skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine an RSS reader (which Facebook, Twitter, etc. basically are.) 99% of the time, an RSS reader doesn't need internet connectivity; it just has a database of synced feed-items and you can peruse them. When you pull-to-refresh it, it goes online and actually retrieves updates for its feeds, then (crucially) finishes and is now offline again.

There's no reason such an app can't be implemented as a plain-old-webapp pinned to your iOS springboard or whatever else. You open it, you get RSS items. You try to refresh, it says "no internet, sorry", and the refresh is cancelled. Every other part of the functionality continues to work just fine.

There's actually something that does exactly this: visiting the Gmail website on iOS will build a local database of your mail, and let you continue to interact with it, search through it, write emails and "send" them (they stay in your outbox) when you don't have internet connectivity.
Shouldn't they?

After all, they make a nice profit from those people.

Maybe it's better to value people well enough for them to be people, and part of that is forming a family.

Or, maybe McDees isn't on the hook. Fair enough. Then let's make sure those programs actually work and that people can make use of them without all the angst surrounding the use of said programs.

One or the other. I don't care much. But I do care a great deal about the idea of some people being denied the standing and basic dignity of being ordinary people when they are working and adding value to the society they live in.
You should not have been voted down for this.

How we value people has a very serious impact on our economics. We wonder about tepid demand? This is one cause of that tepid demand. When people are valued low enough for them to require help to exist and do basic things, they really can't participate in the same economy that desires strong growth year over year.
I'm glad to see this.

I can't believe that in the US, paternity/maternity leave is something that is left for 'the market to decide'. I was hoping for Marissa Mayer to lead and set the example for maternity leave... but she took two weeks... I couldn't really believe it, I was pretty disappointed. In my eyes what she did, sent a pretty sad message for women, her employees, and other companies.

I think Mark taking two weeks off, is an example, for everyone. His employees (male, female, etc) and other companies. Hey, maybe even the Government can learn from this.

TD;LR, glad Mark did this. Kudos.
What PS2 emulator for PC plays even 50% of games well?
Linux Mint on three laptops in this house, two running Cinnamon and one running Xfce desktop. Ubuntu package base. Meets my needs, hassle free, good community support.
YArchive
I have seen that most of kids who have struggled in their childhood because of say low income from their parents or bad family have a kind of a fighting spirit. Most of the people who you see achieve greatness either say in sports or in engineering come from really poor and troubled backgrounds. Now compare that to the upper middle class and the rich whose kids have been given all the resources and you don't see much of them at the top. Even if you see them it would be because their parents would have set up artificial constraints on their resources which they would have to fight to get it.

So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.
I have to say I'm surprised — I thought better of V8 than this.

Arguably it's usually going to be preferable to know you're getting the same kind of random numbers across platforms anyway, so a BYO Mersenne Twister is a decent remedy.

One is linked in the post, and I have a CoffeeScript one here: https://github.com/jawj/mtwist/blob/master/mtwist.coffee
Looks like your first question has been answered!

Re: submitting a patch, there were several previous issues and discussions about Math.random() being problematic that were closed-wontfix or otherwise dismissed. It seemed like the general perception was that it was "good enough." It didn't make sense to me to open another similar ticket without a good analysis and whatnot.

I meant to file another issue before posting, but I forgot. There is an open issue now, however![1]

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=559024
Yes, please do. Completely agreed.

I find these ADS very highly disturbing, and I'm old enough to remember times before these ADS too.
But "brainfAsteriskUck" doesn't quite roll off the tongue... ;-)
Hahahahaha. I can't believe that either.
"And by now people routinely ask personal assistant systems—many powered by Wolfram|Alpha—zillions of questions in ordinary language every day."

Is this true? I didn't realize this.
Some thoughtful stuff in here.

But this is totally misguided:

- "The intelligence services need controlled access [to data]"

As has been said, back doors will not remain under controlled access. And even in the false fantasy world of controlled access, they will also be accessed by corrupt and evil regimes, and corrupt and evil people.

But what worries me about this access is that it will be self-amplifying. Meaning people who get access to it will get information that gives them more power, and then they'll use that power to get better surveillance, in a self-amplifying cycle, ultimately one that can't help but be very damaging to any hope of having free and happy societies.

The world emerging as an end result of that could be more horrific than any terrorism incident that has even been imagined.
> In order to graduate on time you have to be taking 15-18 credits of the hardest classes offered at university. Right now I'm in an 18 credit semester, and next I will be taking 17 credits

So what you're saying is you could drop 2-3 credits a semester, and still graduate on time?

