skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
one example that come to mind is Trayvon Martin's case [1] ... since he died, he could not say that the shooter was not acting in self defense... no jail time for the shooter.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin
The problem with the original lottery is that most of its value is from high-EV tiny-probability events, e.g. the 2^{-50} probability of winning 2^50 dollars. The practical result of that event does not seem to be worth 2^50 utilons, to say the least. It is hard to think about events worth that many.

However, many perturbations of this lottery can actually be good bets.

For example, suppose you gain 3^n dollars with probability 2^{-n}. Then you have a 1/128 chance of winning $2187, a 1/256 change of winning $6561, and this game starts looking much nicer.

The "Pascal's Mugging" divergence is a different problem, where Solomonoff-style priors imply negative-exponential probabilities of Busy-Beaverish payoffs. Ordinary priors don't really have this problem.
Who knew, if you raise prices, through collusion or explicitly, you might just take in less money.

But part of it is probably just the same that is happening with music and TV. There are now very diverse sources to fuel media consumption, you are not bound to a specific "curated" collection. Hence the success of US series in Europe, where most of the time you can't even see them legally.
According to the video, you need vacuum because in air the surfaces will discharge before they are separated to the point where the potential large enough to generate x-rays.
I was speaking in the context of with JS disabled.

There's a JS-based fade-in on page load (or at least there was; the author mentioned that it'd be changed at some point) that doesn't bother to have a fallback. And as such there's a CSS rule that sets the post opacity to zero (making it unreadable).

There are many many many websites that don't work without JS that work if you disable both JS and CSS. This being one of them.

That being said, even other than that there are a number of things I don't like about the website. All personal preference, however. (Namely: 85-85-85 font on 255-255-255 background isn't the best, contrast-wise (I have a laptop and am often outside - readability trumps fashion for me); I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; Continuing on the trend of "why do you put so little on the screen", I find the paragraph separation also overkill (1 line between paragraphs or equivalent is fine, and maybe two between sections)))
Nats is really neat, and super simple to deploy.

For many use cases, the lack of persistence might be a showstopper, though.
My nexus 7 (gen 1) is very slow these days, just something you should be on the lookout for...
tl;dr: I use the Galaxy Note 3 for my phone and tablet. I use it because it's got just enough real estate to check out Reddit/Twitter/websites while on the go, but I wouldn't personally recommend it for note-taking.

--

I had an iPad for a few years and then sold it somewhere around 2013. I just didn't use it enough, because my laptop was so much more useful for what I was doing, which was mostly coding and writing emails.

I have a Kindle now, but am honestly thinking about selling that too, if only because the DRM really freaks me out. It's so much easier than lugging books around, but I've never had to charge my book and it won't disappear should Amazon go out of business one day.

I was going to say that I don't have a "tablet" anymore, but then I realized I have a Galaxy Note 3 for my personal phone, and that's a tablet compared to pretty much any phone before it.

The thing made me nervous when I bought it because I was worried it was going to be too big, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's big enough for web browsing, even for a guy with terrible eyesight like me, but I can still toss it in my pocket. I'd feel like a tool if I did that with an iPad, and I can't figure out why. It's totally normal to see someone fiddling with their phone in a waiting room or on line at the DMV or something, but an iPad looks silly in those situations, for whatever reason.

One downside to the "phablet" revolution: When someone calls me and I don't have headphones handy it looks like I'm holding an LCD TV to the side of my head. But I spend way more time staring at this thing than talking on it anyway.
I doubt that it's used in M.

"Why not just build M with neural nets from the beginning? Without the right data, neural nets couldn’t provide a service much more powerful than, well, Siri, and Wit.ai’s tech can get things started with relatively little data. “This is a good way to bootstrap. With a few thousand data-points, you can start to build a model,” Lebrun says. “Then, using this model, you get more data, and once you have about a million data points, you go to Yann and get some deep learning.”" [1]

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/
I think we're about at the conclusion anyway because roadblocks in our minds are making us go in circles.

That's the part I'm curious about: I don't understand a mindset that can find a degenerative mental disorder horrifying (which I'm assuming you agree with) without finding the end result horrifying as well. I'm genuinely curious to understand that.

This is a fundamental thing we can't seem to make each other understand in terms of why we differ. The process is horrifying to me, but the result is a conclusion that does not horrify me. The phrase "rest in peace" comes to mind here, which I posit many people are willing to say about those who have passed away, whether or not the speaker believes in an afterlife or higher power. Yet they cannot think this way for themselves. I have no theory for this except that perhaps those people are unable to make peace with their end and/or themselves, which is unfortunately a circular argument. I'm not saying that's the case for you. I'm simply saying I can't come up with a better answer, and nobody's been able to explain it to me except that they're afraid because they're afraid.

