skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the language should allow you to express simple memory ownership when you have it

The problem is that you only think you have such a thing. If you're wrong, you're screwed. :)

> The third and maybe most important optimization is to make garbage collection a per-thread operation. You simply don’t allow garbage collected heap allocations to transfer between threads.

This takes away much of the point of threads, leaving you better off with processes---and process boundaries will better enforce this model. You cannot cons up a message, pop it in a queue, and have another thread pick that object out the other end: thus you have to use some IPC based on bytes in a pipe or shared memory buffer.

In other words, you might as well fork a bunch of children that have not just their own heaps but their own address spaces to enforce the containment of those heaps. There is a lot of good in it: fault isolation, more virtual memory footprint to each little worker. There is a degree of attractiveness in multiple processes with just one thread in each one, and single-threaded garbage collection (which doesn't have to deal with hairy concurrency problems, and so is faster and more robust).

> To figure out which region a pointer refers to in this scheme, we simply loop through the different region sizes that our allocator allows, mask the appropriate number of bits from the pointer to get the start of the proposed region, read the region index in the first DWORD of this memory area (this may be garbage if we have the wrong size) use this to index into the region pointer array (taking care to avoid buffer overruns from garbage indices) and ensure that the pointer stored in that element refers right back to the proposed region. We also must ensure that the size of the region at this address actually contains the original pointer.

The problem of mapping a pointer to a region is already solved very well with existing data structures. For instanc, the Linux kernel uses a red-black tree to map a virtual memory pointer to a "struct vm_area". (These are the regions allocated by mmap). The regions don't overlap and so a binary search tree ordered by their base address works fine.

Solving the problem of "does this pointer refer to a heap, and which one" in a garbage collector is only necessary when we are doing conservative garbage collection: we are given some pointer-sized value from somewhere (like a scan of some raw memory area such as a C stack), and we have no idea whether or not the value is a pointer to an object in the GC world. An always-precisely-tracing garbage collector never has to solve this problem. It starts with root values, which are known to be objects in the GC world. If they are heap values, they point to objects whose structure is known to the collector. They are precisely traversed to reach other objects and so on.
why would you use absolute path for qmail?
OP has a point. If you come 1,000 years before your ideas are more original than someone who comes 1,000 years after you.
Hypothesis Generation Strategies for Adaptive Problem Solving (2000) [pdf]
That's the TDP of the chip, or the maximum amount of heat it can generate, not necessarily the power draw. Also, you were assuming it was running at full load 100% of the time. I don't have a source, but for comparison I believe Apple's AX chips have a TDP of ~2-3 W.
Seems like it'd be easier to improve upon that transportation bottleneck instead of something as drastic as restructuring the whole system and growing in urban areas.
iTools as an iPhone Manager Tool
Must of been OS dependent. When I was doing bootp stuff in the mid '90s the whole point of chroot was the jail.
I wonder if (not the homicide stats) being aware of these stats would improve your chances of not ending up in a weeker finanicial position, avoiding the common traps kind of thing.
Great work on this Ben!
In some cases advertising may have been a net positive but I think the future can do entirely without.
It is not specifically built on Chrome. It happens to be developed on chrome because that's the tool of choice of Facebook devs. Incidentally, a Firefox version is now available.
But you don't stop being an employee just because you don't get those things. If I work at Google and one day they take away my work computer, I don't magically become a contractor just like that.
The benefit seems to be shown on the right chart of Fig 8 (bottom line is best descriptor of probability density). Combining classifiers and generative nets is the natural next step, LeCun is working on in in the context of ConvNets - see their SWWAE paper a few weeks ago
Ask HN: What is the significance of Quantitative Reasoning?
in QR classes, we have been taught shortcuts, tips, tricks, pitfalls except its significance. what makes QR an essential element of every other recruitment examination?
Please Help
Solution for Uber: allow drivers to set prices. I wonder how long that would last.
The lottery (and gambling generally) is also a disgusting side-effect of free-market economies.

It enables those 5% of ticket buyers who are buying 54% of all tickets to experience a false sense of economic security or maybe possibility. In terms of intellectual toxicity, the lottery (and gambling) is right up there with religion.

In my opinion, it is a manifest moral failing on the part of state governments, regardless of the fiscal details. If only -- if only -- there was another source of hope besides the accumulation of more consumer goods.
Not trusting root's path is defensive practice.

What's 'qmail'?
This will definitely not work with MeteorJS. It's a React tool built around their framework. I don't think there's anything like this for Meteor yet.

