skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the topic of writing lisps, an obligatory link to my favorite project: Make a Lisp

https://github.com/kanaka/mal
And I really don't want Windows on a PC.
> You're adorable.

And you're bad at this.

> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?

If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.

> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.

It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.

> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.

Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic
A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.

This is actually a major problem with the entire TV and radio age. People who seem awkward or fake in front of a camera are actually normal people. It is simply not natural to talk directly to a camera lens as if it is a person, it is not natural to speak in a folksy way to a generic audience that you cannot see. People who seem natural in front of a camera, are actually slick, well-practiced professionals. Thus in the modern era, all politicians and most public figures end up being essentially actors.
Link encryption and authentication is pretty much "solved" in that we have the components we need already. Then there's the issue of code bugs and lack of updates - I think this should be solved in most cases by devices exclusively talking over a filtered API via a trusted gateway to prevent exploit attempts from succeeding.
> ChromeOS can do most of the tasks that an everyday Internet user might want.

That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? It can, at this point, do MOST of what an everyday Internet user might want? It's that whole 80/20 thing that everyone thought would let somebody overthrow Microsoft Office -- 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Well that's true and all, but it's not the same 20% for everyone, and you only have to miss one feature to make a Chromebook an untenable alternative to a Windows machine. There was a brief window where Chromebooks were significantly cheaper than a comparable Windows laptop but Intel took the ARM threat seriously, Microsoft took the licensing seriously and now the base Chromebook price from a name manufacturer isn't significantly cheaper than the HP Stream or what have you. "Most" is not going to cut it now that the price advantage is gone.

> There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.

This is really only true in that we live on a planet with many, many lots of people, and so you can find lots of people for which almost anything holds true if you funnel it down. ChromeOS market share is a rounding error at this point, and if there were any signs that this was turning around, Google apparently decided they weren't enough for them to continue.
> Atom needs to measure runs of text on screen to absolutely position the cursor, selections, highlights, and overlay decorations such as the autocomplete suggestion box. Chrome does not have a text measurement API at this time, so we need to measure text from the DOM. The problem with measuring from the DOM is that it forces a reflow, and these measurement-triggered reflows were a major source of slowness in early versions of Atom.

It's incredible that the web works at all, considering the heroic feats necessary to accomplish simple things native toolkits got right back in the 1980's.
Ask HN: Cloud computing research topics from a business perspective?
With the rise of a ubiquitous provision of computing resources over the past years, cloud computing has been established as a prominent research topic. In contrast to many other research works focused on
technical aspects of cloud computing I'm trying to find interesting research topics from a business perspective. With so many practitioners in HN what are your challenges/suggestions?
A little bit of feedback: Quite large parts of the UK still have patchy 2G reception so this would not be practical for here. People on HN have been saying don't worry the network will catch up for years, but where I live the network coverage and speed is crap and hasn't changed at all in the last 5 years in the 80 miles between here and the nearest major city.
It seems this piece believes this is outrageous, however I'll argue the opposite, that the school should simply be more forthright about its goals.

There are many parents who do not discipline their children to any meaningful degree, and then expect the rest of society to shoulder the costs. I see no reason not to transfer them to a "remedial academy" for improvement, to lessen the burden on serious students.
GP is saying I could have (with the help of 2999 shell companies) bid $3000, $2999, $2998, ..., $1, and I would effectively have 30000 days to do the work for $3000.
Are you sure you're not the one with problems?
I've had pretty good experiences so far with Ahoy - https://ankane.github.io/ahoy/
Too bad we don't know how Alibaba found this vuln, so the technique can be used to audit the rest of the Xen codebase.
Python Terminal Apps – file args
You don't need to install JRE to get a shell on an Android device. Just install adb[1], enable USB debugging on your phone and run adb shell. adb is a part of the Android SDK but you just need the adb binary which doesn't have any extra dependencies AFAIK.

[1] https://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html
I love Brackets since they have added instant search. That is the killer feature for me.