So to recap, I am saying yes, the process is horrifying, but the end result (death and actual non-existence, not just senility) is what it is and doesn't have to be horrifying. And I believe you are saying that since the process is horrifying, the end result is also necessarily horrifying. I do not see the If A Then B logical path that necessity necessitates for your statements to become acceptable to me.

But if you believe there's a way to break the circle of our discussion, you of course are welcome to email me also. :)
My journey into computing basically started with PC gaming. I wanted to be able to start my DOS games whenever I wanted, instead of relying on my mom to do it for me. I had to learn what the drive letters were, and how to start the various games. I eventually became totally enthralled with computers, not with games, but the nearly infinite number of settings, executables, easter eggs, etc. This continued through my adolescence, when I learned all about computers so I could build a good gaming PC with the meager funds that I had saved up.

I used this experience to open my own IT support business in high school, and later started with Ruby and Rails in college. I've been doing software development since 2008 now, and I think games helped out a lot, not even considering the cognitive changes.
> There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website.

> The web uses javascript. Get used to it.

There's absolutely no reason to require the execution of potentially malicious code in order to read an article. Yes, web apps require JavaScript (and I don't use very many of them, for precisely that reason), but a web page, that is a resource fetched via HTTP (the hypertext transfer protocol) and encoded in HTML (hypertext markup language), simply doesn't and shouldn't.

The Internet is about communication; it's about the exchange of information.
Before you start plugging lots of systems together to solve this problem with a gaint hot mess, take a look at VoltDB. It basically is the system the article describes, but faster, more integrated and tested as a whole. It'll save you the multi-year discovery fun-tour it may take to realize that Storm punts on a lot of the more nuanced problems a system like this needs to solve. Just ask Twitter.

Disclosure, I'm one of the original VoltDB engineers. Apologies for the rant.
> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants

This American Life devoted an entire episode to covering one of them...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/p...
That graph of "comparable algorithm strength" would be great if it included the key length of the symmetric cipher.

It was discussed for 2048 bit RSA, but not for 4k or 8k. It seemed like an oversight.
It depends on what your degree is. If you have a CS degree (or other degree where this course should have been taken), putting Introduction to Algorithm course makes you look unprofessional. The same happens, if you have math heavy degree and have Introduction to Calculus course.
When an ebook costs over 90% of the price of a hardcover, am I going to buy the ebook, which I can't lend, resell, or give away, or the ebook, which can only be read by me? The answer is simple, I'm going to buy whatever the cheapest physical book is.

In Canada, with a Kobo, buying from Chapters/Indigo, the trade paperback is often cheaper than the ebook. This is my situation, and it means that the only time I buy an ebook is if I'm extremely motivated to read a book right now and I can't get it digitally from the library. If I had a situation where I was travelling and extremely space-constrained I might pay the premium for an ebook, but that hasn't happened to me yet.

All that doesn't mean I don't read ebooks, but that I don't buy them. The ebooks I read come from the library, (I'm a member of two libraries with great ebook selections), or are classics from Project Gutenberg or similar.
SQLite addressed writers blocking readers in 3.7.0 with its Write-Ahead Log. See https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html for more details, but point 2 at the top is "WAL provides more concurrency as readers do not block writers and a writer does not block readers. Reading and writing can proceed concurrently."

(Writes will still block writes of course.)
Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show
I love C#/.net/ASP.net (I enjoy it, actually) but it's not ready for prime time on non-Windows platforms at all. And I'm unsure .net will ever be nothing more than the proverbial "red-headed stepchild" on non-Windows platforms, we'll see.
It does. The blue word is the closest guess before and the red word is the closest guess after.
Keeping Amazon from becoming dominant is the only reason for jacking ebook prices that makes sense.

> [Amazon] accounted for 64% of the U.S. e-book market, by units sold

That's actually lower than I thought, but higher than publishers should be comfortable with.
In which case, what on Earth is rsyslog doing that it takes 1ms to append a line of text to the log file?

I could see it if it was outputting something to software-based video - except that in that case, why is it trying to output to software-based video?
This is probably a stupid question, but why do we have null as a concept? Nullable booleans especially grate on me. Surely it is true or false, but not null. Otherwise you surely have the wrong type? Does anyone else have these deep down feeling that null feels wrong?
I tried the glue on envelopes and I tried sugar cubes and have seen both of them emit a faint blue glow. And I assure you I was not standing in a vacuum chamber when I tried it. Just try it yourself in a dark room. It actually doesn't have to be exceptionally dark, it's pretty visible.