Unless you mean does it work if you use React within a Meteor app. If so, it may.
Elon Musk: Tesla Model 3 to cost $35K, preorders start in March
Faraday – Premium electric car sharing done right
I definitely agree that some companies are clearly doing more to directly address "big world problems". I can't give you a list of the ones that are though, but you see some stuff in the news, esp. here on HN. Lots of companies have been mentioned recently, for example, who were working on fusion power.

All of that said, let me take a minute to defend the seemingly no-so-important type companies. Let's take, say, Facebook. On one hand, you could say that Facebook is just a way to sell advertising based on the actions and opinions of a bunch of self-centered, narcissistic twits who think he world cares what they have to say. And you'd probably be mostly right as far as "Facebook the product". BUT... in their defense, "Facebook the company" have done some cool stuff, especially in terms of the cool Open Source software they've released over the years. React, Presto, Thrift, etc. have been used, or are being used, by people tackling all sorts of other problems.

And you can say the same thing about several other companies who have, at least, given the world some really cool code over the years: Oracle (via the Sun Microsystems acquisition mostly), Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.

Now, of course, code by itself doesn't solve antibiotic resistance, or world hunger, or poverty, but it can help. So if you were looking for a company to work for and had to go for somebody who wasn't, say, directly tackling world hunger, at least go for a company that's known for sharing cool technology with the rest of the world.
Sounds somewhat higher than an arm. But take any phone and run it under a worst case load. Say a 3d game that supports multiplayer and GPS. When you run display, CPU, GPU, GPS and WAN flat out many phones don't last very long.
Can't buy me love...
I think Communism broke itself. There is the myth that Reagan created the SDI program that didn't really exist to make the USSR spend more on research for space based defense to catch up, but I think that is a red herring.

Communism would pay janitors more money than it paid scientists and engineers, simply because that janitor was a member of the Communist party. Many scientists and engineers defected from Russia to other countries to earn more money. Russia had some great products AK-47, Soyuz rocket and capsule, and sold the MIG to many nations as well.

Look at Greece right now, they had major socialist programs and they got into deep debt. The USSR got into deep debt as well with their socialist programs, and their military was expensive to maintain. Nations that owed them money like Afghanistan they invaded and the USA countered by training Osama bin Laden and the Taliban to fight then guerrilla style, on 9/11/2001 we wish we hadn't trained them.

The USA didn't outspend the USSR it out innovated it with science and technology. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Sun, etc all developed better hardware and software and the PC Industry with MS-DOS had programs that automated tasks and saved money. It wasn't Reaganomics that boosted the economy it was the tech industry that did so. US companies sold the technology to other nations and money started to flow into the US economy. This was back when technology was made in the USA, now it is made in China mostly.
I did not see that at all in my 'I didn't read the whole page' exploration, and ended up not really studying further because of it. That might be UI feedback for you, I guess. I'll take another look when I'm at my desk.
You can also use Egeria as a free and easy-to-use
alternative to expansive commercial budgeting and
planning software.

I assume you meant "expensive", but in this case "expansive" works fine if you consider that a disadvantage and your product is more focused.

Check it out :)

EDIT: I see there are a handful of typos and incorrect/unclear wording. I'm writing you an email with the corrections I would make.
Is this open source ?
The 'Failing Is Succeeding' Culture
Whoa. I didn't realize it was reading 300 bytes. That is excessive.
Man, this makes you feel like vanilla html / css (and the DOM) are almost like browser machine code.
Neetforge: a startup accelerator for NEETs and shut-ins
> MNIST dataset is not a difficult dataset

oh how far we have come
Few people will publicly criticize their current employment, but many people will give a noncommittal or vaguely positive answer when asked how they like their job if they don't really like it that much. It's a case where "It's good" means it's probably bad, and "I love it because X Y and Z" means it's good. You can't take people's word for it, but you can still easily tell what they probably actually think.
Yeah, the bug was really how it handled the case of waiting forever without telling you why. In GPG's defense, before it actually stars reading from /dev/random, it does give you all kinds of warnings that it needs sources of entropy before it can make any progress.

Hard to get that kind of thing right, but fundamentally it did stop you from making exactly the kind of terrible mistake that I was talking about. ;-)
Thanks. There was a flurry of dupe or near-dupe "Batteriser" submissions, and it seems I misread this one.
Note to self: when macbook gets too hot, submerge in ocean.
Here is a list of browser-based editors:

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Editor

Although ProseMirror isn't listed, the page provides a decent summary of various editors and reasons why they are unsuitable for certain types of in-browser editing.

Kudos indeed!
I don't understand why someone who 'believes in the free market' must accept a binary position on 'free' market. In experimental design, you're supposed to produce tasteful granularity of measurement conditions to capture the breadth of a phenomena. Free vs. not-free is not very granular.

