skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Demonizing farmers for the water crisis is completely missing the issue. The fault lies at the feet of environmentalists and politicians who stopped building water infrastructure in proportion to the growing state population. LA is naturally a desert. SF cannot supply all of its water locally. Water infrastructure is necessary for humans to live in most regions of California and we have been living off infrastructure investments made 50+ years ago.

If you reduced direct human usage of water to ZERO in California, you still wouldn't have enough water for agribusinesses.

This is playing out. As water prices rise, the coastal cities will turn to desalinization, and the agribusinesses will be left to knife each other.
HPCToolkit and TAU are good options for profiling C++ applications. They come from HPC so they are intended for use with parallel and highly concurrent applications.

http://hpctoolkit.org/
https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/tau/home.php
Could be used for a package dependency solver like Cabal's, possibly.
Why TLC Diet Is a Must Try
The United States Radio Spectrum Graph [pdf]
Life is like Tetris
As an exercise for the student, reflect on the implied trust that this site is asking for.
Edit any website and save the changes permanently on your computer
I went to the first Moogfest about 10 years ago. Back then, it was a tiny event featuring obscure musicians, and I saw a fantastic theremin virtuoso. Due to the extreme difficulty of playing the instrument well, my guess is that the vast majority of people simply aren't capable of ever achieving the level of proficiency that makes it actually sound beautiful like this woman did. I've never liked the sound of the instrument outside of her playing.

Her name, by the way, is Pamelia Kurstin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJU0QRYbe4A
Programming without pointers is essentially programming without run-time identities used in aliasing; i.e. programming with values. You can program with values, make it a unique ID or include one, copy that around, and you are essentially back to programming with pointers again (this happens in functional languages a lot, but they don't like to talk about it).

OO languages like to think of everything as an object, FP languages like to think of everything as a value, but in reality you often need both in most applications, and an extreme bias one way or the other isn't useful.
Reference counting steal cycles all over the place. The counting itself steals cycles, and the effect of dropping a reference is unpredictable: whichever module happens to drop the last reference to an object which is the last gateway to a large graph of objects will suffer a storm of recursive reference count drops and deallocations.

If you have a limited number of file handles, you may want them closed ASAP, and not when some reference-counting mechanism or GC decides. Reference counting is not ASAP. Typically, you have some smart pointers which will drop the reference in relation to some lexical scope. That could be too late: the file handle object could be in scope over some long running function, and so the file is held open. The fix is to call the close method on the object, and then let refcounting reap the object later. (Woe to you if you decide to manually take over reference counting and start hand-coding acquire and release calls. Been there, debugged that.)

I implemented weak hash tables in a garbage collector; it's neither complicated nor difficult. Under GC, we use weak referencing for essential uses that requires the semantics, not as a crutch for breaking circular references.
In addition to the tonal aspects modern theremins like the Moog Etherwave also make great CV controllers.

http://youtu.be/c8uE3Q8p9Jo
Brett Victor had a similar idea involving something wilder http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/
Good Vibrations doesn't use the theremin, but a custom electronic instrument that was inspired by the trombone: http://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2013/02/07/171385175/no...
I'm a former intern from AWS (6 month non-tech internship). Now I work in a completely different part of the company full time.

My experience is exactly like what 'onaplane' wrote. Internship was great & very rewarding from a career/working on cool stuff perspective. What I saw was that people who worked long did it because they wanted to (I work(ed) long sometimes because I wanted to!). 40-50 was the norm for AWS & it's roughly the same on the retail side. Are there bad teams at Amazon? Absolutely. Are there awesome ones? Yep!

"A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent."

You're doing the exact same thing in reverse.
Auto-boxing isn't really about creating pointers, its just about having some consistency at run-time. Since the boxed item is a value (immutable), it has no state and the fact that it has been given a pointer isn't very interesting.

C# is an example of a language that goes the other way: it provides first class support for custom values in the form of structs. When you are writing performant code, you actually begin to worry about transparent auto boxing and such.
Pretty much. Here in Serbia, the official number is IIRC > 90 % Orthodox Christian, but out of that number, hardly anyone actually believes in god in all seriousness and in line with the Church doctrine. Also hardly anyone goes to church on a regular basis, in fact I'd say that the idea of weekly church attendance is something that most people picked up from American pop culture. There even are fairly respected local priests who squarely say to people there is no god, and then proceed to woo women, eat meat on fasting days (there's even a "spell" with which they bless the non-fish meat to turn it into fish) and so on. It's pretty hilarious really. :)

The last and only minister of education that proposed creationism be taught in schools was laughed out of office.
Ummm it's a sawtooth oscillator based analog synth. It sounds like that. It's easy to learn, difficult to master. It was a huge part of 60s and 70s music. you could say that a Stradivarius sounds bad if a toddler is playing it. I it's just an instrument, and it depends on the player to "sound good"
Lisps are very abstract[1]. They have no value if you write a tiny mathematical expression or conditional. Who ever had trouble reading these ? This is not were you suffer when you write code IMHO. When you want to compose, rewrap any kind of objects at scale, then it's brilliant.

