skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good to see steady progress :)
I hope the L4 port picks up a new round of steam eventually [1] but they squeeze quite a bit out of the Mach design (from my lay person's understanding of microkernels) and having GNU/Guix since this year is also nice.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/port_to_another_mi...
It's kind of magical:

https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/collections/__ini...
The Apple Newton used a microkernel inspired by Mach, with a custom MMU that reduced the cost of context switching.

It was . . . okay. The number of cycles it actually took to do a lightweight message pass was dismaying, though. The newt would have benefited from a less partitioned design for the underlying page and storage management.

I used another microkernel OS on a set-top box. Now that was a misery, but one I attribute more to the uncaring attitude of the company that wrote the STB's firmware than any inherent problem with their OS (a decade later, critical and customer-affecting race conditions are still present in their code). To be honest, their OS didn't help.

I don't think microkernels are bad. Making bad choices about performance that affect performance, battery life and other things that customers care about is bad, and you might have to break some abstractions in your microkernel to address those.
Mobile apps, Snapchat and how presidential candidates are getting tech-savvy
uMap is great for that:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/UMap

If you want to do more complicated things, try leaflet, http://leafletjs.com/
> Frost thinks we should pay the organizations which own underground coal deposits—specifically, the U.S. government—for the right to never mine it.

This is a wildly impractical idea. It's so bad, it hardly deserves any serious consideration.

There is far more coal still in the ground - to go with deposits that are either expected to be there or have not been found yet - than that which we already have operating mines for. If, for example, you remove US coal from the global supply, the only thing it'll accomplish is to lift prices for the rest of the world's miners (bringing their operations back to high levels of profitability, whereas today the global coal industry is in terrible shape), and encourage the creation of new mines all over the planet. In the process of restricting supply, it'll lift coal back to highly profitable as an industry, and it'll fund the creation of new mines.

Unless the plan is to buy all the land on earth of course, so you can guarantee all those untapped coal deposits never come on-line. I'm sure it would only cost a mere few dozen trillion dollars to make a serious dent.

Matt Frost's plan should be renamed: The Coal Industry Restoration Act
I was a class action lawyer for several years.

There is a great deal of definitive evidence that arbitration clauses undermine the purposes of class proceedings, those purposes being:

1. increased access to justice (i.e. one may be automatically included in a successful claim, as opposed to seeking prospective reward through a potentially lengthy and expensive adjudication);

2. lowering of overall cost of adjudication (i.e. many issues may be resolved at once, at lower expense to the plaintiffs, defendant, and the courts); and

3. behavioural correction (i.e. raise the likelihood of bad behaviour by corporations resulting in monetary consequence).

Contracting-away class procedural rights can undermine point #1 and #3. Most people do not litigate even when they have an excellent chance of success, and behavioural correction requires a certain percentage of individuals to bring and succeed in their cases. The percentage who tend to litigate, and whom can be confidentially settled with out of court, are empirically a fraction the aggregate exposure from a class proceeding.

Which is all to say, arbitration clauses are not a problem if you do not feel like corporations should have monetary consequence for bad behaviour. This is certainly good for the people who own the corporations.

There is a problem, whether perceived or real, of "lottery ticket litigation" where plaintiff class action lawyers receive a large payout on success. Certainly one wants to incentivize capable lawyers to take on hard and speculative projects by dangling good returns, but in the case of class actions I have always thought of it more as a public interest litigation. There should be an incentive to succeed, but properly employed class proceedings can have a substantial public benefit. Lottery litigation can attract the wrong lawyers, though in my experience there is a fairly wide spectrum. On the other hand, public service class proceedings have their own set of distinct issues.
I've used the desktop version. It's amazing: it looks, and feels, and operates, just like a Unix, except if you want it it's got this ultra-fast real-time core.

When I say 'just like a Unix', I mean: you log in and start up some terminal windows and it's sh and you can compile and run X11 software with configure scripts and gcc and you can print stuff with lpr and it all just works. It even runs Java --- my copy was completely self-hosting via Eclipse!

Years ago there was a single-floppy QNX demo disk: you booted from this and you got a basic desktop with dialup modem support and a web browser. SINGLE FLOPPY.

Hey, look! I was all set to write a paragraph about how sad it was that you couldn't get the bootable QNX CD any more, but look what I found!

http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=19602

It doesn't even need registration and a login any more! Holy crap, I have to see if this still works...

Edit: looks like it won't install without a license key. I'll see if I can get one...

Edit: apparently I have an account with QNX dating back from 2012, with three hobbyist license keys, one of which makes the installation CD happy. I don't know whether these are still available, though.

Edit: so it installed into a VM in about two minutes flat, and I now have a very old copy of Firefox running. It can't see the network, but that's nothing to do with QNX and everything to do with my inability to set up kvm. I need to find a real machine to run this on.

