skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using metric everywhere would have avoided this particular mistake. Although indeed, the bureaucracy would probably have let some other error slip through (like mistaking cm for mm).
Oddly enough I just turned the page and found the scifi book I'm reading discuss this controversy. Apparently Chomsky and Pinker are noted ape-communication skeptics.

(The book I'm reading: http://www.amazon.com/WWW-Trilogy-Robert-J-Sawyer/dp/0441018...)
Their conclusion is interesting:

If you have a terabyte or less of CSV or JSON data
then you should forget both Spark and Dask and use
Postgres or MongoDB.

I don't really have "big data" problems. I have "annoying data" problems. 500G of 10:1 compressed csv log files that I want to run reports on every now and then. Often just count or topk by a column, but sometimes grouping+counting (i.e, sum of column 5 grouped by column 3 where column 2='foo')

I've been looking into tools like Spark and Drill, but my tests running on a single machine found them to be extremely slow. Maybe things would be faster if I converted the log files to their native formats?

I've been considering trying to load the data into a postgres db using cstore_fdw, but what I really just want is a high performance sql engine for flat files, something probably like Kdb.

Like this article that I read recently: http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... I know this can be done efficiently enough on a single machine, I just need the right software.
Then I would not call you "C purist". The "C purists" I knew, refused to much typing. It also was the reason they refused other languages for example such with "tiresome long" words like "begin" and "end".

I on my part (in spite using C myself) think that typing code is not that problem, but typing the right code. And -- at least when you are not alone programming -- every code line is read 10 or more times more often than it is written. So, to be clear and understandable is much more valuable to me, than come away with less strokes ...
Super interesting... We are doing something similar with our Android app, Paq... To be honest I didn't understand how to actually post more than one comment or engage with others... Did you?
The paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0261 is a reasonably good introduction with a fair amount of math.

If you're looking for a non-technical overview, you might try https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum... but I don't think English alone is precise enough to explain anything really interesting about quantum computing.
It really depends on the jurisdiction, but it certainly isn't 'crazy wrong'.

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/resisting-an-u...

That said, I definitely agree with most of the sentiment here, that it's best not to push it, especially given the abuses of power we've seen. Fighting it after-the-fact is probably the best choice.
Great advice... Totally agree
openssl 1.0.2a on an old Conroe Core2 gets this:

sign verify sign/s verify/s
256 bit ecdsa (nistp256) 0.0001s 0.0003s 8727.8 3493.3
384 bit ecdsa (nistp384) 0.0005s 0.0020s 2001.4 493.0
521 bit ecdsa (nistp521) 0.0010s 0.0017s 1021.3 603.0

Can P-384 (or Ed448-Goldilocks) be close to P-256 in speed?
I think the necessary permissions missing were from her supperiors.
Tutte-Coxeter Graph
Or maybe Russia just doesn't spend as much on this stuff as western governments do.

There have been exposes by western AV firms too, but not as many and not as good. If there was obviously Russian govt malware out there, it'd surface sooner or later. We've seen American, Chinese, British, French, Israeli ...... seems odd that there's no Russian yet. But then I get the impression that Russian spying is overblown anyway. They seem to mostly focus inwards these days, or focus only on the former Soviet satellite states. USA has a much more aggressive global agenda.
Runit and ignite: a suckless init system? (2013) [pdf]
Among the States, Self-Driving Cars Have Ignited a Gold Rush
Thank you for posting this, and yes the term is very much a put down. It gives the illusion that said business is a hobby of a member of the leisure class, and that just isn't the case.
s/prelminary/preliminary
tl;dr: it takes too much of your time
That's only the number of fatalities. A large number of serious injury occurs across a wider range of vehicles than just HGV's. I'd say the majority are probably down to poor driving judgement, and a modest number are due to distractions. A lot of these HGV injuries are to do with bad road design and poor cyclist judgement - pulling along side the left-hand side of a HGV while it's stationery into both the drivers blind spot and being unable to see the vehicles indicators. A few of the fatalities I know of were pretty unnecessary, since there are more than adequate cycle paths to skip around the dangerous sections of road. The Elephant and Castle roundabout is particularly notorious, but is surrounded by much safer cycle paths. Despite this, a large majority of cyclists stick to the highly dangerous road, and probably the same majority that decide to risk running red lights. (I am a cyclist, so I'm not starting a cyclist vs driver debate)
Is there a real trade off between intuitive and easy to compute, versus sound and satisfies the ordering constraints, or can you just compute the most precise sound solution?
And Denver!
I've been plagued by supposed 'purists' all my career. What they are, really, is bad at typing. They won't refactor a crap method because it would take them too long to type it all

The best investment in my career I ever made is, typing class in high school. It has separated me from the crowd at every job. Its more important that so many other irrelevant 'purist' ideals.
Would it be possible to release the PCB and schematic source files?
How browsers work [presentation]
New Study Revelas Octopuses Have Alien DNA
How Uber hires drivers where background checks are impossible
That's a fancy way of saying "its ok to beat women because personal freedom"? Or did I interpret your $2 words wrong?
Hacker breaks into Henderson computer server
Indeed, this is something we've known since time immemorial. It's even in the Bible:

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil. - (Ecclesiastes 8:11)
When you look at books that introduce OO, and languages that incorporate it, it's usually presented as is-a and extends and inheritance.

