VC's who make the most noise who are looking for a big exit one way or the other.
We have several "offices" (NYC too), and many people who work from home all over.
Google is not your friend? (8chan entirely blocked from Google results)
Actually, for compilers, platform is typically not just hardware, but the operating system as well. Windows and Linux are night-and-day different for major platform requirements (e.g., filesystems, I/O), and even Linux and FreeBSD can be important target differences in some platform areas.

So the number of platforms is approximately
{x86-32, x86-64, ARM, AArch64}×{Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android} (- a few combos) ~= 17 (I think). MIPS, Sparc, and PowerPC can be useful in some scenarios, as can even x86-16 (hey, wanna write the initial startup code on x86?), and platforms like PNaCl, Emscripten, or WebAssembly are effectively their own platforms as well.
That's what the article said, no how I think things should be.

With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms.

But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.
Don't things get more complicated than that if you are expecting certain architecture features like SIMD?
As someone who deplores recreational drug use, I would be happy to see it's manufacture distributed, cheap, and hard to detect.

It would remove the majority of the violent crime element from the equation without significant downside (that I could see.)
Indeed, but they are incredibly expensive; as in tens of thousands of dollars per exchange per month.

I think that the outrage against HFTs is basically that they've raised to bar - if you want to have a chance of getting the good fills, you have to spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

Personally, I think that this outrage is misplaced. Playing field was never fair. The costs of playing are just clearer now. (And higher, thanks to HFT, yes - but they weren't low before HFTs; just opaque)
Show HN: Quickly calculate and compare income, salary vs. hourly, days/week, etc.
very mini. With price per ft2 now nearly $1.4k, $2m is 1430 ft^2. That's not tiny, but for a 3 bedroom it's far from a mansion.

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/marke...
Hold the phone! I didn't say that all women have it worse than all men. I totally agree that gender is just one of many factors that gives some people unfair advantages and other unfair disadvantages.

My only claim is that being a woman tends to be a disadvantage in the same way that being poor or being black tends to be a disadvantage. It obviously is the case that the advantage/disadvantage conferred by one trait (here, gender) is conditioned by other factors. So, it might be that upper-income white women are more disadvantaged relative to upper-income white men, compared to the relative disadvantage of lower-income white women with respect to lower income white men. This certainly seems like a real possibility given, as you say, the unreasonably high incarceration rate of lower-income men. (Though I'm not sure I'm ready to commit one way or the other on who has it worse. I just don't know enough about the lives of lower-income women, frankly.)

Given that we were talking about the software industry, though, it seemed reasonable to relativize the conversation to, broadly speaking, middle/upper income people.
There's no way of answering that question without knowing your exact requirements.

However, if you want to preserve the extreme flexibility of the daemontools approach, but with a workflow that is systemd-like (even converting systemd unit files to native service bundles), check out the nosh project: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar...
Founding a startup with my spouse was very useful in a lot of ways, but unfortunately, despite enthusiasm my spouse lacked sufficient skills and experience, so unless your spouse has also been working at startups for a decade, it's not always ideal-- but you can count on loyalty there.

Truth is, give me a cofounder who has been working for startups for 10 years and what you say makes sense. But co-founding with someone whose first experience at a startup is founding one and it doesn't make sense.

And it's not like more resources are bad, it's a question of their cost.
Computer Scientists Find Mass Extinctions Can Accelerate Evolution
There's a difference between being approved for general aviation and being approved for commercial air carrier (Part 135) use.

Reception would be even less of an issue for commercial carriers since they are rarely not above all significant precip.
> appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements

Which is why everybody loves getting a letter asking them to turn up for jury duty, right?!
No. A revolving door refers to government leaders who leave government service and go work for lobbyists. We just go back to the private sector.
When I discovered that there was a third path between job and startup, a whole new world opened up for me. http://www.jasonswett.net/the-whos-who-of-the-micro-isv-worl...
How much interaction does the USFS have with Congress? Do you have any idea when we'll start to see more technically-minded and possibly younger representatives in Congress who might make these issues more of a priority?
Maybe the way to stop people making websites about gender issues in tech is to stop complaining about it?
For as long as there have been financial markets, there have been people playing the role of market makers, HFTs are just the latest incarnation (although HFTs are not exclusively market makers, it does tend to be the largest chunk of their volumes).

Market makers are people that take no long term view on price movements, just try to provide liquidity in the short run, collecting the spread and trying not to to accumulate positions that are too large either way. Without market makers, prices would be much more volatile (they would just move a round lot because of short term fluctuations of supply and demand with no long term predictive power).

Basically you can think that market makers charge you a small (very small in case of HFTs) fee in exchange for the risk they run for holding inventory for a little bit and in the process reduce volatility.

Before HFTs, market makers were people that had seats at exchanges, which had much more of an information advantage over normal market participants and who certainly charged much larger fees and ripped off people more. The current system, with HFTs playing that role, is by any measure better for both retail and institutional investors.