And there are of course also videos showing the effect, here with duck tape outside a vacuum chamber. [1]

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=54R6q2_-4Yo
I wonder why gradient descent (gating all compute/memory operations with parameters, gradient updates to parameter vectors along sample loss gradient) ended up dominant over genetic programming (algorithms as parse trees, mutate/recombine to minimize sample loss). Both seem equally theoretically unjustified, although I guess SGD is more friendly for gpus.

Also I wonder if all programming should just be done by showing a sgd-solver example i/o. Of course this notion has been around since the 80s with prolog but apparently representing "concepts" as 1000 dimension feature vectors is more robust than single boolean variables.
Own-Mailbox, the first 100% confidential mailbox
I coded c# in my last job. We used mvvm and wpf and msbuild and all that other lovely stuff. I was productive if you counted lines of code. It's a terrible language for actually getting things done properly though.

I first coded a winforms app using 1.0. It was very nice experience. The OOPfuscated wpf api with its confused mvvm anti-pattern made my life a living hell of high coupling and constant refactoring. Performance and debugging were terrible because of all the dispatching. The rect class alone has 200 members and is the 6th or so down on the inheritance chain. Making your own widgets was a very messy and tricky task.

.net also felt like a second class citizen on its native windows (8.1 was last time I touched it). Had to fall back on win32, incomplete comparability layers, deprecated apis, weekend hobby projects that are incomplete.. Yuck!
I have a first gen Kindle Fire. I'd use it, except it requires a US credit card for a bunch of app store stuff and I can't be bothered to go through the faff of getting a US credit card.

There's the possibility of rooting it, which I'm looking into.

I think making it easy for users to root / reuse devices would help drive sales to new devices by providing a more vibrant second user market.
Null is wrong. It was implemented because it was easy, as it maps directly to how object references are typically implemented in memory: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3186
The difference is that your experiences didn't directly challenge any member of staff. You might have challenged some abstract rule or social norm, but you likely did not personally and publicly attack a teacher. This guy named names and went personal, he crossed a much bigger line. His "crime" was not to lampoon the official magazine, but to personally attack school staff. I don't think any school, as good as it might be, would have tolerated that (although they could have handled it better, as he pointed out).
Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?
just waiting on tech bubble to burst.
Let me make the connection a little more explicit:

In {the burger case}, {removing sesame seeds} is an act that makes {the product} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.

And in {this case}, {punting things from server-side to client-side} is an act that makes {power usage, wear and tear, security, battery life, bandwidth use} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.
On a related but no quite note, I've got a personal vendetta against sales pages that think buzzing and zipping jQuery is anywhere near to being a sensible idea.

<rantyrant>
So from a personal standpoint, if I'm on your sales page, I want to know what you're offering, and why I should be intrested in what you are offering. I'd be fine with that being a plain html site with nothing but a few paragraphs and some bullet point lists. Maybe a table or two as well, and a link to somewhere I can give you money.

Now the last thing I need is for that part of the page to zoom in, wiggle around or do any other bogheaded things a designer with just enough jQuery to be dangerous could think of whilst they're being "creative" with it.

Now from a marketing perspective, this is incredibly stupid. A sales page is a machine for turning prospects into customers. There's a single design purpose if there is one. If someone come over and tried to paint flowers on the tip of my soldering iron, I would cut them. If someone decided to replace my PSU with a music box because the music box looks a lot better, I would not be pleased.

So why did it ever become a thing to do that to one of the most essential parts of your business? The part you point your advertising money at. The part that can very well be the difference between you going the way of the ipod or the way of the zune. Go nuts on your About page if you really have to keep your designer busy, have your faces zoom into it and spin and put the text into maquee tags and what have. But please, for the love of god, don't, don't ever do that to your sales page, because you're wasting my time and your money on that.

I blame marketing professionals with an IQ of 50 and designers with delusions of grandeur, CSS3 on the holster, jQuery in their hands, trigger happy on anything customer facing, spreading more $ signs through the site than the rap business.

</rant>
Show HN: React-native-deck
Why+You+Should+Embrace+Being+Alone?
Why not allow any kind of overlay filesystem like docker does instead of hard-coding the btrfs dependency ?

It seems like a decent solution overall, and it allows to distribute security updates to libraries unlike docker images.
Mostly reading, sketching and writing. I couldn't ever get my iPad to work for anything major other than these three things. While individual apps work fine, app switching almost always results in an app-refresh.

I'm guessing you have the iPad 3 (the 'new iPad'), which had significantly better specs than the iPad 2 (along with a better screen, I think).

