skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the sibling comment[0] on the interpretation of Feynman's quote. Also, rejecting the usefulness of philosophy of science doesn't imply accepting the view that the scientific method can and will describe the purposes and meaning behind every phenomena both natural and man-made that have any relevance or importance to our lives as humans. I think the following is a good summary of Feynman's lack of commitment to any philosophical viewpoint[1]:

I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover.

If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is, but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't predecide what it is we're trying to do except to try to find out more about it. If you say your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature, but I don't look at it [like that]. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10176173
[1] http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=0738...
Linux and “The system is running in low-graphics mode” error
I am sorry, sir. What is DRM? I only have Digital Rights Management flashing in into my memory, but I have no idea what you could mean with DRM. Apparently I've been able to ignore and live behind the moon, not knowing what DRM is, while using Linux mainly since 2003-2004.

I'm sad that there is no alternative to X that works with `legacy` graphic cards like mine (Radeon HD 4500). But to be honest I'm personally just concerned due to already mentioned security problems with Xorg.
> Your upbringing in a privileged society doesn't make you better than those from less privileged societies, it just makes you privileged

We fought and still fight to have the society that we have. Maybe you should do the same instead of picturing yourseves as passive victims.
And now you know (one of the reasons) why I don't own property.
Apparently, Vladimir Propp did a lot of work on this.

Orson Scott Card's "Enchantment" is a fictional take, and explanation, for the reason there are so many similar fairy tales in eastern europe.
FSs designed to run on dumb flash exist: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=site:lwn.net+nand+flash+file...

> I don't see why people try to design filesystems that do everything.

For general use, [0] I would rather use a FS that works on pretty much every media type [1] -and has reasonable perf- than to have to worry about whether $SPECIALTY_FS is actually tuned for $WEIRDO_BLOCK_DEVICE, or if I've failed to understand the particulars of either the FS, device, or both.

[0] That is, when getting the absolute best perf isn't a requirement.

[1] Except for like, tape, and optical RAM/WORM drives, natch.
Since it's for UI, it would be good to see some screenshots in the documentation or the README.
I'd much rather Slick Willy's mid 90s economy and his less than consistent commitment to the truth than Carter's honesty & stagflation.
I've updated the NLTK issue tracker with information about how the model for NLTK's built-in POS tagger was trained:
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/1063#issuecomment-138005...

The second edition of the book will include a "scaling up" section in most chapters, which shows how to transition from NLTK's pure Python implementations to NLTK's wrappers for the Stanford tools.
Lots of good points.

Autotools has a steep learning curve and makes a good deal of project maintainers nervous because it's not obvious how it works and it's diffult to cut through all the abstraction steps to figure out what-goes-where. CMake is usually a pretty good alternative to figuring out m4 scripts with autotools. CMake is usually faster too.

Valgrind is good but it doesn't work on all platforms and it again needs more examples and howtos.

Dtrace too could also use some more blog howtos.

Powerful tools need to be both clearly and succinctly explained and sufficiently configurable in order to be widely usable. The clear conveyance of system behavior should be a top priority for code and supporting documentation.
Oh. How did you do this? Are you using an NVidia GPU? Does XRandR work? I couldn't get this to work at all, though I was using the closed drivers (since I couldn't find any evidence CUDA works with the open ones). Do you need the open drivers for this?

In the end I spent £30 on a second GPU. Problem solved... ish. XRandR still didn't work, and GNOME3 switched to fallback mode, which is basically GNOME2, i.e., a totally different window manager and a totally different shell.

I have no opinion on the performance on Windows vs that on Linux (not a concern, hence the £30 GPU...) but this whole situation was certainly a lot less hassle on Windows ;)
Perhaps but I can understand his frustration her as the work he does is tremendously valuable and a relatively small amount of money would be a massive force multiplier for it.
I don't really understand what the heavy emphasis on "real-time" here.

I mean it's log/event aggregation for ops insight. Unless the whole system is some tightly coupled feedback loop into an unsupervised machine learning model where the whole thing has actual hard-real-time requirements (something which might well be impossible to build), then there's no possible way that having a second or two delay, between a message being created and when you can actually see it, can possibly matter.

I mean you don't have someone with instantaneous reflexes and resolution ability sitting there 24/7 with their eyes peeled as a stream of thousands of log messages flies by.

The whole premise seems spurious. Is it really necessary for every startup and their uncle to delude themselves into thinking that their use case is "mission critical" or "carrier grade" or whatever?

Auth0 provides basically "login as a service". Its not like they're managing the access control to nuclear launch codes or something.