> and I've also developed this weird problem where I profusely vomit several times a day.

I really hope you've seen a doctor about this.
Anecdotally, it's unheard-of to not take full advantage of paid family leave at a technology company, whether it's two months or four.

There are issues around vacation, especially "unlimited PTO" as a perk, but no one seems shy about paternity and maternity leave.
If it's an AI, then I should be able to talk to it like I would other intelligence.

That is how we talk to an AI. This article is framing a set of powerful computational entities as an "AI", and that is not yet defensible.

So much of what we communicate among humans depends on implied, common context. We know what would make sense to other people, or have a good idea of that, based on our understanding of ourselves and other people.

When I think, "AI", I think about something that knows me other than a set of attributes and rules, and I can know it in the same way. Imagine a little kid type intelligence connected to those powerful compute entities and with a great memory. Better than our memory. And it's fast.

It's that "little kid" type intelligence that is missing! We have the fast, we have the great memory, we have lots of powerful compute entities too.

What we actually don't have is the "intelligence" to complete the idea of "artificial intelligence"
Don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Time management/organization skills can go a long way.
UK here. Paternity leave is 2 weeks off - half of that unpaid. It's a disgrace.

https://www.gov.uk/paternity-pay-leave/overview
World's first baby monitor with thermal vision to help new parenthood
> but also how they're constructed (MAC address, timestamp, and a random element).

Who uses UUID1? The vast majority are UUID4 and they are pure random.
Which large tech companies don't have paid paternity leave? It's kind of a common thing... https://www.fatherly.com/50-best-places-to-work-for-new-dads...
I am astounded that you're astounded. Seems like common sense advice to me: put your family ahead of everything else. That's what I do, anyway. Once "everything else" starts to interfere, I make sure to change my circumstances to make sure that my family gets the attention it so richly deserves.
The scientist, David L. Parnas, a professor at the
University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Parnas
Oh, yeah, downvote the messenger instead of respecting the message, which is that a third-rate amateur approach to random number generation just doesn't cut it. This was known as far back as 1999, when similar flaws bedeviled online poker sites.[4][5]

Anyone going into the business should have known that from the start, instead of stumbling into it. And definitely shouldn't be trying to retroactively justify such gross incompetence. It's not Google's fault that these guys designed a crappy PRNG into a real money application.

There is always the potential for cheating when real money is involved:

1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal[1]
people added weight to supposedly random ping pong balls

scratch lottery tickets weren't random[2]
a "trick worked about 90 percent of the time"

American Coin Machine Company[3] video poker machines
were programmed to cheat players out of jackpots

people were cheating online poker as far back as 1999,
due to a flawed PRNG[4][5]

Those are just a few cases that I could recall. I'm sure there have been many many more. True randomness is just the start in what it takes to prevent this.

People who want to "disrupt real money gaming" shouldn't be making amateur mistakes like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scan...
[2] http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=American+Coin+machine+compan...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/13/business/compressed-data-e...
[5] https://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.p...
There were earlier reports of Soviet economic weakness that predate Reagan. As early as 1975, Senator Moynihan had predicted the demise of the USSR for economic and ethnic reasons. I think at best the policy accelerated the process.

My view is that if the Soviet system was inherently inefficient, and it was, then it should eventually lead to collapse or reform if left to its own course. It didn't seem to necessitate such an wasteful expenditure that lead to a collapse that was terribly managed. It's not difficult to imagine worse scenarios where the Soviet nuclear arsenal played some role.

That said, Reagan's original argument for increased spending was that the Soviet Union's military capability was relatively stronger.
Seriously? I better stop eating Polar Bear right away!
Interesting. Have you read any of The Last Psychiatrist? This article in particular is directly related to this thread.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html
Skimming on phone and I missed it-thanks!
I knew I'd seen that name before.

http://bellard.org/jslinux/
Well done Sir. I've worked as a back office software developer for a large corp for the past 4 years. My role specifically involves working directly with 2 external consulting companies. We have numerous BAs, PMs, Specialists and Directors.... the companies doing the work seem to have minimal technical staff and limited managerial guidance. In short, the developers often appear overworked, stressed and kinda in "don't give a fuck" territory. I have no idea why this is the case...I can't say that you're right - but you raise a valid point.
I find it comical that they even think they can put the genie back into the bottle
-403 error. Homepage gives back an Apache test page.
Machine Learning Summer School 2016 in Càdiz, Spain
1 out of 4 isn't that extreme, historically ~20% of individuals in Western Europe didn't have children.
Quite true. They did have one of the largest Drupal sites for a while. I'd wager that the articles that explored how they did it would be a little outdated now as I think they were on Drupal 6 when they switched platforms.
Flights to spain- Barcelona on flychecker at € 70
Touche'
>few Americans have ever been so privileged to save for college, yet this has not stopped the ever-increasing average educational attainment for Americans.