EDIT: Just realized I wrote "iPad Air 2", instead of just "iPad 2 3G".
deck of card with react-native, inspired by deck-of-cards(http://pakastin.github.io/deck-of-cards/)
Can you explain? In C#, for example, type inference barely works. You have to do e.g.:

Func<int, int> inc = x => x + 1;

In F#, this is just:

let inc x = x + 1

Based off a simple test (coded same thing in both languages), C# requires about 20x more type annotations. Fields, methods, type parameter constraints -- C# simply doesn't implement type inference in most places.

You're right that F#'s lambda operator (fun) should be shorter. I'd prefer \. i.e. map (\x.x+1)

But verbosity isn't the reason C# devs don't switch to F#. Hell, it's still a "thing" to decide if using "var" is ok.
IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US) students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for off-campus speech.

There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-related event.

On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.
Well I'm not sure why you would put "server" in quotes.
Robots.txt usage over the Alexa million
I'm not arguing about decoupling, exposure of APIs, etc. But decoupling doesn't mean you have to push all work onto the client. Have a backend server and a frontend server, the latter consuming APIs of the former and rendering content. You have to write that rendering code anyway, and opting to put it all in the browser is saving yourself a small electricity bill by passing it onto consumers, multiplying it millionfold on the way.

(Once again, I'm writing about web pages, not web applications (and no, a blog is not a web application).)

Modularization, decoupling, "rule of single-responsibility", etc. are meant to produce simpler, more maintainable code and better, slicker software. But instead, they're taken out of context and abused. Modern web codebases are getting more and more complicated, not less. What people are doing today is not good engineering. It's the architecture astronautics' equivalent of Kerbal Space Program.
All syslogs that write to files/sync non-optimally? There is of course the risk of dropped messages on machine failure but I think it's pretty safe to assume that at that point you're doing what ZeroMQ was going to do anyway

I should clarify syslog, with naive configuration, is slower than file I/O because it does stuff, then writes to disk. feel free to correct me if I'm wrong
Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's public critique of their teachers.

Related: http://voidnull.sdf.org/ (unafilliated)
It's very simple; he's saying the problem goes back to elementary school. You need to plant the seed then to foster any meaningful amount of interest and engagement in computers and computer science. Since this is currently only really succeeding with boys, you need to re-examine what's being done and make sure that the seed is also planted for girls.

The boys will be fine because clearly what's being done is already working for them, but as a group girls are clearly not being drawn into computer science education and so that's where the problem lies.
>Surely it is true or false, but not null.

If that's surely what you have, then you have a regular "bool" and not nullable "bool?".

In C#, "bool" and "bool?" are not the same type. (Although C# provides some convenient implicit conversions that minimize tedious verbosity when working with both -- but that convenience also has the effect of blurring the lines. Nevertheless, they are different types.)

A "bool" can represent 2-states. A "bool?" can represent 3-states: true -or- false -or- unknown/empty/indeterminate/invalid/etc.

Your premise that I quoted is constrained to 2 states -- therefore use the 2-state type which is plain "bool". Unless you think nullable "bool?" as a syntax seems to defy some kind of airtight mathematical logic? What would be the alternative?!? Have everyone create a custom enum that with 3 enum values "{falsy = 0; truthy = 1; unknown = 2}"? Why would reinvention of those semantics in everyone's redundant code snippets be better than C#'s standard nullable "bool?"?

(Another issue that may confuse the "null" discussion is the 2 separate concepts of "null": #1 is "null" as an indicator of pointing to invalid memory and #2 is "null" as deliberate semantic placeholders for application/business logic of unknown values. The #2 concept is what is modeled by C# nullable<T> and SQL database fields.)
Previously, in chronological order:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251288

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9211630

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477612
To add to the downsides you have mentioned, we practically don't really own them. I mean, almost.
It looks like they kept the zookeepers on the same machines as the kafka brokers. Why not split them up and have a 5-node zookeeper cluster and decouple the number of kafka nodes from the number of zookeeper nodes (especially if you're virtualizing these machines already)?
Before anyone suggests Calibre to rip the DRM: that's not legal and Calibre is a barking dog of awful software.

I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been something better - although creating a tool to bypass DRM is probably not a good idea.
Like I said, cue the sophomoric replies about IEEE floating point number representation.
yes, you are generating ~430nm light

x-rays (0.1-10nm) are much higher energy and need a greater potential to be created, which can only be done in a vacuum
I think they specifically meant x-rays, rather than blue light; the x-rays would require more energy, so their explanation makes sense to me.
goodluck with zmq. I've had pretty bad experience using zmq in production.