Unless some medical device manufacturer was stupid enough to make a critical surgical assistance device require an internet connection, a WAN round-trip on unreliable networks, and reliance on a 3rd party service in order to start operating it... how can this service being down possibly be anything more than an annoyance? What's the worst possible scenario? A session has to be rebuilt? A user has to make an extra login attempt?

By their own admission the service has gone down already due to the old system architecture. How many babies died?
A quick Google search found "Direct Rendering Manager": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

Doesn't look like something you'd necessarily need to know about unless you were developing for the GPU on Linux.
Syslog didn't start out as a standard, and the RFCs basically just try to formalize what was already implemented in OSes. It's a big mess. The protocol itself is not... great.
Chocolatey is pretty good
Working for an astronomy company while in grad school was the first place I got to play with Fortran. It seems like Python is becoming the common language for researchers in a variety of fields -- ML, etc.

I still have the Fortran Coloring Book around somewhere.
Show HN: Fakettp – Command line http debugging proxy
Not infrequently, one's data is less than useful without the software that manipulates it.
Quick Reply:
I'm currently studying orbital-mechanics. Starting with something like Celestial Objects then downsizing to small-bodies later on. This has me reading up on Newtonian physics. With a solid understanding there, I'll move onto General Relativity.

My current open question (that may have been answered by this thread) was where can I obtain star-charts? How do I interact with them. Etc.
Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in science, and that is "anything goes!". There are interesting parallels between scientific method and software methods...
The Web We Have to Save
Most large corporations including Google, Apple, Intel, etc. have an entire department of designers and social scientists (mainly anthropologists) who do ethnographic studies, user studies, etc. in order to understand their customers, new markets, etc. It's really only the startup world that puts less emphasis on user research, but that's in large part because it's resource intensive to do so and many companies have shown that they were able to succeed without it. As startups grow larger and the market more saturated, they must shift from "scratch your own itch" to "user-centered" in order to grow and stay competitive.

Alas, because the startup scene is overwhelmingly centered in the Bay Area and is dominated by white upper-middle-class American men, white-upper-middle-class American male itches get scratched first.
My comment was tailored to address killface's dramatic lack of understanding [0] of pixard's statement. :)

[0] Indeed, he appears to have failed to read and/or comprehend the first two sentences in pixard's comment.
I like Google's new logo. Good article, though.
Hey! I'm 'Jake'! Not sure why it won't use the nickname field I entered. I'm MadcapJake@lightwitch.org (they need to add this to the profile or config or something, I had to go back to check my email to remember where I signed up)
Reminds me of how CouchPotato works, always loved the idea. It would be neat if projects like these took advantage of Github's Electron or nw.js (optionally of course).
Permutation City by Greg Egan

A 1994 science fiction novel that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

I was impressed that the book begin with a description of the concept of Fovea Rendering that is all the rage now with Virtual Reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging
Using MultiPath TCP to enhance home networks
Again, there is a (massive) distinction between Turing-complete languages and non Turing-complete ones in terms of how often they are exploited (and in terms of how severe said exploits tend to be). I don't mind non Turing-complete languages being run clientside, but do mind Turing-complete languages being run clientside, for mainly that reason. (Also, because Turing-complete languages tend to end up abused in terms of resource use).

And you can do most of a thin client, if not all, while keeping sane bandwidth use. (Note that almost all cases where bandwidth use would be excessive for a thin client in a web setting, said bandwidth use would also be excessive for a fat client in a web setting.)

It's mainly that current tech has settled on the brute-force approach of "let's stream every pixel and then try to compress it" as opposed to saner approaches (vector graphics, remote compositing, that sort of thing). But note that there are, for example, remote desktop protocols that work well (for most things) over a dial-up connection!
High-Quality Streamable Free-Viewpoint Video [MSR/SIGGRAPH]
David Mitchell's first book. Was also reading 'Knockemstiff' but I decided 3/4 of the way through that I should read something less bleak.+1 for everything @sshine mentioned.
There is amazing bit of irony to this little story. The author starts out with a highly judgmental critique of the unworthy generations that came before her and their treatment and depiction of women as made abundantly clear by the show, and yet ends her critique at least mildly positive because the movies finally showed her "people" --ironically epitomizing the very difference between men and women. Men typically are standing around the water cooler talking about things like the larger ramifications of a society of androids, or silly masculine things like who would win a fight between a Klingon and a Vulcan. Whereas woman want to know if the androids have families, and how the Klingon feels after being defeated by a pinch. As much as modern PC sensibilities want to whitewash the facts, women and men are different. TOS was created for a male audience. Women of that era had numerous soaps to enjoy catered specifically to their predilections. To be so judgmental and to miss the larger significance of the show, in my opinion, only goes to show the youthful ignorance and gender bias of the author, not society's.
Cambridge Company Says Live Bacteria Spray Will Keep You Clean
I don't mind having a filesystem that works reasonably well on most devices. But I would consider "being able to append to a file reasonably quickly" as part of that "reasonably well".

