skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really sad, but in one way kind of laughable, to see so many ostensibly bright students wasting their time cramming useless crap into their brains for AP history and calculus tests, and doing socially acceptable "extracurricular activities," all so they can get into socially acceptable or "impressive" universities where they can pay obscene tuitions and try to figure out what they want to do with life. Compulsory K-12 education is really bad for smart students who know what they love to do and what they're good at, because it's a massive, needlessly competitive distraction. Not all smart kids need to learn the details of calculus or chemistry or history, it turns out, because not all smart kids want to be math professors or biochemists or historians! Who woulda thought?!

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Oh, you're a talented young engineer? You can write a program in 3 minutes to approximate nearly any integral? Fuck you, we don't even teach programming in high school. In fact, such witchcraft is prohibited here. Instead, spend half a year of your life memorizing these integration tricks because we're definitely still in the 19th century. Speaking of which, don't forget that you have a big history project due tomorrow because you will no doubt be required to distinguish between Greek column types when you're in the real world!

Oh, you have a natural gift for writing? Too bad you don't know what a gerund or past participle is! You must be dumb! Let me tell you: In the real world, it is imperative that you be capable of diagramming sentences. Yes, you deserve to fail grammar tests even if your grammar is impeccable in practice.

Oh, you taught yourself conceptual aerospace engineering in elementary school? Fuck you and your creativity and advanced knowledge; you must follow directions to the point in engineering class to build this cardboard rocket! Engineering is all about following directions!

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Yeah, I've seen some nasty things in school.

I hope I see the day when students don't feel pressured to learn things just to make the grade or "keep up" with the fierce competition. Maybe young people will increasingly realize that competing to be #1 in the Great Conformity Competition is really dumb because it actually makes them less competitive where GPAs don't matter.

Imagine where you'd be if you were given the chance and encouragement to really focus on the things you loved while growing up. Young people should not be led to believe that there is one correct path for everyone.
We found only one-third of published psychology research is reliable – now what?
Thanks, I actually read!

"The Go devs have since stated that they were surprised to see that a lot of Go converts were from dynamic languages like Python and not C or C++. Go still makes sense for a lot of apps ... somewhere, however, that has been extrapolated to the idea that Go is a good language for writing web apps."

I think this is the crux of the question. And heck, it's very easy to spin up a web server in Go, and so many intro examples focus on that.
Workarounds, and penises. Per http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm..., a 100% digital gov't becomes a 99% digital gov't in the presence of militias, mafia, terrorist, etc. That 99% digital gov't doesn't have "balls" in the Bill Maher sense, and gets quickly overwhelmed. By workarounds. Stupid. But some people feel "vindicated". Especially teenagers (which brings in the question of voting age).
One thing I really like about Go is that the output is a binary. This significantly reduces some types of infrastructure complexity (deploy, CI, etc).

After a long stint as a python dev, I find myself seemingly almost subconsciously avoiding languages that require a ceremonial dance and some type of sacrifice to get all the various bits (dependencies, etc) in just the right place before the app will start up properly.
Sure, but you can also understand how your speech and other actions outside of work, while not prohibited by law, could also create a conflict with your employer (whether it's because you pissed off a bunch of customers or shareholders or went around posting things online that could harm your employer's reputation or business).

In such a case, would it not be your employer's right to terminate your employment? I'll give a hamfisted example:

Let's say I work for "E Corp". I also have very strong opinions on interracial marriage. In my opinion, people of different ethnic backgrounds shouldn't mix because it pollutes the gene pool of "superior" races.

Now let's say I start a blog where I regularly post essays and editorials which describe my opinions and I critique various media and public figures based on their adherence to my worldview.

One day, after a particularly impassioned post, my blog is noticed by a columnist at the New York Times who writes an opinion piece on modern day race relations. The public debate quickly spreads and soon my blog and opinions are being condemned by millions (and praised by several as well).

Now, E Corp knows I'm one of their employees and despite what you may have heard, the executive board is actually a pretty level-headed bunch. They typically seek to maximize profits but draw the line when it comes to things that make the company look bad or could hurt their public image. In fact, the CEO is currently the spokesman for a well-known minority rights group.

Now, while the state cannot force me to take down my blog, no matter how unpopular the opinions posted there may be, they also cannot force E Corp to keep me (a non-contracted employee) on the payroll. In fact, many public figures have stated their opinion that in keeping me on staff, they're essentially saying that they're OK with my opinions.