The fact that Alan Kay meant something different is irrelevant.

While you can build messaging and composition into most languages, they're usually considered application models in their own right, not core features. (Objective C is an exception, among a handful of others.)

So I think it's a valid question - why do mainstream languages still present this model as a core feature when other models are less rigid, more expressive, easier to work with, and better candidates for language fundamentals?
Avoid the Feature
...and Agile is mostly about restraining enthusiasm to small, testable efforts. Which causes much moaning and misery among the most talented developers.

What we need is, some kind of process that sorts the ambitious parts to the talented/experienced devs, and the rote jobs to the new folks. Let the horses run!
The tour of duty metaphor isn't perfect, but I've always interpreted the "tour" part to refer to the term limit. Everyone in the DS and at 18F has a hard term limit. Can't speak for every municipal government, so don't know about your DMV, but most federal employees can keep their jobs beyond four years if they choose to.

I would bet that a DMV employee would appreciate a thank you, though.
I wonder if anyone will find an actual use for this ...
Ask HN: Do you have an inner monologue while programming?
Someone on a thread here the other day mentioned that loud music is good to listen to while programming as it drowns out the inner monologue. I found this odd, as this is the last thing I would want to do. I think constantly in words when I'm programming, coaching myself through what I'm doing. I prefer, then, silence, for working. If there is music on in the office it annoys the hell out of me and stops me focussing.

So I was wondering what other - much better - programmers do. Do you let the voice switch off and do it by feel? Is not doing this what is holding me back?
Rayiner appears to be talking about bans for a carefully defined small section of society - people with criminal behaviour when drunk.

Vezzy-Fnord appears to be talking about the problem of bans when applied to everyone.
> I understand the interest an employer (or in the worst of cases a neighbor) might have in knowing that about a person but... somehow it seems deeply unfair.

It is unfair if you believe that the jail is supposed to rehabilitate people. It seems to me that people believe it in theory but don't believe it in practice.
iOS kinda does this. Apps built with a different SDK/toolchain will see different behavior from system libraries (UIKit etc). This was very noticeable in the ios6->ios7 transition. Existing binaries got the old keyboard, old ui metrics, old table view layout and behavior. Simply by recompiling with the new toolchain, the app is opted in to the new ui and behavior. (Incidentally, this meant a lot of work to patch up old code after upgrading the toolchain, quite a pain if you just wanted to release a small update to your existing app: Either you have to build with an older toolchain (not so easy or even supported), or you have to test and tweak your whole app all over again. This could probably be less of an issue if apple would support installing old sdks in new xcode version. But everyone just runs with "SDK: Latest" in their project build settings file)
Your comment made me think of cops pulling over a driver and sticking them in a VR driving sim for a few minutes to test their response time and motor control. Implausible, sure, and we'll probably have autonomous cars before it can become a reality... but it would be interesting to test for actual driving impairment rather than a proxy like a breathalyzer (or even walking in a straight line).

It would also give police an opportunity to remove other dangerous drivers from the road, e.g. certain elderly or sleep-deprived drivers.
I am really glad someone is trying to save this collection. I started collecting vintage hardware a few years ago and recently I've started focusing on buying back old books that I now regret throwing away 20+ years ago. In many cases, old books are becoming rarer than old hardware and software.

Some of these old books have some gems of information in them that you just won't find in modern books. Things like hardware schematics are commonplace in old programming manuals. In the 8-bit era it was usual to cover everything from assembling the computer to programming it in the same book. There weren’t dozens of blogs posts and “for dummies” books either: the manual was it. It had to cover everything.

Then there are the useless factoids, my favourite of which is that Tron is actually a command from old versions of Basic: TR(ace) ON. There is a corresponding but less cool-sounding TROFF command. I was rather disappointed that the names in Tron Legacy were all random nonsense, presumably because nobody involved realised that that the names in the original were all real computing terms from that era.
The trouble with fundamental forces is that they're fundamental. Trying to explain them in terms of something else is ultimately misleading (even though this can work with literally almost everything else). So I'm sympathetic to that specific question.
I never had a formal typing class and I guess I am still not that fast in typing, but with the years I learnt my keyboard (even in the US and the German variant) and for my opinion I am typing fast enough now, since I have to think sometimes between the strokes, still.