Edit: it will only install from CD, not from USB (unetbootin doesn't help). And I've lost the power cable for my CD burner. So until I find it, I won't be able to proceed here. Sorry. Still good to know this still exists, though...
On going discussion on reddit about this article/subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/3qw7m4/improving_yo...
This argument has been beaten to death. But another line of reasoning really struck me this week after seeing the Tesla collision avoidance.

I think before deathly accidents become a problem for self driving cars/manufacturers, the public will already be convinced of it numerous benefits.
Reading the contract isn't sufficient. You also need to be able to understand the legal language and its implications, and most people can't do that. If I read that arbitration clause, it wouldn't occur to me at all that it's a way for the other party to circumvent the court system.

The real problem here is that companies tend to have their own legal counsel writing these documents, but customers don't have their own legal counsel reading them and advising them about potential pitfalls.
This is the second step of undermining individual liberties in favor of corporate oligarchies, by subverting the justice system. Thr first step, of course, was subverting the legislative system via citizens united, turning elections into bidding wars.

There isn't much left to do now except slowly turn the dials.

EDIT: I guess the obvious next step is subverting state authority entirely, through things like the TPA, that put corporate interests above that of "democratically" elected states.
That's not how I read it. I think the guy wasn't "not making any effort to do [his] job", he was burnt out and tried to make the effort but failed.

His reply is not surprising from a Russian perspective (in broad strokes Russian discussion culture is extremely...let's say "honest", to the point of appearing crass or blunt to western ears) & does not mean "I don't give a shit as long as I get money".

I read it as "if you want to fire me, do so", and I don't think that's too bad (as in this case the appropriate response really is firing - not asking the guy to quit).
Exactly what I want to be doing all day: watching my bank's github repo and trying to keep up with their ever changing policies.

Edit: Mentally tracking and integrating policy reversions[0] sounds like a good time as well.

[0] https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies/commit/b0a644035fb...
What it says on the tin. A well-written tutorial perfect for those of us just learning about causal consistency. Examples are dead on.
Right, for different definitions of "same". I think that the OP attempts to explain that there are different definitions of "same" that are each valid.
This exact language shows up in almost every ToS

But almost every TOS is not written for a service whose primary marketing feature is privacy and in particular the transient nature of the communications it sends.

The kind of generalised boilerplate you talk about makes sense, at least up to a point, for hosting services or social networks, places like Pinterest or YouTube or Facebook. Even then they are often written more broadly than they need to be to provide the service with reasonable legal security, and this is something that should be challenged IMHO. But for a service like SnapChat, this seems wildly inappropriate and, in particular, unexpected.
At work I'm the guy who's always saying that overuse of dictionaries is a code smell.

What keys does the dictionary "person_data" have? Well, originally it only contained username and email address, later we added street address (everywhere where it was used, we think). And then came preferred language, but that was only added in the functions that care about that. And so on, and so forth...

Eventually all functions work with a slightly different version of a person_data dict, you're never quite sure which one a given function expects, and there is no central definition. Death by duck typing.

Dicts are for algorithms, they shouldn't be the go-to tool for structs of data. That's what classes and namedtuples are for.
Nothing I was suggesting would create "awful" performance. Inlining and unrolling are not necessary to get reasonable performance -- just try gcc or Clang with -Os.

For an occasional exception to "act like a DoS attack", the cold path would have to be thousands or millions of times slower than the hot paths. But compiler optimizations don't create anywhere near these kinds of constant factors. Even from -O0 to -O3 is more like a 5-10x difference, maybe 100x in extreme cases. The difference between -Os and -O3 is much more modest, more like 0-50%. Nothing that is going to cause anything remotely resembling a DoS.
This is an important observation about identity (a sense of self) itself.

What's more interesting to me is that the point remains valid even after replacing "money" with "love", "financial worry" with "social anxiety", "workforce" with "family" and "career" with "family", viz:

> Grow up without love and constant social anxiety, without a sense of home / self and few / no friends and start in the family when you're a teenager. You find yourself in "always love [more] to be more secure" and "always look for validation from other that you belong". You become family driven as thats what defines you - and a "community" becomes your self reinforcement and friends.

The question then becomes: why the need to identify in the first place? Why the need to "define" oneself (be it via a career or family)?
BCG has 4.3 star rating on Glassdoor. I think BCG+Dubai is the problem. @sogen's link about Dubai is telling.
Using Sankey Diagrams to Visualize Better Ad Placement
I've heard that the one thing an Amazon employee can buy without getting manager approval is a pager. Which tells me pretty much everything I need to know about working there.
Strongly doubt it. The developers have adamantly focused on improving the standard Hurd/Mach over pursuing other microkernels or even compatibility layers on monolithic Unixes. Given how ridiculously little manpower they have, it's only the most practical. Not to mention the fact that rump kernel integration is very slowly but steadily picking up: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2015-10/index.ht...