Note that it's entirely possible to have a filesystem that's actually several different filesystems with a magic selector. (I mean, block sizes and reserved block percentages and inline inodes already are along those lines)
The simplest way forward is to use something like stellarium[0] or xephem[1] to make charts and view/adjust them in real-time. But that involves no python. :)

A more complicated option would be to program one up using various tools in the astropy library. You could retrieve catalogs of objects and plot their positions using the built in coordinate system tools (wcs) with aplpy[2] or matplotlib.

[0] http://www.stellarium.org/

[1] http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/

[2] https://aplpy.github.io/
Extensive discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653
Here's a simple counter-example.

The state monad is the following functor

St s a = s -> (a, s)

if we compose it with itself (using `d` as the second state parameter)

St s (St d a) = s -> (d -> (a, d), s)

is `F a = St s (St d a)` a monad? The return operation is clear enough

return a = \s -> (\d -> (a, d), s)

but the join operation fails

join :: F (F a) -> F a
:: St s (St d (St s (St d a))) -> St s (St d a)
:: s -> (d -> (s -> (d -> (a, d), s), d), s)
-> s -> (d -> (a, d), s)

join m0 =
\s0 -> let (m1 :: St d (F a), s1) = m0 s0
in (\d0 -> let (m2 :: F a, d1) = m1 d0
(m3 :: St d a, s2) = m2 s1
(a, d2) = m3 d1
in (a, d2)
, ??? )

The trouble is the ??? bit where we'd like to place the furthest advanced `s` state named `s2`, but it's not in scope to return at the top since we have to apply the d state to reach it.

This however only means that St does not compose with itself as a functor. It composes just fine in another method. If we install the inner monad "wrapped around" the tuple

StT s m a = s -> m (a, s) -- T for "transformer"

then the composition of states looks like

StT s (St d) a = s -> St d (a, s)
= s -> d -> ((a, s), d)
= (s, d) -> (a, (s, d))
= St (s, d) a

which is obviously a monad.
Its also easy to put a fake cardboard obstacle on the road. People tend not to do it.

It is no different to shining a laser pointer into drivers eyes from a motorway bridge. The police will show up pretty fast.
I use an iPad for :

- read HN or Reddit, an app with reddit and safari with HN, it is nice to be on the couch and do the same thing I would on my chair

- play games: hearthstone a card game like magic, a tablet is the perfect medium for it.

- read technical papers or CS books in pdf, the best way to read rich text book with being distracted.

- a DJ app with spotify integration, nice UI, tactile feeling, and quite fun for parties

I had an Nexus 7 and I hated it, I really like the ipad last gen.
Well, for one, there is no streaming socket API, just HTTP. I suspect the 5 reads/sec limit on shards is mainly due to multitenancy, but I could see this increasing in the future. Amazon has already improved the latency of Kinesis a fair amount, but it still has a ways to go before it matches Kafka.

We also have cases where we need many consumers reading a stream, so having that effectively limited to 5 concurrent consumers is a pretty tough limitation. Their solution to this is to just have consumers sleep on a failed poll, but that doesn't really help if you want to scale out your ingestion. You don't have that problem with Kafka.
Tip: you will also want to study structure-preserving numerical integration methods if you want to simulate planetary orbits. The book by Hairer, Wanner and Lubich is good (but not for the faint-of-heart).
Another theory is that the bomb was used because the USSR was shifting its focus towards Japan.

In Europe, all allied forced descended on Germany, and Europe the region was divided between the west and east, specifically the US/Marshallplan/NATO and the USSR/Molotovplan/Warschaupact.

Had the war ended in Japan the way it did in Europe, with the USSR playing a major role in the final battle and the inevitable Japanese peace process, Japan (and the region) may have been divided much like Europe was. Japan might not have become an ally of the US, might not have been part of the gigantic US economic motor in the post-war era that heavily relied on Europe and Japan as (economic) allies, and Japan may have ended up as some kind of North/South Korean divide but between the US/USSR instead of US/China.

The theory goes then, that the nuclear bomb hastened the process to swiftly force a Japanese surrender before the USSR could exercise its influence in the region.

As such under this theory, the nuclear bomb is seen as the beginning of the cold war, which is normally recognised to have begun two years later. The bomb ensured the US its first major exclusive ally, Japan, in the cold war.