Can the state compel E Corp to keep me as an employee since I make my blog posts outside of work? Would that not be compelling E Corp to make the statement that my publicly broadcast opinions are OK? They may not be illegal but I'd wager that just as The Man can't shut down my blog for being unpopular or "offensive" to many, they also can't force my employer to make a statement by standing with me.
I think something like this will have to be clean-slate. The trick used by SGI and Cray, though, was to have some nodes run a full OS with compute nodes run a tiny OS. Then, there were storage or I/O nodes to handle that stuff. Most of the parallelism was in the operation of the compute nodes, interconnect, and storage. So, this worked out pretty well in practice for many MPP-style system. Today's work is trying to make denser, more efficient MPP's. So, they could use similar techniques as what worked in the past.

The use of ARM processors threw me, though. Usually problems needing this much memory and I/O take similarly beefy, multi-core, multi-CPU nodes to handle it. That wasn't good enough so many added GPU's and FPGA's to nodes. So, kind of wondering if their little ARM chips will cut it. Maybe something like Cavium's ThunderX could do...
I found each point illuminating; this one stood out, for me, as a good description of market positioning: "When you hear Volvo what comes to mind? Scandanavians, but more importantly you probably think “Safe car.” How about Honda? Odds are “Reliable car” came to mind. This is the basic idea of positioning. What comes to mind when people hear {company name}?"
Uber has hired the car hackers
hahahah this comment is absurd
[I'm the author]. The core tech description is still (mostly) valid, but the general ecosystem has exploded far beyond what is discussed in the thesis. See http://rumpkernel.org/ for a description of current reality (and http://book.rumpkernel.org/ for ongoing work to produce an updated version of the thesis).
Substitute the tech buzzwords for real estate ones and your terrifying comment could have come straight out of 2007. You shouldn't be building anything to "flip". That attitude does not lead to a society full of people doing productive things. It leads to a shake silo of charlatans doing their best to dupe VCs until the bubble comes crashing down on all our heads.
I am the author (of the book). AMA.

Ali
"Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore."

I wonder if this is why the rise of the Internet and the decline of religious affiliation are so closely related.

"As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible."

In today's society, we can shame anyone in the world we want in a matter of minutes using the power of social media. People themselves can enforce society's morals through shame. God may or may not be watching, but the Internet is always watching, and it never forgets.

It's an interesting idea indeed.

"They hope to show that the more omniscient and punitive the gods that people worship, the more money they are willing to give to strangers in their own religious community."

I wonder if people would be more willing to give to strangers if they were told that their name, social media profile, and donation amount were being put on a website for the world to see (and judge).
I spoke with a "grizzled old Lisp hacker" at my Clojure meetup here in Minneapolis. He let it drop that "If I didn't know the problem in advance, I would choose Racket over any other language. I love Clojure, though. I just don't get as much opportunity to use it." There's room for everyone here.
I agree with the author. I came to the same conclusion way back. Shoehorning commands and errors onto HTTP request methods and response codes was frustrating. As the author wrote, they're not rich enough to map on to. For example, if an error occurs what do I return? 400 Bad Request? What does that mean to the client who needs to show something to the user? Have to stick some details in the JSON response like an error field with the detailed message. So why not just check if there is an error field in the JSON response and make 200 OK mean that the HTTP request made it to the server. Now the client is simpler as the error callback is just for HTTP transmission errors (host not found, transmission errors, etc) and the success callback is just for communication with my back end code.

The HATEOAS just combines the documentation with the protocol. No thank you. I'd rather have a good API document to work from and a fixed API rather than trying to dynamically figure out what's going on. Seems HATEOAS is more suited for interaction with a human rather than a machine to machine protocol.

It's ironic that you used the NOSQL vs RDBMS debate as an example to prove your point. HTTP is a transport protocol. While it has some support for being an API layer it is way inadequate for that purpose. Expanding it is just not feasible as most servers and clients don't even support all of the existing options.

So just use what's best designed for the task. HTTP for transport and JSON for data. Makes things a lot simpler.
We've banned this account for repeatedly flouting the HN guidelines despite several requests to stop.
If you build systems that are part of an existing ecosystem, specifically an ecosystem built on Java technologies, then Guile or Racket would be terrible choices.
[A crude simplification to make a point]

Judge: "I can't tell the cops to stop secretly spying on everyone because I don't know who they've been spying on"

Plantiff: "Then make them tell us who they've been spying on"

Judge: "I'm sorry you have no standing because you can't prove they've been spying on you, so you can't demand anything"

Yes, I understand this kind of argument is correct in the legal system but it seems to make a mockery of "higher" notions of justice (which I think sometimes the courts take into account and sometimes they don't).
Yes, and the standard Go workspace layout (and therefore not even needing a makefile) is great.
Path Finder. It seems that somehow I've managed to screw up the reply. Sorry :)
Elixir is easier to deploy than Python/Ruby. Since Elixir compiles down to bytecode all you need installed on a server is the BEAM (the name of Erlang's virtual machine). It's not as simple as a binary but is still a significant improvement over git-based deployments.
I'm not trusting this one bit. Sounds like many descriptions of developments that later ended in bankruptcy or acquisition. Just give me a bunch of nodes with Octeon III's, TOMI's, and/or Achronix FPGA's in a SGI UV-style system (esp interconnect). Should meet almost any need I have for quite a while. Hopefully, the exascale designs are worked out by the time that isn't true. :)