Being able to search 10k+ files instantly as you type is really awesome.
Any MU-MIMO technology in sight for these radio protocols? Would be a great way to potentially extend range and throughout if multiple spatial channels could be used on each frequency / radio channel for every pair of connected devices. If it could be done efficiently enough, it could also reduce congestion even in tight crowds for things like wearables by reducing interference.
I'm not sure how much JS is actually faster in the past few years... I mean there's been progress, but a lot of the progress in the earlier days of V8 aren'twhat we've seen lately. Probably 5+ years since huge leaps in JS performance have happened... it's just modern computers are pretty damned fast and have been for a while (on the desktop). Even CPU development has been more about reducing power use, than increasing raw performance for a while.

Most of the advancements/bottlenecks lately in browser tech are in how the DOM and reflows work in the browser in practice. JS has been pretty damned fast, and probably one of the fastest scripted environments all around for some time.
Google wants to be in the enterprise market. Microsoft dominates the enterprise market right now, and they're doing a lot of things (Surface, Windows 10, Office 365, Azure) to extend their dominance. If you look at new versions of Office and don't see anything new in there for you, it's because you're not looking at the collaborative space. Microsoft is pulling the rug out from under Google Docs (which for some reason Google rebranded as Google Drive because they're so terrible at naming things) by adding anything Google's services have over Office AND having backwards compatibility with current Office docs. Google can't match that. Apple meanwhile has the MacBook line, which was and may still be the laptop to beat in the ultrabook space. They also have the iPhone, which is the top dog for people who can afford them, and the iPad, which has dominated the tablet space in terms of productivity. (Android is dominating the tablet space for consumption, but that doesn't help nearly as much in terms of enterprise).

The move to convertible devices is being driven by and catering to enterprise users. Microsoft is in the lead here with the Surface, and they're trying to extend this to their phones but they may not be able to overcome the handicap of nobody wants their phones. Apple is playing from behind here because there's walls between iOS and OS X that they won't cross, but they have inroads into the enterprise space, they have enough native iOS productivity apps that work well on tablets (Adobe and ironically Microsoft are both heavily into the iOS productivy app space, and that's a huge part of the market) that the iPad Pro is... unappealing to me personally but quite possibly will be successful in the marketplace.

Google has... Chromebooks, which have no apps and no market penetration outside of the very, very captive education market (where IT administrators just want computers so locked down that teenagers can't do too much damage). And they have Android, which (in tablets at least) has almost no enterprise penetration and very little in terms of productivity apps. And the merging of ChromeOS with Android in order to tackle the enterprise market and the Surface line and the iPad Pro makes a lot of sense. But I'm not sure either papers over the other's flaws enough to make it viable, and I'm definitely not convinced that they're going to be able to be combined in a way that incorporates what ChromeOS does well that Android doesn't, like system software updates.
This is a backup plan in case Google loses the fair use case against oracle / java.
> Please show us some of these promised optimizations. I don't think they actually exist.

I already gave two examples: "removing redundant elements from struct definitions all the way down to bitshift optimizations like i * 28 == i<<4 + i<<3 + i<<2". Neither of those optimizations are used by mainstream compilers, although it is possible that LLVM might include some optimizations like the latter due to work from the Souper project.

> Most of the larger code / algorithm tweaks require subtle changes to the behaviour. The compiler can't choose to do that by itself, as it could break the program. Programmers need to make these choices for themselves.

If it introduces a bug, then it is not an optimization, and it has no business being included in an optimizer (at least without explicit flags like -ffast-math).

> Besides which, compilers can already select slow or fast optimizations on the command line, so users can minimize compile time if they wish. There are plenty of people who would give anything for faster code, no matter what the compile time is.

My whole point is that -O3 is still weak sauce. There are tons of compiler optimizations that are excluded from both GCC and LLVM because of fears of compilation time impacts. Take a look at the specific techniques section of this wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimizing_compiler

I can guarantee you that the mainstream C compilers cover maybe half of those, and for lesser known languages far less than half.
I'm not even sure it's more full-featured than non-OS application platforms, like Java. Mostly what it has is a large install base.
Déjà il rêvait à une thébaïde raffinée, à un désert confortable, à une arche immobile et tiède où il se réfugierait loin de l’incessant déluge de la sottise humaine. -- Huysmans
Lol, i love how this is at the bottom of the HN comments page. Sometimes HN can be kinda clueless.
I'm impressed by the simplicity of this design. How much control can you get out of the robot over that power cable? Is timing and computation done on the robot itself, or on the other side of the wire?
As a FirefoxOS user, I'm excited to hear this news, in the hopes that eventually people will realize that HTML+CSS+JS is not a terrible stand-in for a full-fledged OS (iOS/Android), depending on the task.
Measuring for the width of a text string isn't exactly a typical action in browser based applications/pages. That said, I'm half surprised they didn't resort to canvas controlled rendering to work around the issue, making the editor itself a controlled canvas field.
It occurs to me that a decent segment of the public figure that politicians and public figures have acting skills.