I haven't studied it but it seems like a credible theory in that it's plausible. Whether this plausible type of reasoning actually played a role in the bombings is another story, one I haven't ever taken the time to explore.

In contrast, the notion that the USSR's declaration of war made the Japanese surrender strikes me as implausible. After all, the Japanese had been viciously decimated for many months, the nuclear bombs were dwarfed by the firebombings campaigns of all major cities over and over again, and it was well known that the Japanese's military capacity was reduced to virtually nothing, and that as a country with few natural resources and reliant on imports, it was bleeding dry after every single one of its logistics routes (air, land, sea) were completely cut off. Finally it had no air supremacy left and was defenceless to bombing. My point is, victory was impossible and defeat inevitably, the USSR declaration changed very little from the Japanese perspective. But it changed a lot for the American perspective, which is why it's plausible the US wanted to force surrender quickly.

Beyond that, the cold war was very much, perhaps most powerfully characterised, by constant shows of power. Demonstrating nuclear power as the first nation must have played a role in the US's claim to hegemony. Any doubts there may have been that the era of European supremacy was over, and that the US had become the world's superpower, must have instantly faded. It's the equivalent of China overtaking the US in GDP, building a base on mars, dominating at the olympics and showing unprecedented military power and weaponry. In that sense, too, a show of power with the bomb was perhaps the first action of the cold war.
I'd propose the following distinction, especially for React users:

If your components will only ever be used by you or a small, internal team of programmers, then inline styles can work.

If, however, your components are meant to be re-usable, public and accessible then CSS is still a must.

To pick on one project react-datagrid is a super useful, public component for displaying data, but they use inline styles, which makes integrating the component into any other design a nightmare. You have to fork their codebase to update a style because you can't over-ride it and there's no way they'd pull in a PR for your preferred style.
I don't see how the same logic applies: porting a source program to compile to something which runs on a new architecture seems pretty different to me than writing an efficient software to emulate another architecture for the purposes of running a program.
According to a recent study on the current usage of programming languages in astronomy -http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03989 - Fortran, quite popular in the old days, is still used by a quarter of scientists in the field. Python has been growing very fast in the last five years, eating away at the IDL share of astronomers.
As a metro Detroiter about to move to Silicon Valley, this was very interesting to read!
Lisp, Haskell or Scala?
Considering that is not what I was asking for (I quote, "a functional browser that doesn't have bunches and bunches of exploitable bugs in its JS engine"), it, although impressive in its own right, is irrelevant.

(Not to mention that said software isn't available for public scrutiny, and as such I have to take the assertion that it is bulletproof with a grain of salt. I mean, even NASA has had braindead-stupid moments (failing to convert units properly? A casting error? Running out of space on the filesystem?)))
Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff.

The cover says the book is a "sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationships between humans and computer" and it is just that. A literate and thoughtful history with an eye towards the future.
Especially because employees have to work for someone who tells them what to do.
Cool! I'll admit I haven't had time to give this more than a gloss yet, but the architecture is interesting. I've always wanted to implement a fuzzer. My current fuzzer of choice is Sulley: https://github.com/OpenRCE/sulley
Im not advocating GP > nn+grad. I'm just saying nobody knows why nn+grad performs better on practical problems. Also nn+grad methods were essentially complete failures for the first 3-4 decades of their existence (invented in 60s, legit results like Lecun or Hinton in like 90s/00s).
> * clustering - what kinds of clusters are supported? How do they scale? Do they favor availability or consistency?

There is no persistence so consistency is irrelevant. NATS does everything in the name of availability to the point of dropping connections for slow consumers.

> * security - is there any authentication? authorization for certain resources? TLS?

TLS is planned, not sure on timeline. It sounds like Apcera has plans for some form of authentication and multitenancy as well.

> * guarantuees for delivery? Transactional modes?

At-most-once delivery. No transactions. There may be some form of more reliable delivery coming in the future, but I'm not sure of the details.

> * what does the wire protocol look like? Support for meta data?

Very simple text-based protocol. I don't think it's formally documented anywhere currently though.
So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save my locality it seems.
my movim id: fsiefken@lightwitch.org
my movim feed: https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org
At least the trick with old CRT is fake (as one YouTube commenter noticed) - it can be clearly seen in TV screen reflection that someone throws something towards the TV just a moment before it breaks. And if you look closely at the garbage before the TV -- a gray brick appears there just a moment after the "explosion".
Ah, I see, thanks!
You could probably use the kindle cloud reader for them, https://read.amazon.com/ probably not as good an experience but it's an option at least while you figure out what path you want
Tweetable Mathematical Art