And given the immaturity of the state of economics relative to other disciplines, I don't see why anyone should just have blanket faith in the free market. The "freeness" of a market is but one variable in what is possibly a million-factor model, a model that possibly won't ever be developed in our lifetime.
Pyxley: Python Powered Dashboards
Apache Flink: platform for scalable batch and stream data processing
The first google result for qmail:

> qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure replacement for the popular Sendmail program; qmail's source code is in the public domain.
Splash – A JavaScript rendering service implemented in Python
Using AWS Lambda for Web Video Transcoding
Petuum is a distributed machine learning framework
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139734
If root's PATH environment variable can be compromised, then you might as well ditch the whole system.
Thanks for this! Aha is an inspiration for me. I am working on something similar but not a direct competitor to Aha.
What, you don't actually want to make a bet? I was hoping for easy money! :(
Nope. Copyright notice on page 2 (including "no part of this may be reproduced... by any form or any means") and no reason to believe it's not valid.
Ibis on Impala: Python at Scale for Data Science
Well that line is more like an advertisement for Instapainting. Instapainting doesn't run on this technology.

That being said, a human artist can do a much better job than these algorithms!
I really enjoyed his first C++ book. The only one I've seen that assumes proficiency in C and dives into the new stuff immediately. Bruce is a good writer but I think the ship has sailed on writing new Python books that can stand out from the crowd. Atomic Rust would be more commercially viable.
What is simple and clear about Python? Overloading, decorators, coroutines, dynamic typing, strong reliance on exception handling for control flow, a boatload of basic types, deep class hierarchies, eval, massive standard library, schism between 2 and 3, eggs vs wheels, pip vs setup vs easy install... it's really a pretty complex language with a deep ecosystem.
Abstract: Genetic studies have consistently indicated a single common origin of Native American groups from Central and South America. However, some morphological studies have suggested a more complex picture, whereby the northeast Asian affinities of present-day Native Americans contrast with a distinctive morphology seen in some of the earliest American skeletons, which share traits with present-day Australasians (indigenous groups in Australia, Melanesia, and island Southeast Asia). Here we analyse genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted.
GOP candidates split on Kentucky marriage license clerk
I seem to recall an interesting anatomical feature in a whale's mouth or tongue, highly vascularised, whose function isn't fully understood. One thought I've had is that this is a heat-transfer interface, and part of the whale's temperature regulation system.

Whales consume prodigious amounts of energy, and that is largely trapped within its body mass. I suspect that thermal management is actually a fair part of their design challenge. Even humans in fairly cool water can have difficulty keeping sufficiently cool, and experienced long-distance open-water swimmers have died of heat exhaustion in warm water (a case occurred in the Middle-East a few years back).

PS: love Geoffrey West (and the rest of the Santa Fe Institute crowd).
Not sure about the timing of your comment but all advice here is spot on. Not everything will work for me but it is good to know what others are doing to avoid burnout. I definitely appreciate all the responses. This is what makes HN so great to participate in.
TIL You can pay National Geographic and NatGeo to talk about your topic
Seems like it would be harder to re-engineer food transportation to be virtually shock-free. You'd have to revolutionize all packaging, sorting, loading and transport for each product.

Even handling when picking has an impact on shelf life; field workers aren't encouraged to be lax with their time.

As opposed to the alternative, where you walk a few steps to your garden and pick, sort, pack, transport, unpack a few minutes per day yourself.
No, no.
The quote that struck me (via Wikipedia): roughly an amphibian metabolic rate. 1/2 to 1/5 that of a mammal's.
I'm unfamiliar with that rebuttal, but it sounds like it has significance. Could someone explain it to me?
I think there is about 10,000 airports in the US, so I bet it is missing quite a few.
Your app is a unique snowflake – The framework that treats it like one
"in the middle of an event people often get social" absolutely. This was the case. A lot of them were tweeting about how the matches were progressing, predicting, analyzing match situations and having good old banter with the opposing team fans :D
The scrolling seems perfectly normal to me, but that huge fixed banner that takes up 1/3 of the screen is just ridiculous.
Isn't this how IPFS works? Content is hashed so it will check to see if you have it locally first, then inside your network, then externally from the the closest node that has the data.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clue on the site about what "NEET" refers to. So, for those, like me, who had never heard this term before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET
Yes, the timing of the match was the key. Because these high profile twitter users were tweeting, it increased the chance of them seeing my tweets to them. Few of them clicked on the link to dashboard and RT'ed it. It then snowballed from there by RTs by their followers.
I thought he did a good job with atomic Scala and recommended it to a friend who wanted to see if programming might be for him. It did a really nice job of walking you through the language without assuming prior knowledge.
In reading comments of software authors in mailing lists and forums over the years, I sometimes noticed a particular vitriol for writing what are called "trivial" programs. By the same token, I sometimes noticed a strange attraction to large programs that only the author(s) could ever hope to understand. Not sure if I am the only one to notice this. I recall one author proudly telling a forum of programmers that his creation was so complex it would hurt the eyes of anyone who attempted to read the code.