Can you expand on why acting authentic, and the authentic seeming the opposite, in front of the camera is "a major problem with the entire TV and radio age"?
VS Code is amazing speed-wise, I couldn't believe its web-based at all.
I would be very very happy for him to do talks about his way of working.
If you stored it in the DB as "2015-10-30 17:00:00 SOMETIMEZONE" then it would be unambiguous when the event is going to happen. If you stored an UTC timestamp, well, then you'd get two different values depending on whether you had the updated tzdata or not when the value was entered and converted to a timestamp.

If you think this problem can be solved by declaring today's version of tzdata immutable and final, then I'm afraid you're not being realistic. Timezones, DST rules, country borders will change and always have.
I've used a Chromebook as my machine for the last 18 months. I love it.

Anything I need to do, I can do through web services, remote desktop or chrome remote desktop.

The one thing I have come to love about ChromeOS is the security. I don't need to worry as much and I have confidence in using my Chromebook all the time.

My phone is android and maybe I am just suffering from Verizon abuse, but I've never had the same security confidence with my phone. And I think this will be the issue. Most people only know Android through a phone experience and it's left a bad taste in their mouth.

Anyway, the Google folks are smart. My hope is the security and reliability of ChromeOS is what is taken and folded into Android.
Changing Climates of History (2014)
Google will merge Android and Chrome OS by 2017: report
I have referred to NPR, for some time now, as the Bureau of Silly Voices (in homage to Monty Python's Bureau of Silly Walks).
There is a revolution. It's called Library Genesis.

Now if we could only make it legal...
Similarly, I've really enjoyed VS Code's Git and Search features... Though thinking of trying Atom again after this release noting performance gains.
Don't forget Alphabet's Google's Google Music All Access.
That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert). After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.

In practice, eugenics seems to move from "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others, and we should strive for those in future generations" to "some genetic makeups are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should force there to not be so many of the others". There doesn't seem to be any clear point at which you can say, "No, you've gone too far", and explain to the true believer why the step they took is too far. They'll just tell you that it's logically implied by the steps that you are in agreement with.

And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places. (I probably need to qualify that with "eugenics movements that had some influence", because if you don't have enough influence to get people to accept step 1, you don't move on to step 2. And that may be begging the question on my part, because Nazi Germany may be the only historical example where the ideas got taken seriously and actually influenced much of anything.)

Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
I use Python 2.7 all day every day and I definitely still notice the warts and find them irritating. They are minor warts, and almost never affect my productivity, but they're definitely things that should have been, and are, fixed. super(what do I pass here again?), old vs. new style classes, integer division, input, print, exception bubbling/chaining, nonsense compares between different types, True/False/None as regular variables, no "nonlocal"... Then there are the features I can't use, like extended unpacking and merging, better yielding, function annotations, and lots of improvements to the standard library in terms of their API and functionality.

I'm not a fan of asyncio, but the other stuff is quite awesome. It's not compelling enough to port some of my older Python 2.7 projects, and isn't a revolution of the language or anything, but they're good improvements. And even if they weren't good improvements, Python 3 is the future, and Python 2.7 simply won't be a viable option for a lot longer.
One convenient thing about TOS is that everything was done optically and the prints that were scanned for broadcast were still available. They were able to go back to the film without being forced to redo all the editing and effects, as was necessary for TNG, which was composited and edited on tape. As you say, they were wise to include the unaltered versions on the Bluray releases. The "upgraded" effects are certainly interesting, but far from subtle!