[1] I believe it's from birth, it was a thought experiment at first, IIRC it didn't even have numbers. Just symbols. It was about writing your own abstractions (see the symbolic differentiator in Lisp first paper). If you don't think about it that way then it surely will look absurdly convoluted.
The "insubordination" thing is killing me.

As a manager, one of my highest goals is to get people to be usefully insubordinate. So many people, thanks to controlling bosses or color-inside-the-lines education, will just do whatever they think powerful people want. But I think we all do our best work when we're thinking for ourselves about how to best serve our users and treat our colleagues.

Good for you! I hope you keep being "insubordinate" wherever you go.
Ask HN: JavaScript framework that I can use “right now”?
After spending a week learning and experimenting "modern" JavaScript I think it's not worth the effort to use React.js and Webpack if I'm not making a full SPA. It's like alpha software with constant changes (I'm mainly talking about the ecosystem and its components). Documentation is also lacking, specially Webpack. Even tutorials from 3~6 months ago are somewhat outdated. Funny thing I learned Flux's basics and now they are already talking about Relay (ffs!)

Right now I have a tradicional (and huge) MVC back-end and an API (I'm not using Node.js). Assets = Gulp to concat+rev+uglify.

What would be the best approach to my pages where a lot of user interaction is needed? Using jQuery and handlebars seems ugly but I think I'll be overcomplicating things if I adopt an entire new stack (React, Babel JSX/ES6, Webpack, modules, hot-reload...) on top of what I already have.

I'm the single developer on this web app, I feel extremely productive on the back-end side but the front-end is driving me NUTS. Since it started making a good amount of money I quit my job a few months ago and it's my main income now.

I'm (literally) having nightmares about a JS bug I won't be able to solve since it's so many moving parts and I'm a back-end dev who doesn't have the time or patience to replace his entire front-end stack every 6 months.
Just commenting to say thank you.
I'm not sure about that. Orthodox Christianity is pretty strict about that kind of stuff. I strongly doubt any Orthodox priest or monk with authority would say that there's any allegory in the creation story. There are some contemporary theologians and bishops who might attempt to court modern public with "updated" views, but that's hardly official teaching.

The reason you don't hear much from Orthodox Churches on this topic is that most would find it absurd to even discuss questions such as these.
>Why do people who write or talk about Lisp always have to start with something like this?

Well, the people who write or talk about Lisp generally probably think it's true, and it's the sort of thing that, if true, makes for a fantastic selling point.

>you can add/remove 'language features' as you want, and the syntax is really simple, and code is data

I think this is the meat of it: that Lisp offers an exceptionally low barrier to entry to the world of, let's say, "experimental programming." It lets you do things you would never dream of if you've only ever mucked around in something like C or Java. Whether or not those things are actually useful in and of themselves, it's fun and rewarding to experiment not just with programs, but the way you write and even think about them.

Of course, there are people who will tell you that Lisp is also good for solid technical reasons, but I think this is the main appeal of Lisp to most people who describe it as "awesome."

>Everyone tries to read programming languages as close as possible to plain english in their head

That's simply not true. You may do this, and it's a perfectly valid approach, but not everyone thinks that way. Personally, I think of code in terms of what it "does," rather than what it "says," if that makes any sense— it's difficult to explain.

As for readability, I firmly believe it ultimately comes down to familiarity. Yes, infix syntax is easier to read for a limited subset of small, operator-dense arithmetic expressions, but I find that kind of code is relatively rare. Broadly speaking, you're going to get most of your structural information about Lisp code from the indentation; the parentheses eventually fade into noise. And honestly, the same is true of just about every other programming language.
Do any of the down voters have another point of view they would like to share?
Police: Messages for No. 1 Mafioso Hidden in Sicilian Soil
In that case, on behalf of your coworkers, I encourage your plan of leaving.

For the rest of us, though, quitting often doesn't help. Shitty workplaces are commonplace. Jointly pushing back (which doesn't require a union) can create a place that you don't want to leave, one where you can have more confidence that it will stay good even as executives come and go.
Seems like ubuntu 15.04 has problems with the omnibus installer. Does anyone have a pointer for me that works?
That's a straw man. He's not criticizing the intern for saying that he had a nice summer. His objection is to the intern assuming that three months in a cushy program at the beginning of his career qualifies him to judge other people's stories and the work of professional journalists.
Most likely not programmed by humans, at least at the highest levels.
You don't have to understand a model for it to bear fruit.

