skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be sensible for hypervisors to require IOMMU for all PCI passthrough, but it looks like Xen allows it without IOMMU for paravirtualised guests:

"VT-d Pass-Through is a technique to give a domU exclusive access to a PCI function using the IOMMU provided by VT-d. It is primarily targeted at HVM (fully virtualised) guests because PV (paravirtualized) pass-through does not require VT-d (altough it may be utilized too)."[1]

[1] = http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo
How to Jump from Cloud to Cloud
I found StatusPage's blog about a year ago when I was launching my company, and it was invaluable. They do a great job of walking through everything.

One of my favorite things is how open they were. They weren't vague about numbers, which made it much easier to understand and follow.
And then there's festina lente...
> While I hate the dishonesty and treatment towards employees it seems like Pandora was guilty of, I think some of the numbers are hyperbolic and while the situation was really, really bad, its not as bad as your comment made it out to be.

If the story is at all accurate, these are numbers that Westergren himself was giving in a presentation to a conference. If there's any hyperbole involved, it's his, not mine.
Thanks for your support! We are very much still active in the development of Lantern (the physical satellite data receiver). We've sent about 12 updates regarding the campaign; we're a little uneasy about flooding inboxes with campaign updates. You can always read about the latest here: http://blog.outernet.is/

Our newsletter archives are here: http://us3.campaign-archive1.com/home/?u=3b850004d879edb7542...
Let's see, a TL;DR, then a table of contents list, then straight to benchmarks...

This man knows how to get right down to business.
(Disclosure: I’m the VP Eng at Jut)

As Dave pointed out in the blog, we’ve definitely run into our fair share of challenges with the inherent limits of node.js. But on the whole, we’ve found it to strike a good balance between speed of development and performance. In addition to some of the techniques talked about in the post, we’ve also dropped down to C++ add-ons where we have really critical performance sections, and we do coarse-grained load balancing between multiple node processes to distribute computation on multiple cores.

We also have a good bit of shared code between the browser and server (including the Juttle language compiler and runtime) that has been hugely beneficial for us.

YMMV of course.
That's so not true in my opinion. There is a whole generation that was raised with Scheme as first language (and SICP ), I am particularly grateful that I was part of that and today I program (or had programmed) in most of the top languages in the Tiobe list as you say.
Ask HN: Is There a Google Search API?
Just wondering if there's a Google Search API that allows filtering by location and more specifically, by longitude/latitude?
Thank you. Just knowing for sure that it is an adjective helps a lot. That word appears pretty far from the noun it's supposed to modify, so it was not obvious.

This is the first line of the Paraguayan National Anthem:

"A los pueblos de América infausto tres centurias un cetro oprimió"

Parsing that sentence is a common exam question for college admissions.
Thanks for the OpenCart suggestion. Would you mind if I asked a few questions?

What kinds of services did you ultimately tie into it? Did it hook into stripe, paypal, or another third-party payment provider? Did you incorporate it into any kind of marketing or analytics pipeline?

I'm not much of a PHP dev (stronger in Node and Python), but it would really help for showing me what to look for. I'm definitely interested in something relatively out-of-the-box, I just want something I could dive into more than a WP plugin.
Yes and no.

Yes: I believe you're well within your rights to ask to see the financials of a company you're about to become a co-owner of.

No: If you're asking for proof because you distrust them, that's a HUGE red flag. Don't work with people you distrust. Even if it's just a hunch, go with your gut and just walk away.
Every entity in the world experiences risk. If you can't identify it, you're not trying hard enough.

The Fed can prevent yields from rising through another round of QE. The tradeoff being that it will have to push even more money into the system, undermining confidence in the US economy's ability to operate healthily without serious Fed & government intervention.

I never mentioned hyperinflation because I don't think that's a realistic outcome of more QE. I don't think something, something hyperinflation is a good way to summarize my argument, but it is sure is patronizing, I'll give you that.