But when I look back at my career, I never had the feeling, to be to slow in typing even for Module II -- a language, that would never ever get the approval of the "C purists".

Doing refactoring, I use a simple trick myself -- I do much copy and paste ;) ... and delete (!) the copied stuff afterwards.

I think, as a programmer, it is a good property to be lazy -- but you should merely use it for code reuse instead for avoiding typing.

Oh, I forgot: I use vim, a typing avoidance editor. You can avoid lot of keystrokes or mouse moves with that editor. But not to avoid real content.
DST is great and the reasons I think that are nicely summed up here: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/

> If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July.

> If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
NASA tests the 'Ferrari of rocket engines' for mission to Mars
So you're suggesting that people be allowed, for example, to practice medicine without a license right up to the point that they kill someone through incompetence?
I'm not sure how this applies to football (soccer). As far as I can see, Barcelona have the most superstar team in world football, and are winning everything. The next two teams with the most superstars (Madrid and Munich) are winning everything else.

Also, isn't this impossible, too? A team that wins everything over a long period will by default have their players considered superstars.
They are in the repo:

Schematic - https://github.com/s-gv/cookoo/blob/master/schematic/whistle...

PCB - https://github.com/s-gv/cookoo/tree/master/pcb/gerber
True, you don't have to be killed or maimed to be a "victim".
Now I get it. It is not that complicated after all.
How misspelling in Colin McRae Rally 2.0 ruined my day
I visualize the algorithm flow and system state, and manipulate them symbolically. I don't really notice my internal dialogue, neither positively nor negatively.
I would like to add 'Introduction of Probability' by Joseph K. Blitzstein, Jessica Hwang. I actually have not used the textbook yet but I have taken Prof. Blitzstein's Harvard Stat 110 and it has been the best of all online courses I have taken for statistics. I have also heard very good things about the book. Worth checking out.

The problem sets for the course are available free online. So you can have a look at them to decide.
What's the status of automated book scanning - I can see how one could easily cut off the spine and scan looseleafs (looseleaves?); but when the book must be preserved ... there's surely a robot book scanner?
I have a gripe with references in general. Most references are just reference formulae and symbol manipulation. In general, they are the form of - We call this as Title X. In this X, you have ABC; you then do MNO* operations to get YZ. There's hardly context of when to use them or what they really mean. "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart hits hard here.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
no michael thanks for the info! any thoughts are appreciated, you never know where inspiration will come from ;)
That's a really good point, I've been using Pushbullet for a year now and didn't realise these announcements weren't verified. If anyone wants to see the troll announcements: http://www.clipular.com/c/5738478393360384.png?k=Qv9rfMKnRDe...

Edited: The Google channel may just be a rare exception, I've not sure about how the notifications are triggered but it may be unfortunate that the urls contain both "google" and "acquire <4chan>" but then just links to a a google search result.
Thanks for your reply! There aren't preprocessors, that's true, but I think the way MyPy does things is a bit unnecessary. They could have avoided the typing module and just used bare annotations, and made MyPy a static type checker. Still, this just avoids the dependency, which isn't such a big deal.
GNU GLIBC 2.22 Released
Kefir looks interesting, thanks for the pointer!

Now if somebody makes async channel combinator so that I wouldn't had to build so much boilerplate for network requests. Be it direct callbacks or promises or the new fetch specification, control flow of async operations seems to require more than one channel and glue code in between. That seems to bend the paradigm a bit too much for what is essentially IO ops in my apps.
Type inference for higher ranks is in fact undecidable, but not type checking. Hence, exactly like in Haskell with RankNTypes, you need to annotate your higher rank functions.

Actually, the Frege compiler employs an algorithm described in Simon Peyton-Jones paper "Practical Type Inference for Higher Ranked Types". Ordinary HM types are inferred, and higher ranked types checked.
I have words and phrases I say at all stages of programming. I've never made a list of them, but I should. They repeat, a lot.
Privatize the groundwater?
Show HN: OutFitR – Personal fashion stylist you can text (From TxTAdvice)
The problem with lay explanations in physics articles is that they tend to be wrong: they over-simplify to the point of contradicting the physics, or diverging into a discussion of language. Neither of those are considered acceptable, (though you could argue otherwise.)