Gotta leverage what we have a bit better even in designs pushing the envelope. Can always add better tech as it gets proven.
Masters of Doom does a good job detailing his logic in refusing to leave north Texas. Cheap cost-of-living and warm climate were his original reasons IIRC. Even though he could live wherever he wants, he's still extremely practical.
Maybe it's that I'm not confident enough, but "First, find a skill of yours you can monetize..." sounds an awful lot like "First, find oil in your backyard...".

I like what the author wrote about the subsequent advice -- pick a niche, go with established competitoin, etc -- but it still feels like it's meant for someone who has found the thing they do which is Special, and I don't yet feel that yet about myself.
I listen to them because they seem to be the least bad option, but far from good. So bad, but not as bad as others. On the other hand they like to think themselves as source of truth, to some extent. In other words that their politics are good politics.

Another thing about npr is that they handicap issues. So, there might be a small issue but it affects one of their agenda, it gets handicapped and given more exposure than something like that would warrant, under even treatment.
Fun to Imagine – Richard Feynman [video]
It's fine, but you need to have an agreed strategy for what happens to the company if you break up. Will one founder leave, what happens to the stock, etc.

As long as you can treat it professionally it shouldn't be a problem for most serious investors.
Funnily, in Hindi that literally means "cow dung" :)
AM is a great place for women to find anything from a sugar daddy to just someone who will pay for dinner. I'm sure there were a number of actual prostitutes on the site as well, but I personally know of one woman on it who was looking for guys to just take her out on the town, and if they happened to buy her stuff, that was cool too (which a lot of them were more than happy to do). If you're female, single, have a low-paying job, and don't want to be in a relationship, it seems like an obvious choice for some -- the guys are in a relationship, so it's easy to keep it uncomplicated.

Please don't take this as an "all women are gold diggers" sort of thing. <sigh> But that may explain why there were a lot of single women.
In fact, the secret of the not-as-young people is to manufacture the luck as much as they can and increase exposure to serendipity through consistent - well - showing up. And behind most lucky youngsters are diligent parents and support networks that know this lesson and apply it to their offspring, even if the offspring stay unaware.
TIL billionaires care about cheap cost of living.
I'm not terrified of death, in the abstract. You can't be terrified of something that you have no clear concept of, and I'm not quite so foolish as to invent something there to be scared of. The truth is I'm never there to be dead... that's what makes it death, the person not being anywhere any more.

Nonetheless, I don't feel like I'm ever going to want to die. The world still has many bright and wonderful things and people, and I've not noticed the charm of existence wearing with time. The company of my loved ones, for example, is as fulfilling this year as it was last. If some day, hopefully in a far distant future, I should find existence has become unbearably dull, then I imagine it taking place while sitting upon the observation deck of a castle built on the face of a sun.

Maybe that day would come, maybe it wouldn't. But to end after less than even a scant few millennia; to never get the chance to find out? It feels like rather a shame.

What I can imagine is finding death preferable to a life of pain or tiredness. (Which is really no more than to say that I can see why people wouldn't want to age too much past their early twenties or suffer lasting injury.) But even then, I'd not want death any more than someone offered the choice between being shot in the leg or the head wants to be shot in the leg. Preferred is not the same as desired.
Have you never used more than one disk in a machine? Locked out of a machine because /var/log is full?
Murder, Reinvention, and Someone Is Watching You Right Now
Ridley Scott confirms Prometheus 2 as his next project
Fascinating implications. The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage prosocial behavior. As the article says, "Watched people are nice people."

With the rise of the global internet and the simultaneous decline of religious viewpoints, what is the new "big god" that is big enough to unify the world's prosocial behavior? Belief in an omniscient NSA??
> I think functional programming is really good at some things, I don't feel like many people talk about the things it's not good at.

This is a wonderful tenet in general: let's think about what X is bad at, rather than what it's good for.

While I'm not much of a Rubyist (I've hacked a little in my time, but I fall on the Python side of the divide), working with trees (hashes of hashes are a kind of tree) has never been easier than in Clojure in my experience. I suspect this is true of any lisp.
After spending a couple of years in Austin, I always felt it had a veneer of "cool" that was mostly fake. It's cool because people say it is; it's really not a liberal oasis in a sea of conservatism, it just seems like it is. Having lived there, if you're not into going downtown or sweating your ass off doing something outdoors, there's not much in Austin that you can't find for cheaper elsewhere.
I'd imagine that it would be easy to miss a disallowed system call down one rarely used path in a larger program.