Can you provide an argument that explains why we would want more QE at this point?
> productive organizations that rely upon peoples' consent for their existence

As a bonus for portfolio optimization and market experiments, they are more disposable than their predecessors.

The half-life of socioeconomic belief continues to shrink.
I've seen this a few times before. Just goes to show you, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". It's better to be the 'first' with a product than to be the 'best' and release a little later. Of course nowadays if he posted something like that on any social media site, he would be slammed with 99% negative comments, insulted by too many trolls to count, and in general, simply ignored. Yes, I'm cynical. Go ahead and attack me for that. You know you want to.
Thanks, I'll see about a public defender. Edit: unfortunately, I believe it's a civil matter so I don't think I can get a public defender.
> Whats amazing to me is that if I understand correctly backprop still works.

Yep! One computes the gradient with backpropagation and trains LSTMs on that.

> It is very odd that SGD on the error function for some training data is conceptually equivalent to teaching all the gates for each hidden feature when to open/close given the next input in a sequence.

Agreed, it's pretty remarkable the things one can learn with gradient descent. I'd like to understand this better.
So true.

I can't count how often I was in a situation, where someone told me something religious/spiritual and I just thought he was joking.
Teespring signs up with the NFL to sell custom fan t-shirts
They already have. All you need to do is reference their stance on encryption. The UK is not free.
I remember the day it was announced. We were sitting with my dad watching evening news.

The news was almost over and just in passing they quickly mentioned there was "a malfunction" at the Chernobyl power plant. They showed a quick picture of some smoke rising. And that's it. Nothing more. It was like they were announcing about how the local sports team won a medal or something.

My dad said, yeah this is not good.

We didn't live too close but we were a bit downwind. The only thing I remember then was that my mom's flowers on the balcony outside died. It was probably not related now that I think about it, but she believed it was. People didn't know what to believe. They obviously didn't trust the official channels.

There was a lot of fear mongering and people making up stories.

It got worse later when people from Chernobyl were sent to live in other cities. Unbelievably, they carried a stigma! People would shun them, as if those people were carrying a disease or were somehow responsible for it. I can't even imagine being uprooted from your home, irradiated with an unknown dose, sent to live in a new city starting with nothing, and then have your new neighbors and coworkers shun you as well.

But that's not all. At some point they called for volunteers. Basically people to help clear up the mess. They promised money and free apartments for those that went. Many went but, when they came back they didn't enjoy the apartments too much longer because they got cancer.

Anyway just a few personal anecdotes if anyone is interested.
Put my 5 euros.
List of unsolved problems in computer science
If I was starting an email client today I would store all of the messages in boring ZIP archives, with all of the metadata stored in an SQLite database (which can actually grow pretty huge with version 3 and above). Then use something like Lucene and SQL to retrieve, sort, filter, and search records.

Postgres would be great, since it has a full text engine built within, but I don't know much about running a Postgres instance within a single piece of desktop software (rather than actually having to launch a Postgres process, and then connect to that).
For that exists Typed Racket: http://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/
yes, but we can bolster our confidence somewhat because we know radiation causes leukemia. it's not a statistical association, but causual
I can't believe you just posted this. I had a 5 hour drive this morning and listened to nearly all the cryptography lectures during it.
Study: Most Experiments in Leading Psychology Journals Can't be Confirmed
"...and approximately 82,000 people are homeless on any given night." [1]

82,000 homeless on a population of 9,818,605 [2]; 0.835%

I just compared it to the 2012 stats for The Netherlands (highest homeless count in 2012).

27,300 homeless [3] on a population of 16,779,575 [4]; 0.163%

That was a bit surprising to me. It looks like there are 5 times more homeless per capita in LA than in The Netherlands...