Of course, if all else fails, you can just go with the "write a Mach kernel module for Linux" route and make Linux cannibalize itself. The Darling (OS X compatibility layer for Linux) developer has done some work on this for his project, and it's one I might try to pick up for the Hurd if things advance too slowly, or simply as a research curiosity after I'm done with other projects.
Perhaps it is time for a generic markup language with stylesheets.
> my lay person's understanding of microkernels

I expect that's rather _too_ modest!
Assuming you're doing this as a full time job.. at 1k-2k, aren't you wasting your time? Or are you going to be doing multiple projects at once?
ESP8266 Dual AT and Web Server Mode
Caltech Physicists Uncover Novel Phase of Matter
The countryside is a big part of it. Like a lot of Texas, large plots of land can be had for cheap. I had a friend I would spend time with who had 20 acres with farm animals and pets, and we'd ride around his property on ATVs traversing creeks and the like. I found it beautiful and calming.

There's also lots of big lakes for fishing and boating which is a pastime of mine. Folks in the grocery store would recognize that I was an outside and approach me, introduce themselves, welcome me to their homes. There may be many a technological rube out there, but a lot of nice people outside of that
Liability will not depend on current laws; it will be determined in legislatures after intense lobbying by manufacturers. They will claim that without liability protection, the government will stifle innovation and economic growth.

Perhaps clauses banning class action suits and requiring arbitration will help them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483024
I always found it interesting how much Intel's protection ring architecture dictated the direction of operating systems back in the 1980s. (I'm sure Intel didn't even invent it; similar concepts were probably already in place in mainframes?)

x86 has highly specific support for protection rings and switching between them, as well as things like page faulting and interrupt management, leading to the classic kernel/user split with a kernel as a privileged actor underneath a user mode.

But having just one exclusive, reserved "kernel mode" is starting to look old, which is why there's now so much talk about virtualization and exokernels and so on. The microkernel design certainly seems very elegant, but it looks to me like Intel's architecture was always a stumbling block. You have to wonder about what hardware support you could invent that would make microkernels a better fit.
They hire their thugs to break your kneecaps when you don't pay.
That's a really interesting fact. Thanks for sharing!
Who's on JavaScript?
One year since the last version of jQuery Mobile released
How to measure translation quality in your user interfaces
I guess my position is in the middle.

Apple has only one monitor, and it is clearly out of date (not ultra resolution, not of same body type as current Apple products). So I quickly figure out I don't want it with no stress.

I am more likely to buy a Dell monitor. But I would be even more likely if the website was more oriented to the task of telling me which monitors are current in each class.
Well I'll be damned. Never thought of trying it. Thank you.
Best of VIM Tips from a veteran
I just replied with basically the same answer. I am from MA but have spent time in ETX. It was nice to go into Brookshire's in Quitman and be approached by people who knew I wasn't from town, and be welcomed into their homes or just have a friendly conversation. Canoeing on lake Winnesboro and chatting with the regulars at the store on the water there, etc.
Announcement on Refunds (Batman: Arkham Knight PC)
The History of the Yew Tree, “The Tree of the Dead”
I would suggest going to a big bioinformatics conference like ISMB or ECCB. The amount of graphics / images / pictures that goes into genomics / biology / genetics posters is amazing. I moved from pure CS to Genomics, and the differences are quite stark.
Does anyone have practical experience running GNU Hurd as a personal computing environment? I see they have Debian running on GNU Hurd... if I were to install that on my X200 running with LibreBoot (currently running Trisquel Linux) what would my user experience be like?
I totally agree, I far prefer a standard watch to a smart watch.

A band can be simpler and more durable, it's too bad this one isn't more water-resistant for swimming/surfing/etc. I wonder if there's a way to coat it to seal it? Or is the limitation due to the touch interaction?

Is there another dev-friendly optical HRM band with a mic?
It probably should not be uniformly illegal. For example, settling a lawsuit generally involves promising not to sue. Perhaps such agreements need to be supervised, which would take them out of the domain of "click-through" contracts.
I think its really unfair to the rest of the team to have dead weight. I understand that it was in his best interest to ride it out as long as he can and try and claim benefits and I can't say for certain what I would have done, but that behavior is really abusing the safety net. He should have tried and find a different role.

> In my particular case (Switzerland), I lose three months of unemployment benefits (80% of salary x3) if I do, and there may be other reasons as well (in my case - work permit). This has nothing to do with responsibility: why should I sacrifice my personal interest and the interests of my family for the interest of the company, as a parting gift? I see no reason to do so.