I'm sure you could find plenty of traders on Wall Street with models of the market who would say "we don't understand and it doesn't matter" as the money flows into their account.
> You're doing the exact same thing in reverse.

Could you explain what you mean by that? It sounds like you're suggesting that he's part of an anti-Amazon cult, which I'm having trouble making sense of.
It could be, but the primary issue with the Communication Free Learning algorithm is the fact that it is very hard to tell when a given constraint set has no feasible solution by directly trying to solve it. That's because Communication Free Learning is a probabilistic algorithm that is meant to converge to a solution over time. But, if after say 10k iterations we still haven't found a solution, that could mean that there isn't one or that we just haven't stumbled on it yet.

However, it is possible to apply the algorithm in situations where we know that there is a solution, at least with a pretty high degree of confidence.
Give it a try. There are over 1,000 games on Steam that run on Linux (most can also be purchased from GOG.com if you're wary of Steam).
Metric: Building a quantitative self app in Meteor and React
There's code, you can compile it and try it out. For fun I'm thinking to write a little python wrapper:

http://unql.sqlite.org/index.html/wiki?name=UnQL
Every big feature starts out small.
Empty Stomach, Poor Decisions
The original link looks like a scratchpad/notes page to me.

For insight into John Baez's ideas around this time, try the slides from this colloquium: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/quantum_spacetime/

(http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/quantum_spacetime/qs.pdf)

Urs Schreiber currently is at the forefront of where this line of mathematics ties in with fundamental physics. Here is a series he has started recently:

https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/20-years-ago-today-m-...

Baez's higher dimensional algebra program formed a large part of the heritage to these ideas.
Chakra Maze Game for iOS (previously Chakravyuha)
>And Apple would suffer no bad publicity for its cowardice because… ?

Cowardice? Judging by the public reaction to case Snowden, I'd be willing to bet it would be considered patriotic.

Regarding Apple's privacy policy (http://www.apple.com/privacy/) Gruber references and says that

>Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.

To play the devil's advocate of paranoia: What else they would say, anyway? Privacy statements are cheap. My understanding is that refusing to cooperate with US government would break a couple of laws (constitutional or not). You can prove it only after the fact - turning down the government request you consider inappropriate (if such thing ever is sent), and facing the legal consequences.

To turn the paranoia lever off, I agree that after certain point "but I don't believe what they say" sounds unreasonable. However, I have no idea where the limit between unreasonable paranoia and healthy suspicion goes.

Personally I don't use Apple products not because of privacy or panopticon considerations, but because I'm broke and can't afford new toys (not certainly Apple ones).
Yet OTOH the number of people in Eastern Europe who are fervent and actually have any clue about Orthodoxy is vanishingly small. Most people hold beliefs which are some sort of their own private Christianity which only pays lip service to actual Orthodoxy. The common phrase "I don't need a priest or Church to communicate with God" or some variant thereof is illustrative of this.
Sorry about that, i'll fix it
Just like Amazon. Right?
I totally agree. I can see why he would blame a lot of this on himself, but I think it's a mistake. A good manager would have been keeping an eye on him, helping him set boundaries, reducing schedule pressure, etc. If this guy were the only one to have a problem at Amazon that would be one thing, but the sheer number of stories points to deep problems with culture and management.
The Most Destructive Computer Viruses of All Time – Infographic
This makes me think of a generic assembler I wrote at one point (in C++ I think, I should put it on github). The idea was that you could define the instruction set right in the assembly source. It included a backtracking BNF parser to support it with these pseudo ops:

.rule name value pattern ; Define a syntax rule

.insn pattern ; Define an instruction
... ; Macro expanded on pattern match
.end

"pattern" contains literal characters, whitespace and
references to other rules with "<rule-name>" or <expr>
for a math expression.

"value" is a comma separated list of expressions which
can contain "argN" to reference the Nth value from the
pattern (as returned by embedded rules).

For example, this is how you could construct the
instructions "lda <expr>", "lda #<expr>", "ldb <expr>",
and "ldb #<expr>":

.rule dual 0x01 lda
.rule dual 0x02 ldb
.rule mode 0xf8,arg1 <expr>
.rule mode 0xfa,arg1 #<expr>

.insn <dual> <mode>
.byte arg1|arg2 ; Emit op-code
.word arg3 ; Emit argument
.end

SNOBOL4 itself is not an assembler, but I think you could make one like this from it.
Famous White House performance given by Vladimir Horowitz in 1978 [video]
> But if everybody's defining their own values, then a bunch of people are going to define their values very selfishly.

There are only two options: define morality for yourself, and own it completely, or allow someone else to define it for you.