[1] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California
[3] http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/themas/bevolking/publicaties/ar...
[4] http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLNL&PA=...
Fake Goldman Sachs is latest Chinese counterfeit bank to hang out its shingle
No, this isn't an implementation of Aaron's thesis (reagents [1]). It's an implementation of Keir Fraser's thesis :) [2]

[1]: http://www.mpi-sws.org/~turon/turon-thesis.pdf

[2]: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-579.pdf
Which is even better than a physical knob you have to remove your hand from the steering wheel to operate.
That's great, but I don't recognize that deeply caring is a requirement to be a good, productive employee.

And I'm not saying that "deeply caring is a requirement to be a good, productive employee" either. However, I will contend that - all other things being equal - a person will be happier, more content, and derive more enjoyment from their occupation, if they "deeply care". How much so is, obviously hard to quantify and this probably matters more to some people than others. I'd also posit that, in general the employees who "deeply care" (or however you want to phrase it) are likely to do better work to at least some small degree, just due to the whole "intrinsic motivation" thing.

I know for myself, I have professional pride in any circumstance, but there's no question I do better work when I actually care about the work, as opposed to when I'm just collecting a paycheck. OTOH, I recognize that I am not a representative sample. :-)
Exactly. I was hoping for a downturn so I could invest more in the stock market. But sadly there was no downturn.
Apologies for delayed response, I'm guessing you won't see it, but...without Camus in place...did you do anything to ensure exactly-once semantics in moving the data to the Batch Layer?

For the real time layer I see it as not being mission critical for most data sets to be 100% correct, but for the ETL part of the process, the guarantees provided by Camus (ensured by the OutputCommitters part of MR I believe) are invaluable.
@cwyers I understand this problem. However, this wasn't an acceptable situation for Docker to be in, because there is seemingly no choice "B" in which Docker comunicates with cgroups in a non-init system specific maner. I accept the concept that this is a hard technical problem, preventing race conditions while allowing more than one program to run on your system (to put it flatly), but tying Docker to systemd just wasn't an acceptable option.

I think that RedHat IS at fault in this, because their design choice of designating systemd as the single writer was extremely anti-standardization. Imagine if KDE wanted to be the single cgroup writter. Would people accept the fact that they would have to use KDE and interface with KDE in order to do containers on Linux? RedHat could have created a service "cgroupwriter" which would have communicated via D-bus or something. A "cgroupwriter" service would be far less divisive because it wouldn't be divisive on other issues such as choice of init system.
If they were using Ghostery to block ads--aside from testing--that would be ironic.
A year ago I was testing out a bunch of different cars for longer periods of time, and I found that the BMW was the least bad infotainment system. It's ok. Everyone else is just worse.

Cadillac Cue is rage-inducingly bad, I would love to see your reactions to that if you think IDrive is an abomination. :-)
Sad to see this eating up and killing off FluxBB. Seems like we're slowly but surely running out of basic, universal, no-nonsense forum software in favour of a move to Twitter/Facebook-timelines or Stack Overflow-style layouts, none of which are great mediums for organised discussion.
Self-patching Microsoft XML with misalignments and factorials
Is there a way to import my current lists from mailbox app?
YC Applications Open Today, Our Successful Application and Video
That happened to me two days ago. The weirdness went away after about 12 hours. I assume they're doing some kind of slow/rolling upgrades a few servers at a time.
I'm surprised there are any homeless people in the Netherlands.
> The only thing I remember then was that my mom's on the balcony outside died.

Are you missing a word? I hope you are. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
The U.N.’s Investigation Wars
What are you waiting for?
have used codemirror extensively for HiveMind (www.crudzilla.com)...donation will follow soon :)

Thanks for the great work!
How are people not picketing this? Where the fuck are these people going to go? There are over 6,000 homeless in the city. Do they think they're just going to take a bus to some other city? (Which, by the way, is what both Sacramento and NYC have done in the past, among others)

If they can't get them out of the city or into permanent housing, they're just going to wander around looking for a new place to collect change, soup, methodone, dope, and a corner to sleep in. That's going to anger residents and result in many conflicts.
Well of course in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (the computer game) they had combined the two. The Zone there is obviously Chernobyl, it even includes the giant over the horizon (now defunct) radar installation and so on.