Americans didn't have to. They could pay for it with a part time job. But the cost of college has risen far faster than wages, helped by cheap student loans from the government.

>Which is why we have Social Security

Social Security will need to be vastly expanded to keep up with an aging population. With a new generation having no pensions, retirement savings or property (student loans in lieu or mortgage), the next "middle class" doesn't look like much different than the working poor of today. The cost of living is not going down.

The concern with income inequality is not that the rich are getting richer, it's that the middle class is getting poorer. And this has a ripple effect both inside the economy and into other areas: the justice system, politics, public safety.

Lots of people can afford to ignore it now. It doesn't look like that is going to last, however.
BTW, is there any way to get the chat archive from the original marathon? Is it saved at all somewhere? rechat.org does a similar thing, but its retention period is only one week.
Completely agree. Am surprised they made it through Jessica's Social Radar into YC.
ive a vizio smart tv (they basically are all smart tvs now)
its just not online. easy. the software sucks anyway.
TPP Would Harm User Rights and the Commons
TrueCrypt is safer than previously reported
Has anybody gotten a response from this site in any of the submissions of the last 3 days? I just get hangs, on multiple browsers -- including without AdBlock.
You are way out in left field all by yourself.

Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said.

I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.)

Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born.

We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too.

Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases).

I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler.

BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.
I am a different DB Cooper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Cooper
If, by quality, you mean "indistinguishable from true randomness" then there are many valid metrics. One important metric that many non-CS PRNGs have, but many CSPRNGs do not have, is a provable deterministic cycle length for all seeds.

These characteristics don't just make Monte Carlo simulations converge quicker, they also do things like guarantee that your 52 deck shuffle will definitely produce the one shuffle that gives player two a royal flush on the flop in a round of texas hold 'em. Or, more generally, they guarantee that your Array.shuffle() method is unbiased for a reasonable sized array. In general you need true randomness and/or a long cycle linear-transformation PRNG to make those sorts of guarantees. It's also nice that they're fast. That said, I do also agree that the scenarios in which these things matter are rather rare, and most people should probably just use a CSPRNG by default.

Do you really think a CSPRNG is fast enough for your standard library's array shuffle though? Wouldn't you rather have something like xorshift1024* that's probably > an order of magnitude faster? Maybe a CSPRNG is fast enough... I don't have all the numbers. So this is an honest question.
There's always someone to say "X is prohibited" and people that do X and that profess to be allowed.

Ah so is it wrong? Go tell them. Also look at Apostasy and how it's dealt with in the majority of Muslim majority countries
From the page you just linked, Jobs's birth father was "the son of a self-made millionaire".
Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won. Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day.

Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.
My take on it is, why keep playing a game when you've already won, and the only way from here is down? I can't imagine running a website can keep feeling meaningful for more than a few years.

As for parental leave, your kid is only a baby for a remarkably short time, two months is nothing. I was able to take two weeks off for each of my kids, and combining a full time job with small children can be very stressful. You never have enough time for the kids, and at the same time you never have enough time to keep up with your job.
then you'd debug it, or program debuggers to flit around looking for programmer error then address it

the system is clear about its capabilities regarding 'correctness'

which seems to imply the programmer's job is to optimise with those built in inaccuracies

but what those inaccuracies afford is what ackley is calling robustness and indefinite scalability

ackley addresses your question directly with a sorting comparison(o) from a later video

the graph fails to exhibit where maxwell's demon(i) horde sort would express itself on the graph, but sorting corruption is addressed in the paper(ii)

The demon horde sort’s performance may be just adequate,
by that measure, but its robustness seems quite impressive.

Figure 23 shows results of one experiment in which we
randomly corrupted site memory with simulated bit errors at
a range of probabilities. Each error occurrence selects a random
site and then flips from one to eight of its 64 atomic bits.

We can see that while channel length helps performance, it
does not help robustness against this system perturbation—
but the system is strikingly robust anyway, tolerating upward
of 10 multibit corruptions per million events with essentially
no visible performance degradation, regardless of channel
length.