(disclaimer, am an HFT trader)
Had microsfot paided the least attention to Dvorak back in the 80's, we might have been able to bypass all of those lovely "benefits" (read as "ugliness") that Mr' Gates's tight OS/App integration bestowed upon the DOS world.

I don't let MS do automatic anything on my windows box. I only use that box for a couple of apps, but when I need them, I really need them and can't afford to be blindsided by a box that won't boot.

I pick and choose the updates I apply and only then after they've been out in the wild for a month or so. I'm not going to let microsoft do any alpha/beta QA testing... errr... I meant "automatic updating," on my production box.
I can't help but wonder if perhaps "dreaming" serves no function but is just a side-effect of our brain-cells shrinking (?)
That's gotta make your "founding" customers happy.
In general I agree with the other comments that discuss that lack of sleep might have other issues so "work arounds" designed to help pilots and truckers probably aren't a good idea. However and in particular connection to this article there might be people who are at risk for Alzheimer's where it makes sense to "sweep" the brain more than once a day? So normal sleep + another process around 2pm? Not sure if it would work like that but that was what I wondered when reading this/
There was a monkey experiment called Project Nim with a documentary about. The footage in that movie is amazing. They used to sit in smoke circles and pass the joint to the chimpanzee. Ultimately the story turned sad when the funding for the research was pulled and I know this is about apes, but I am just saying animals are capable of much more than we think.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814836/
It's also been demonstrated that tumblers are not always reliable depending on the implementation and how they are used. There is also the risk that the tumbling service could be seized, hacked or operated by "unethical" individuals. It's a complete gamble as far as anonymity is concerned.
Okay, maybe it shouldn't be exactly there. But we have to start building more vertically on the Peninsula -- we just have to.

And I understand fully that it's going to take a sea change in local sentiment before that can happen.
If you're a programmer, and you're relatively young (like under 40) you probably don't have a lot of experience. Sure you have a lot of experience programming, and solving problems. But it's VERY unlikely that you know an industry, and it's unsolved or badly solved problems. To get to know these problems, I think you need some outsider experience.

For example, i'm in the healthcare industry. I can name a whole bunch of problems here, but none of them are ripe for a new startup. That's because I really only find out about a problem from my little part of the world. The few times i've had glimpses beyond my world I certainly haven't had enough of a glimpse to really try and tackle it.

So to me, that's important. Without a cofounder who really knows an industry, you're going to work on 1st world problems that a normal person might run into, that are solvable by a single person.

To be honest, of the problems left in that space they're not really interesting businesses. Either they won't make too much money, or they solve a boring non-problem.

As a technical person I want to find someone who has ran into good problems, and will know if a solution will work or not.
Haha you can say that about war too.
Here's Todd Park's (White House Technology Advisor) talk during the recently concluded Twilio Signal devcon. He's then followed by the co-founder of Twilio, newest avenger in the USDS team https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s
Man, my working knowledge is really outdated.
Is "to 20" superfluous? If they had said "at least 10" that leaves you open to baking a thousand. The "to 20" caps the possible range and makes the statement more confined.
Fair enough! I think there is a lot of information out there, and it can certainly be overwhelming.
costs are lot lower than ever. Think about what you had to do before direct feeds and colocation. You had to have guys on the floor of the exchange. If you think paying them was cheaper than a direct feed, then you are wrong. Direct feeds cost money because....everything costs money. Exchanges are businesses, why should they give away their data for free ?
Interestingly, even though I follow Bitcoin pretty closely (I regularly read/troll r/bitcoin) I'm just now hearing about this company.
Indeed, that is my intuition as well. This is the safest default behavior from the compiler, and even solves crazy expressions like:

u64 = ((u8 + u16) * u32) / u8;

It's hard to reason about what a programmer would want that statement to do. Coercing everything to u64 is the safest option. The idea, though, is to allow the programmer to use explicit casts to define exactly what they want when the need arises. So:

u64 = (((u8 + u16) as u16) * u32) / u8;

Would mean u16 addition, u64 multiplication and u64 division. So you get the benefit of safe, implicit type widening without losing the ability to micro-optimize when you want to.
Your underlying point seems to be about making decisions objectively, without baggage related to gender or whatever.

But you wrap that point in a lot of highly subjective angry baggage, where you presume that anyone downvoting you is an "SJW," and you mock something you disagree with as "demagoguery," as if it is a rhetorical play to garner a following rather than a sincerely held belief.

This tells me that you are NOT a particularly objective person. And if you aren't, perhaps you could open your mind to the possibility that other people aren't, either. Maybe you personally aren't biased against women. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that other people don't have such biases, and objectively speaking, this is the case regardless of how you or I might believe we behave.
Win a drought? This isn't chess. The wording should be 'survive', cope with or even struggle through. (Take that nature!) There is no winning. I was in California six months ago and was taken aback by the lack of worry. Nobody seemed to be doing anything. The lawns and fields were green, the backyard pools all full and people were washing cars like normal.