It might be interesting adding the ability to do something like:

#define TAME_ENABLE
#define TAME_ENABLE_FOO
#define TAME_ENABLE_BAR
#include <foo.h>

which would cause a compile error by removing declarations for uncallable functions.
Local metal recycler has an electric arc furnace. Old fencing, bicycles, chunks of cars, whatever goes into the furnace to be melted.

A water heater, still filled with water, stuck to the side of the crucible. When most of the metal was flat-bath (all melted and liquid) the water heater fell loose into the 2000 degree pool.

The resulting explosion blew out the side of the furnace, raining shrapnel and droplets of steel on everything in a 20 foot radius. A man was standing there.

It took half a year for him to return to work, much scarred both physically and mentally. He still can't go back into the furnace room. They found other work for him in the yard and office.
It has "Calculate Folder size on Space" feature.
Carmack a few tens of millions, not a billionaire.
> Also: need to cache some computed data in memory, and reload using a REPL or other means, haven't figured out the most "batteries included" way to do so yet.

Elixir does nicely here, too. For caching, ets[0] tables are very easy to setup. For reload, you can use IEx to connect to a remote node and do whatever you need to do.

0 - http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/ets.html
Why It’s Hard to Sue the NSA: You Have to Prove It Spied on You
Minor nitpick: given their huge focus on memory size, they also have to care a lot about memory bandwidth. That means they want Xeons with fewer cores per CPU, since each CPU (socket) has just 4 memory channels. Furthermore, if they can get away with just 4 DIMMs per CPU, they avoid the ~20% memory throughput performance penalty from memory channel interleaving.

Crunching the numbers, the thing that makes most sense is 128 GB per socket, with 10 core CPUs in that, giving 2500 CPUs, probably dual socket nodes so 1250 nodes. (I'm assuming 2,500 cores above is a typo.) So each CPU would talk to 4x 32 GB DDR4 DIMMs, which are indeed available. This is also just speculation, but I couldn't see any other options giving as good performance.

Given that this speculation is correct, it's hard to see how this is much different from existing HPC hardware tailored to high-memory applications.

As for what your musings on interconnect latency: I believe you are correct that you can't really run with the multithreaded paradigm once you start computing at significant physical scales. Perhaps they want to move to something MPI-like for their applications?
A window into ancient economics
Could be, but it still doesn't make sense. It's the same underlying stuff, so either they're both UNIX (what I'd vote for) or neither is.
> If you have unrestricted sudo [...] your password is effectively the root password.

Yes, but it keeps an audit trail of who's account was compromised, etc.
Binary outcome - a success or not a success
As an East Texas native who's now in California... sorry, Texas has some pretty vistas, but there's no comparison to the Sierras and California Coast.

God, I miss good Mexican food and TexMex though.
It's been over a decade since I looked at this. I wrote a FireWire camera driver for QNX around 2003, and looked at Linux to see how they did it. At that time, the upper limit for external memory requests was a hard-coded constant. The config parameter came later. I think this was discussed on USENET, but I can't find it right now.

FireWire doesn't really have "DMA", anyway. It has some auxiliary functions to let the network controller get and set single memory words, one word per packet request/response. All bulk transfers use a different mechanism, which works more like an Ethernet controller, shipping blocks around into receiver-designated buffers. The "memory access" function is in there as a way to send commands to devices. This thing was designed by people who thought that storing bits into a control register was the proper way to talk to a dumb device. In practice, dumb devices now have some small processor, and the "memory access" function ends up being processed by a switch statement, to do "turn camera on" or some such function. There's no real reason for a PC-scale machine to need the DMA functions enabled, except for kernel debugging. That should be permanently disabled in all production systems.

Thunderbolt, on the other hand, apparently really exposes memory on an external cable as a normal function. That's how it extends the PCI bus to external devices. Not good for security.
I'm not the persuasive person that convince the bosses to use Scheme, so I don't have a triumphant success story, but some minor victories. I'm one of the core developers of GNU Guix (a package manager, distro, and associated set of tools) that recently was deployed successfully in a large production HPC cluster in Germany, which I think is a pretty nice achievement. At work, I use Guix and an init system called DMD (also written in Guile) a lot for development, and I'm trying to slowly work them into production via Docker.

It's an uphill battle to advocate for something that isn't the status quo, so I'm proud of the little victories.
Its different to be fired by somebody for what you said, and for the boss to be fired for what he said. You have to see that difference.
It sounds like you might have a good story here, but there isn't enough information for the reader to tell. Your comment would be more informative if you added the details, which people here would likely be interested in, and took out the insult.
Those shares were worthless, from what it sounds.
How do psychiatric delusions differ from strongly held beliefs or opinions?
RE: (3)

Such as? If I'm reading the text correctly, the judicial power extends to every case and controversy of any human being.