(Note: I never played, I was just told by others about).
No thanks. I don't need to fly into an rages anytime soon :P
motivational sh*t is the signal things will end in tears
Joseph here, I wrote the post.

To clarify - for awhile, I just thought growing revenue was important and having a business model. I was skeptical of the idea of ‘believing’ as well.

Over time, I realized that great people want to work on something with a great mission. I remember seeing a Stripe pitch about how they wanted to grow the GDP of the internet. They were a tiny company at the time, but you couldn’t help believe that they were going to build something great. They also built a phenomenal product. That’s the kind of belief that I’m talking about.
I'm so excited by this news, Teespring CEO Walker Williams used to hang out on the #startups IRC channel on Freenode, and talk about startup ideas.

I remember him talking about Teespring, and I remember testing it too, on one of my FB pages.

I'm not employed by them or anything, but I feel extremely proud of what they've accomplished!
That too can be queued up, with a list of functions to call to free those resources.
Sorry, corrected, it was plants (flowers).
Hm, do you think it'll only take a month for it to be ported to Windows?
It's not payback; this doesn't hurt the US in the slightest. If anything, it devalues the dollar a little bit, which isn't really a terrible thing (the dollar is pretty highly valued right now which hurts US exports).
When I read 20 seconds to compile the list of the 10 most downloaded packages during the past 14 days, my first reaction was that this seems ridicules slow. How many downloads could that query have to accumulate?

A search then revealed that they have surpassed a billion downloads per month. Who on earth installs a billion packages and that every month?
Perfection in materials?
As someone from a legal background, I am used to endeavouring for perfection in the documents I draft or review. Many successful entrepreneurs and investors suggest it is more crucial to get to MVP and then fix on the go. As I move more into the high-tech world, I am curious as to whether the MVP + fix model applies to dealing with (potential) investor materials. For example, I have been asked to review a company's seed-round investor deck over several iterations and on each occasion I have found grammatical nit-picks. I assume these may turn an investor off but perhaps it would be better to just get the deck out there and worry less about grammar (I am not talking about glaring mistakes but more at the highest levels)?
REYES (Render Everything You've Ever Seen) has been the basis of PRMan since the start. Recently PRMan has shifted away from this approach and towards more ray tracing.
see the following for descriptions of REYES:
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/reyes-renderman-under-the-ho...
or the 1987 paper by Cook, Carpenter and Catmul
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf
IDC estimates 3.6M Apple Watch units sold in Q2
Maybe not fatal, but could surely knock out some teeth?
That sounds really neat! Can you tell me a little more about the approach? What language you use and what form the lessons take?
The design is incredibly on-point. The breakpoints for smaller screens work well for me, and everything is where I would expect it to be. The subtle animations and the crisp/clean interface are very refreshing.

Last time I looked at the forums/bb landscape it still seemed to be dominated by phpBB, WordPress' bbPress, and vBulletin. I hope these really fall out of style, as I just don't believe communication online happens in a way that lends itself to those architectures anymore.
Fair point but it doesn't change the argument.
Libwebpki: Web PKI Certificate Validation in Rust
Perhaps the biggest take away I found while studying psychology is that a lot of research in the field just couldn't be trusted until you vetted it. Political pressures are too great a corrupting factor. Words would be redefined. Conclusions overstated or over applied. This is on top of the already existing 'publish or perish' issue that impacts science as a whole.

The closer one was to neurology (like physiological psychology), the better it became. The closer one was to sociology (like IO psychology) or to a politically charged issue, the worse it became.

Also applies to psychiatry. I remember reading some of the papers published related to the DSM-V and at one point it looked like little more than peer reviewed version of two siblings fighting (though that was the worse case, not the average).