Was generous unemployment really designed for ex-Googlers who were burned out and forced the hand of management to fire them? IMO, it's pretty sleazy and hopefully sends a bad signal to future employers.
PNG is an extraordinary place. My father spent a year in the highlands in 1960, in a missionary outpost in a part of the highlands tha only had contact with the outside world about 5 years earlier. He fell in love with the place and the people; I then visited the same a village a couple of years ago, and had what will probably be the trip of a lifetime, with incredible friendly, welcoming and warm people.

The cities however are very edgy, dangerous and of no charm whatsoever.

This article of course is talking about a very ugly and horrific side of the culture, albeit one that flares up once in a while rather than being ever present.

As it discusses, in the highlands the people didn't even know the rest of the world existed until the 20th century. They hardly ever went to the next village. It was extraordinarily isolated. It's also an incredible story, I strongly recommend the (out of print) book First Contact that describes how both the explorers and locals reacted to this incredible moment - all expertly documented, and recent enough that the authors could interview people who remembered it first hand.

The true highlands are not the towns this article discusses. Mount Hagan is a large bustling town with a main airport. It no doubt has much more occurrences of this ugliness, with communities thrown together more and the chaos of large town living.

The villages in the highlands, where I visited, don't have this kind of vibe, though I'm sure sometimes events like this could occur. They have a sense of community that we in the west have lost. For instance, all the children play together in one big bundling group of fun. The 8 year olds, 5 year olds and 3 year olds (with 1 year olds on their hip) all being kids, without parents (let alone a helicopter one) - though any adult might interact if required. When this type of community setting goes wrong you get the 'immune system' response this article describes, but this doesn't paint any of the daily positives when things are normal.

Like the author I'm optimistic that education will make the bad parts a think of the past. But don't think PNG is a country of savages - the highlands that I and my father knew, whilst transitioning in an exceptionally unique way are full of humanity as wonderful as anywhere in this world.
Relativity explains fundamental properties of gold
> Work at detention settings operating in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law (as deemed by specific U.N. authorities), including the Guantanamo Bay detention facility…

Well, that begs the question of whether or not the Gitmo facility is unconstitutional or illegal (literally: it's a textbook pætitio principi).

Never mind the fact that refusing to participate in legal, ethical interrogations intended to protect the lives of millions is itself a highly unethical act. That's exactly what this blanket policy prevents: it assumes that national-security interrogations can be neither legal nor ethical, when it's pretty obvious that they can be.
When the price of coal rises other forms of fuel become more cost competitive. The net result should be a reduction in coal production as utilities switch to other fuels.
More quotes for Chesterton are needed in this (literally) godforsaken place.

Actually, more quotes from Chesterton are needed just about everywhere...
In the plan they were proposing, it would be.
American tax refugees
>And that becomes increasingly inefficient as firms get larger, which is one reason why you generally don't end up with one company running everything.

That's not quite true. While internal firm planning does seem to get less efficient as firms get larger, that inefficiency doesn't seem to stop firms from actually getting larger, or gobbling each-other up to form monopolies and oligopolies. The real-world upshot seems to be that as long as firms are allowed to grow past the point of efficient planning and efficient competition, they will actually harm the larger economy by attempting to grow and consume market share even when doing so makes them less economically efficient.
You probably couldn't get it to run on bare metal, what with I don't think Mach handling message-signaled interrupts for PCI, on top of the lack of USB and sound for desktop functionality. It's strictly developed and used in virtualization currently, and the motivation for rump kernel integration is to finally escape the hellish circle of that and relying on old NetDDE drivers, perhaps finally making it an everyday OS.

On the other hand, it is stable enough to serve the Hurd wiki. In addition, it has ~81% of Debian building, it can run Xfce and Firefox... not bad. It's much more than MINIX 3, which is solid but lacking in packages.
I made a small mobile implementation of this that saves to localStorage: http://sceneti.me

Beware: PDF export is still broken.
They have a license for evaluation & noncommercial use. http://www.qnx.com/legal/licensing/non_commercial.html
Direct link to the CCC-TV GitHub repo:

https://github.com/aus-der-Technik/CCC-TV
Whatever happened to unlocking phones? There was a huge stink about that. Petitions were signed. Legislation then bogged down as it always does. After two years(!) congress finally passed something, but

"the unlocking exemption will only last until the Librarian of Congress's next rulemaking, scheduled to happen in 2015."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2461481,00.asp

This would have been the time to reverse that decision, no? WTH is there no mention of the reversal of that decision? Does this mean we're right back to square one?
That's what I was about to write, but I'm a +1 you instead.

Inherently, one can understand addition as adding of lengths (think stick + another stick = stick of combined length). Multiplication is about computing areas where base-times-height vs. height-times-base obviously doesn't matter.

Brett Berry, you're an ass. You know how I know? Because you suggest 5+5+5 is equally wrong as 30÷2, which has nothing to do with it.