Above about 50 errors/Mevent the system reliably falls
apart—and the pathology appears to run a reliable course..

unintended performance appears to be the reason for the advent of this system

but going further as to deal with unintended performance of hardware

if you have a multi core system running an incorrectly programmed sort and one core fails the whole thing shuts down, but an incorrectly programmed sorter in the demon horde will keep functioning even with failed cores, affording the opportunity to adjust while performing

(o) https://youtu.be/7hwO8Q_TyCA?t=688

(i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

(ii) http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/12/1450.full.pdf...
This is an oft repeated myth. The US was far, far ahead of the Russians already to the point where they stood no chance of catching up. What motivated Star Wars was that the US had been overestimating Russian capability since the 1960s by factors of 10-100, so by the mid-1980s they were actually worried about where they stood. Basically, the CIA had no idea what was going on, as evidenced by their complete shock at the collapse of the USSR. Reagan decided to spend a ton of money redressing an imbalance that never existed.

Star Wars and less fictional technology such as the stealth bomber were so far ahead of what the Ruasians had that they actually risked destabilising MAD to the point where a Russian first strike could be a logical choice. So the decision was irrational unless the US thought the Russians were ahead of them.
Rust's website is the opposite of this: BUSY!

Just look at that landing page: logo, menu, intro, download buttons, code example (and editor), features - all 'above the fold' (on my screen).

Sure, everything's there, but from a design perspective, there's no real focus on any one component. Sometimes that focus is actually the design intention. In that sense, the Io website hits it perfectly.
Make way for the oligopoly!
Evolution Is Finally Winning Out Over Creationism
Huh? It's the basic concept of installing extensions from untrusted 3rd parties that's flawed.

There's potentially a security framework that could mitigate this but it's not an easy problem given the incentives to work round it.
Carnivorous livers such as polar bears' have dangerous levels. Omnivore/herbivore livers aren't very dangerous at all, you'd have to eat many many kilograms in a single setting to approach acute toxicity. Or eat like a pound a week for perhaps months to years.
I tried to catch soft errors for about a year on a couple of Linux boxes I had. They were both desktop form factor machines, one being used as a home server and one as a desktop at work.

I had a background process [1] on each that simply allocated a 128 MB buffer, filled it with a known data pattern, and then went into an infinite loop that slept a while, woke up and checked the integrity of the buffer, and if any of the data had changed logged the change and restored the data pattern.

Based on the error rates I'd seen published, I expected to catch a few errors. For example, using the rate that Tomte's comment [2] cites I think I'd expect about 6 errors a year.

I never caught an error.

I also have two desktops with ECC (a 2008 Mac Pro and a 2009 Mac Pro). I've used the 2008 Mac Pro every working day since I bought it in 2008, and the 2009 Mac Pro every day since I bought it in 2009. Neither of them has ever reported correcting an error.

I have no idea why I have not been able to see an error.

[1] http://pastebin.com/Bv56kVwC

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600308
I would not trust adblock extensions. /etc/hosts works just fine.
Top 20 Films about Finance: From Crisis to Con Men
I have experienced a change in mindset regarding vacations, when I was an employee of a large corp vs now that I am entrepreneur.

Earlier when I was an employee I used to look forward to weekends/holidays/vacations. Not so now. The idea of being away from work for months is unthinkable for me. Local radio on Monday morning has an RJ invariably commenting on Monday-morning-blues. Luckily, I can't relate to that feeling anymore.

Not trying to paint ultra-rosy picture of being a business owner. It does have ups and downs, and it being a roller-coaster ride is well documented by many.

But whatever stage (highs/lows) you may be in. Typically, its hard to keep yourself away from work. Maximum duration of a vacation, I have taken in past 8-9 years, is around a week, and the median is typically 3-4 days.

At the same time, I do understand responsibility towards family. So if somebody needs to do it, I appreciate that, and definitely see myself also doing, but obviously don't wish for it.

Perhaps many others here, may feel similarly.
Is there a good reason to disassemble the shader machine code instead of using what's needed from the open source Linux/Mesa GCN driver code?
Bitwalking dollars: Digital currency pays people to walk
> The "how I did this cool thing" story is sorely missed.

Are you sure there are less of those? I'm not. Certainly they're as on topic as ever, and continue to make the front page. I'm not aware of a lot of such stories that get submitted but not upvoted.