I place the highest value on small programs and the lowest value on large, complex programs. But I suspect this is not the norm, whether among end users, authors, or both.

I also recall some comment from Kernighan about how back in the early days of AWK he was amazed at the sizes of the scripts people were writing. He had never expected AWK to be used to write large, complex "programs".

Maybe small programs are boring? Maybe people cannot manage to simplify their problems by subdividing them into smaller tasks? Maybe they do not believe the problems can be simpflied? Maybe adding features is how authors attempt attract or retain users? Who knows?
The offside rule. Just like futbol's.
Safe from what?
This was a great post. Very easy to digest and lots of stuff to ponder on as my head slowly wraps itself around a few counter intuitive learnings.
The State of Search Engine Marketing in 2015
Speaking of OLAP, is that the old Microsoft OLAP demo database data I see, the one with all of the bicycle shops?
A nano first: researchers use nanoscale vehicle to deliver gene-editing tool
Slightly off-topic but I am curious: what are the things at the bottom? Are they precursors to email or something?
/dev/urandom will generate secure random data. That's what it does.

That was the point of the blog post: if you are using /dev/random as input in to a cryptographic protocol that will stretch that randomness over to many more bytes, WTF do you think /dev/urandom is already doing?

What /dev/urandom might fail to do, and this primarily applies to your specific case of a VM just as it is first launching and setting things up, is generate unpredictable data, and most terribly, it might generate duplicate data, for certain specific use cases where that would just be awful.

I would agree that you got the gist right though: /dev/urandom is usually the right choice, but when it is not, /dev/random is indeed needed. Most people misunderstand the dichotomy as "random" and "guaranteed random", which leads to very, very unfortunate outcomes. Other people misunderstand what they are doing cryptographically and somehow think that some cryptographic algorithm that uses a small key to encrypt vast amounts of data shouldn't have any concerns about insecure, non-random cyclic behaviour, but oddly take a jaundiced eye to /dev/urandom. It basically amounts to "I think you can securely generate a random data stream from a small source of entropy... as long as that belief isn't embodied in something called urandom".

Again, if you don't know the right choice, you should pass the baton to someone who does, because even if you make the right choice, odds favour you doing something terrible that compromises security.
> It is not specifically built on Chrome.
> It happens to be developed on chrome

This is contradictory.
TLDR:

If you burrow down — all the way down — to a typical cell in an elephant, and then compare it to a typical cell in a mouse — amazingly, the two cells behave differently.

Elephant cells aren’t lazy. They’re always working, but compared to mouse cells, elephant cells typically do their job a little more slowly, burn less fuel to get the job done and, being more efficient, they run cooler.*

So that’s why elephants don’t spontaneously combust (and neither do we, much to Calvin’s relief.) An elephant is built from cooler stuff than a mouse. Even though an elephant has many, many more little heaters packed inside its body, each heater runs at a much lower setting.
It looks like the furthest point from any airport is (not surprisingly) about the same place as Point Nemo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...), the furthest point from land.
Sorry to be pedantic... I thought their main website actually just proxies to the actual ipfs gateway. Is it technically a mirror?
Wrong question.

Not "what is the application 'qmail'" (I'm quite aware, thanks). But "what is the token 'qmail'" evaluated to by the shell.

If you prefer: "which qmail".
Pole of inaccessibility
Probably worse than religion, because at least religion occasionally encourages positive behaviour.
That's amazing, I hadn't even noticed that before but now that you've said it I can't not see it.
It may not be common practice (I typically rely on $PATH). But it is, as I noted, defensive.

There are numerous ways in which $PATH can change. Shared profiles and other users modifying root's init among them. Intent isn't necessarily malicious. It can still be unexpected.
News Roundup: Moto 360 Announcements
I disagree that Chrome gets little praise from the developer community. What makes you say that?
Ask HN: What are the arguments for and against React/Flux over Angular JS?
I've seen a lot of these debates on this around on the internet, but they've very quickly become outdated given the speed that the frameworks are being developed at. A good example would be the leap that React Dev tools took with their latest release. Also, the whole argument about Angular not providing an upgrade path to 2.0 is no longer valid. Are the two equal now with just preference towards architecture being a deciding factor? Or are there more compelling arguments for either one?