You start saying things like "one way to think about it is like this..." and anyone who knows better will tell you that, while it's an easy way to think, it is ultimately not correct.
Well, yesterday Barcelona lost 4-0 against Athletic de Bilbao who won't/can't sign players from outside the Basque Country.
How to keep clients happy while traveling the world
> license revocation is adulthood revocation for all but the privileged few in SF, NYC, and maybe Chicago

This is almost certainly true in America, but keep in mind that some other societies view driving somewhat differently. America represents less than one twentieth of the world's population. In major European cities, at least, car ownership seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
Atom 1.0.7 Released, Text Editor Made for Developers
The Functional Reactive Misconception
I have been one of the backers of this kickstarter project for a rust book : Rust Programming Concepts

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1712125778/rust-program...
While I appreciate the extensive links to their sources, this is not much more than a thinly veiled listicle to drive 'related traffic' to a commercial service website.
Easy implementation of randomized algorithms.
... and since scientific results obtained in any way are good enough, US and russians were very happy to get their hands on Nazi "research" done in concentration camps. It was basically slow torture to death usually caused by infections from really twisted experiments, ie sewing in "patient" hay and observing him die slowly over weeks, without helping.

some would say once experiments were done and over, there isn't much that can be done to countless victims. albeit true, using these further gives some sort of approval on all of it (ie becessary evil BS).
All the other points might be correct, but green lawns aren't meaningless. Green helps people to calm down and focus. That's why chalk boards for schools use a dark green tone. Having some grass in front of your kitchen might be a way of us to stay sane. If the price is okay in an environment were water is very rare is a good question, though. There might be other sources of green plantation that doesn't use as much water.
Good content does take a lot of effort to put in, people are to just going to put it in by themselves. Wikipedia is sustainable, that's why it's still around and the worlds most popular reference. The only feasible alternative is private collections of knowledge opening up to the public. Now that's would be ideal but it's not going to happen by itself either.
WinFF Converter FFmpeg GUI [How to Install and Use in Ubuntu Linux or Derivatives]
Wait, do working quantum computers actually exist today? D-Wave is the one I heard about, but the wiki page says it's no faster than ordinary computers and not even sure it works as advertised.
happened to me too, Chrome on Android.
"1,000,000 times the performance and there's still an ASR-33 in the middle ..." [http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf]

There are people (Alan Kay et al.) apparently born with Nada's glasses, but industry as a whole doesn't believe them.
World Without Water: The Dangerous Misuse of Our Most Valuable Resource
Interestingly, both the study and the article in question don't mention one of the most famous examples of an "all-star team," the 1992 U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball Team, who won gold and led at an average of 44 points per game.[1]

The study measures success over a period of many years, but perhaps there really is no substitute for an "all-star team" when you need to get shit done in a short period of time (as in startup culture).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_men%27s_Oly...
Ask HN: Incentivising maintainable code from freelancers?
I'm just embarking on a fairly large webapp/api project which I know I'm going to need to bring some a front end freelancer onboard to make a react based web-app front end (My existing team will be working on the backend).

I am really concerned about getting maintainable code from any freelance talent I bring in, e.g. well written SASS/LESS. Paying for a working front end at a project price (can't take day-rate risk at this time) doesn't seem to incentivise writing maintainable code which my team will be able to look after for years to come.

Beyond asking (and praying) for maintainable code, what can I do to help increase the chances of getting better commented, maintainable code?

Thanks!
The way it does that is by using Diffie-Hellman or ECDH, which both rely on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem that quantum computers would break.
Here's what most people don't get about self-driving cars:

It's not the technology, it's the liability issues that have to be resolved before self-driving vehicles really become feasible.

Can you imagine the corporate finger pointing and circle jerking that's going to happen the first time somebody gets killed in an accident cause by a self-driven vehicle?

And somebody is bound to get killed because there is no way possible to code all of the possible scenarios that can happen on a road or guarantee 100% that the hardware will function properly.

I have yet to hear an insurance company step up and state how they are going to handle these issues.

It seems like a mess. I have a good driving record and enjoy pretty cheap insurance rates ($25/month from Insurance Panda). I also enjoy taking my car out for a spin and enjoying the ‘freedom’ of being able to drive anywhere. Will the driverless car allow all this? If not, I’ll have to pass.

I've also haven't heard an insurance company step up and say they will insure a self driving car. Until this happens all this talk about self driving cars is really a non-starter.
Thanks. It's great to have basically Haskell on the JVM. I'll give it a try.
Barcelona has an undeniable king above all superstars, Messi. This give perspective to all others, Neymar and Suarez just know Messi is better. And the last batch of BCN superstars were formed by stars whose play style was inherently teamworking: Iniesta and Xavi were midfielders whose biggest strenght was prepare the game for others.

And Barcelona have always had its share of average, but impressively dedicated team players, like Puyol, Piquet and others.

Real Madrid isnt the same and do not have the same performance as well.
You bring up a great point. I'd argue that, instead of being required to go to medical school, you should be tested on the merits.

If you meet the objective bar (no lawyer pun intended, though see California's attempt at doing this for the legal profession), then yes, you should be able to practice even without a multi-year degree.