If you want to see the unaltered version of TNG you are forced to go back to the DVD's. Fortunately, the restorers were meticulous in recreating the original special effects as faithfully to the original as possible, even to the point of bringing in a lot of the people who originally did those effects in the 80's and 90's. Practically nothing sticks out as being as out of place as the upgraded effects that were done for TOS do. Even though a lot of what we see in the HD release of TNG is entirely new, it blends in seamlessly. Extremely impressive work!

TV of the late 80's and 90's seems destined to be a bit of low-resolution dip for for the foreseeable future. The TNG restoration was expensive and CBS Paramount hasn't yet gone forth with restoring Deep Space Nine. It may simply be too expensive to give most shows the same treatment. An added problem of the late 90's was the advent of extensive use of CG effects in television. DS9's restoration will be complicated by this, and another great example is Babylon 5. The models, animation files, etc. for this show's CG effects were lost, so they'd need to be recreated from scratch if the show was ever to be restored in hidef. Even the DVD releases suffer from poor quality due to this.
Microsoft is pulling the rug out from under Google Docs

However, Office 365 for the Mac (2016) regularly crashes. All 4 of us that use it at my company have experienced this. I can't remember the last time Google Docs crashed or screwed up a document.

So, it amazes me that the quality of MS Office is so incredibly low. This is not the way to win any market.
that's 1600 devices simultaneously communicating. a sensor might only spend a fraction of a percent of its time transmitting data, so the number of devices supported is orders of magnitude higher.
I'm not sure that I could create/style a Java based application nearly as easily as HTML markup and CSS though.
All right, will try
"With Marshmallow Android is moving towards a runtime-permission-prompt model similar to Chrome"

This is horrible from a usability perspective. Note that large bulk laptop purchasers (schools, large enterprises with mostly web application requirements etc.) have been the biggest markets for chromebook. One of the biggest reasons for that popularity is the lower cost of management of chromebooks compared to windows or mac laptops. In that the base OS not only just works, it also just updates. A huge saving in admin time and headache. The other factor is that all user data is automatically in the cloud, which means backups/restores/replacements/upgrades are trivial operations now.

One way chromebooks can retain this ease of use/administration is by basically shipping a laptop with chrome running on Android OS but no other apps installable by the user (outside of chrome sandbox). This will get Google out of the two OS kernels management business but could still retain the essential goodness of the chromebook concept.
Several advanced economies like Japan have already hit the top of the curve. No starvation needed.
Ask HN: How do people create internationalization store image assets across different platforms?
So, this is totally just a technical design issue. I wonder how other startups are dealing with it. Basically, we have apps on iOS, Android and Windows, and we have 20 languages used in the screenshots. iOS store alone has 5 screen sizes, so we need to create 5 * 20 * 5 = 500 screenshots. I know there are some automation tools out there, but which one is the easiest for designer to set it up and being able to track all the histories and changes? We are thinking to build an internal image synthesis tool just for this now. Wonder what's the thoughts from the community?
Store the starting point for a meeting scheduled for October 30th, 2050, at 5pm local time in Pyongyang.

Are you sure the value of UTCunixtime("2050-10-30 17:00:00 Pyongyang") today will be correct in 2050? What if this record was created last year? (hint: the timezone was recently changed).

Remember, the meeting is supposed to happen at 17:00 local time on that day no matter what.
Fluentd V/s Logstash at OpenStack Summit
> You don't think this is a problem, as you see your house cleaned just like usual.

How are you able to assume this, since I actually would very much see it as a problem if 3-4 people I don't trust to clean my house as much as my housekeeper are inside doing the job? Your underlying assumption is that I'm an idiot and can't see what's happening. She couldn't subcontract the work for the same reason I can't subcontract my work at my current job - my employer would see through it.

> I use the other 7 "working" hours of the day to play videogames.

Not many people would come out for $10/hr for only one hour. What about travel time? And the organization necessary to make sure the quality is still high? I think you're lampshading a ton here.
Germany Hardens Line on U.S. Data Transfers
They're very popular in education (http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2015/05/sixty_...). Mainly because they are inexpensive, a lot more versatile and better suited than iPads, the previous hype in education (see for instance the LA iPad debacle http://www.wired.com/2015/05/los-angeles-edtech/). Also, many schools are already using Google services: Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and now Google Classroom is becoming huge.