Morality is a construct that stems solely from man. What Nietzsche condemns is accepting the morality of others like sheep instead of critically. You cannot own a moral construct until you have fully evaluated that construct and accepted its consequences yourself.

Further, he claimed that a morality based on what happens after you die is bereft of any real meaning. He advocated a morality rooted in the human condition and defined by its relation to humanity, not its relation to dead gods as defined by moral potentates.
What a wonderful post this is! I first encountered Julia fractals while taking a masters class in chaos theory, technically a physics class. It was a masters of liberal arts program so you got a little bit of everything... I hadn't taken math since high school, really, and the class utterly annihilated my conception of the world.

I remember the Julia fractal in particular because it was so beautiful, and it was around this part of the course -- maybe 75% of the way through -- that the fractals and like topics started to blow my mind. Our professor showed us this video that zoomed in on a Julia fractal, something like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gruJ0S3TTtI, and I remember watching it all day at work the next day. I also searched for images of the most beautiful Julias to make as my desktop background, of course.

Not only were they beautiful but so symbolic, as this article captures: Julia fractals are part of chaos theory, which holds that even determinate, logical systems can nevertheless manifest completely unpredictable and nonrecurrent behavior. It's a straightforward equation that gets you these beautiful -- and utterly terrifying, ceaseless, dreamlike -- images, when mapped in a certain way. For me, that's a really beautiful concept because with "Enlightenment" mathematics, Newton and Leibniz and co, you got this concept of a determinate universe, which could therefore also be known and predicated in advance. Yet chaos theory shows that even determinate systems can be impossible to know, refusing to allow the complexity and variety of that which exists to boil down into a boring pattern of predictable and even controllable outcomes.
> This is basic and obvious math.

Yes. But only once you prove that these are in fact space-spanning basis functions.

Does slapping the world 'basis' magically make results obvious and interesting? Why? Because the word 'basis' carries some of that abstract-mathematics cachet?
Actually it's pagerank for Larry Page
Ask HN: How do you approach designing good enterprise software?
Positionly: Hands Down Best SEO Position Tracker
>It is also an act with predictable consequences.

The most likely consequence would be the antagonist getting shouted down and shunned.
If you have to worry about a pogrom breaking out as a result of inflammatory speech then you likely have deeper issues to worry about.
The first time I hear a Theremin played is in a song by "Detektivbyrån" called "Om Du Möter Varg" - you can hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88rxS9ZLytk&t=1m15s

I found it fascinating, especially the way they've used it in that song, as a replacement for a vocal.
Show HN: Bulls and Cows, an SMS version
Is this the early days of unit-testing? I love the way he talks about the tests. A pleasant reminder that a well-formed test suite is akin to mathematical proof of functionality, as long as you've covered all the "appropriate" cases.
Gotos were shot down more than 40 years ago and they have never really made a comeback since. They are still used for error handling in the kernel, I've seen.
>How do you handle health care issues?

I live in Canada / Australia so it's no issue.

If you live in a country that doesn't have health care for all, you need to move.

Take note that I moved from Australia to Canada 9 years ago. It's a long process. It's a lot of paperwork. It's worth it if you get healthcare, no doubt about it.

> And how do you plan for times when you're more likely of not being able to do physical work anymore (in your 70 or 80s)?

Government pensions in both Canada and Australia are actually more than I usually live on, so I'll be fine if that's all I have, but I'm also putting money into retirement savings accounts that will supplement that (which also means I pay extremely little income tax when I am working).

I also won't be surprised if I wind up doing "reverse retirement" as my brother calls it - live life now while my body allows it, then work more when my body is giving up and I'm not so excited to be outside hiking/biking/snowboaring.
Thrust is for CUDA. But there's also the Bolt framework for OpenCL.

EasyOpenCL sounds quite similar to these STL-style libraries.
Man, I have always hated trucks, and this is yet another proof of why! But in all seriousness, this is yet another narrative of Congress' rolling back of regulations that prove quite beneficial by way of safety and overall welfare of the nation in favor of vicious profit margins for those warlords of industry. I certainly hope to see restored a body of lawmakers that can get their act together and promote the welfare of a healthy, vibrant nation before the end of my lifetime. We have too many clowns now who are willing to pass laws or not pass laws in downright stupidity, and I'm not sure if it's out of sheer corruption or debased philosophical convictions. For myself, this issue serves as an ideal example of where the government can and should intervene with laws and regulations and oversight in order to promote general safety and welfare, not to mention economic fairness, in preventing the exploitation of the have-nots by the haves. I'm just as weary of government getting too large and intervening in our private lives as anybody else, but who can argue that in cases such as truck driving and highway safety in general, the government cannot easily play a part in saving not only lives but tons of money?
So what happens if instead of an ellipse you take a curve of negative curvature, so that the reflections would be a lot less predictable?