One big thing is to look at how the researchers defined words and look into how things translate when multiple languages were involved.
It's both. Each new movie will generate new technical challenges, and the tech side of the studio will be prompted to rise to the new creative demands. Finding Dory, for example, is a natural choice for using path tracing because of all the refractive surfaces-- In a movie that's set in the ocean, it's pretty important to have water that looks realistic and natural (and frankly, using older technology might be more difficult to work with in the end). Finding Nemo-era technology would not really cut it these days. It makes sense that Pixar should put in a lot of effort to get this right.

On top of that, it's important to stay on the cutting edge, both in terms of keeping RenderMan a competitive product, and in terms of keeping the internal challenges interesting and fresh-- which is necessary for attracting top talent and preventing the company from getting into a rut or a routine.
Joseph here. I wrote the post.

I think some companies can get it wrong. I think others do a phenomenal job. Companies like Stripe, Twilio and Airbnb have incredible missions that tons of people love to support - even people who don’t work there. I think that’s an incredible thing.
It gets into a pretty philosophical area. What's the difference between that and writing down an algorithm? Did you discover an algorithm or make it?
Actually, as I'm so used to the articles that place benchmarks at the end, I immediately scrolled down to the bottom after reading the preface. Then I realized the pretty graphs are at the beginning.

Anyway, this is an excellent way to present an idea to the public.
Too Big to Care: Citibank and the Cost of Uninvested Bureaucrats
Thanks a bunch Greg! Glad it's been helpful :)
When I test-drove a Tesla, I was actually surprised that the touch-screen controls weren't as bad as I expected, compared to physical buttons.

They're worse, for sure, but they've actually tried to minimize the problems, contrast ratio is high, buttons are clear, and feedback is as good as it gets without being tactile. Some buttons are also located on the edges, which allows you to feel out their position.
I've had people actually stop in front of me on the onramp a few times. Talk about dangerous. Now I and everyone else behind me has to get up to highway speed from 0 in about 50 feet.
What IT Support Used to Look Like
They devalued the yuan a bit, and probably want to keep it where it is now.

China runs partly on low interest rates on deposits. That means savers are effectively subsidising loans to businesses. Chinese savers are already looking for other places to park their savings (stocks, real estate, offshore), and China doesn't want to add more inflation as another reason to withdraw from banks.

I guess they figure that buying and selling US bonds is a way to control their target exchange rate (which they probably want to keep fairly stable) without messing other variables up too much, because the global market for bonds can soak it up.
DEmotivational sh*t, on the other hand... http://despair.com/collections/demotivators
Is there any sign yet of a funding pullback? I am not raising funds, but for those of you who are, are you seeing caution or hesitation from investors?
“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”
@Zuider, I am very familiar with Scala! In fact, the scales contained in the Tune.js archive come from the Max Magic Microtuner .mtx archive, which was compiled from the Scala .scl archive. It seems the .scl archive has surpassed the .mtx one, which I think was last updated by Victor Cerullo in 2010. I'll have to try to integrate the new additions to Scala into the tune.js library. I'd also like to add functionality where you can define your own scale. Maybe for version 2.0!

As to your point about pitch variation in microtonal music, that is often the case in a lot of traditional musics that make use of microtones, for sure. It is part of the character of a lot of that music, and some of the Irish music that you mention, to have a lot of subtle variation and microtonal embellishments. I read somewhere that non-fixed pitch instruments, such as violins or the voice, tend toward pure intervals naturally.

But there is a lot of music on fixed pitch microtonal instruments, such as the music and instruments of Harry Partch, La Monte Young's Well Tuned Piano, and refretted guitars.

Lastly, you could definitely program the kind of variation and fluidity into the web audio instruments that you use with tune.js. The demo just uses a piano sample for demonstration, and to have long sustain to hear the microtonal harmonies. I would love to hear this used with more portamento or with a pitch bend function, to get more natural variation.

Thanks for sharing the Irish music links, I'll definitely take a look!