skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why?

Good question. As they author noted, k bits of state can support a cycle length of 2^k. You can look at that from the other direction and state it as a cycle length of L requires at least log2(L) bits of state.

If your cycle length is L and you are using k bits of state, and k > log2(L), then in theory with a cleverer encoding of state you could save k - log2(L) bits of memory.

Whether or not I'd characterize k - log2(L) excess bits as "wasted" memory depends on just how big it is. For instance, suppose someone implemented Mersenne Twister and used twice as many bits as theoretically needed for the cycle length. Typical MT has a cycle length of around 2^20000, so needs 20000 bits of state. Someone doubling that is using an excess of 2500 bytes.

On the other hand, the generator the article is about has a cycle length of around 2^60, and so need in theory 60 bits of state. If an implementation doubled that they have an excess of less of 8 bytes.

2500 bytes is enough that if I were implementing I'd probably take a good look at seeing if I could eliminate it, even if it meant making the implementation a little more obtuse. I'd be inclined to consider that 2500 bytes as wasted memory.

8 bytes? That's small enough that even on most embedded systems I'd probably consider clean and clear code to be more important than saving that memory. I'd not be inclined to consider it wasted memory.
All the emoji part of the Unicode standard is, when you think about it, is a way to provide all the different "WingDings-esque fonts" a common set of names/identifiers for their little pictures†, so that something that looks like a smiley face in Android WingDings will still be something that looks like a smiley face in iOS WingDings.

(Well, that, and asserting a minimum shared base of symbols that each WingDings font is expected to have depictions for. I think that's a less important role, though; they could just as easily get away with shipping a "Unicode-official fallback emoji font" instead, that would backfill for any codepoints a particular OS's emoji font doesn't have.)

---

† Identifiers for the pictures themselves, not the concepts they represent. That's an important distinction, I think: there really isn't a difference in concept between U+1F601 'GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES' and U+1F638 'GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES'—but they're different little pictures. Effectively, they're like an icon/logotype/mark, with each font giving you a different artist's treatment on that mark.)
I think everyone who works the equivalent of full-time should be able to afford to have children. The fact is, not everyone is going to get out of these low wage jobs, and that doesn't mean they would be bad parents. Have we gone so far as a society towards judging the poor that we don't believe the are fit to reproduce?
Yes, but probably not a 98% discount.
Of course, we now know that the Reagan Administration knew that the "Star Wars" anti-missile systems were not going to actually work. The goal was never for them to work as advertised. The goal was to convince the USSR that they would work, and force the USSR to spend huge amounts of money trying to keep up. And it worked.
I would assume that they are prioritizing the recall appointments
This. And they see plenty of private lucre for it.
Using node IDs and timestamps is just an additional safety factor. Statistically it's not necessary if you have a good generator. Even without those things our target collision probability is less than the expected uncorrectable error bit rate of a HDD.

Good PRNGs have equivalent entropy at each bit. With a good PRNG (even a non-CS PRNG) you shouldn't need to mix entropy to do scaling. You should still do rejection sampling[1] if you care about bias. It looks like a good scaling method might be added to the ECMA spec as part of the standard library thanks to some awesome people at Google.[2]

[1] https://gist.github.com/mmalone/d710793137ed0d6b8cb4

[2] https://twitter.com/mjmalone/status/667806963976134656
I don't buy regret. From what I've read so far, people who worked too much regret not doing things with family, etc. and people who lived bog-standard GenPop family life regret that their life had no meaning. So I guess death is just one big paradox of choice.
You trust the companies to leave the features disabled if you disable them?

I don't.

Vizio is a bad actor, here. This paragraph illustrates that quite well:

"Cable TV companies and video rental companies are prohibited by law from selling information about the viewing habits of their customers. However, Vizio says that those laws - the Video Privacy Protection Act and cable subscriber protections - don’t apply to its business."
I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned this. Advertisment? I doubt it. Written with the explicit intention of writing about Gone Home/Jazzpunk/Sunset. Probably. I did a google search of her name, and then the names that came up associated with her. They all write/talk about these games a lot.
Those indeed are interesting questions, with the way virtual dom is gaining traction its up for debate. Right now so much code depends on the DOM api that it is unlikely to change. What will likely happen is that more and more ways to sidestep the DOM's shortcomings will emerge.
Do you mean there cannot be a CSPRNG? Most of cryptography is based on security in practice, not in absolute theory (i.e. everything except for one time pads and maybe some quantum crypto). That's like saying there are no cryptographically secure encryption algorithms other than one time pads, since you can break all of them in theory. That's a pretty useless definition of cryptographically secure.

edit: By in theory I mean that with enough computation resources you could break them even if you didn't find some new, clever weakness. Not that you could break them in theory because a weakness could always be found.
Edge-disjoint Fibonacci trees in hypercube [pdf]
You thought this because it was basically true 10ish years ago. But they slowly gained functionality until we got to where we are now.
No. The fix is to militate against "smart" TV makers and boycott them until they remove this malware and stop snooping as a means to gain more revenue. That is the only fix. No other fixes are trustable and verifiable at this point.

The fix is, don't ever buy a smart TV. Buy the stupidest TV you possibly can.

TV makers don't know anything about software and security, and they don't care at all about user privacy. So they shouldn't be allowed to write software and put features in their TVs.
I am a cult member too but even more than this article says: I was on a client onsite in London four years ago and, well, the day was not going well and Googled, just out of sheer desperation "travel washlet" and lo, Toto makes one of those too! That's an excellent introduction into the cult for only 60 or so dollars (hint: B005FDJ8SM). It's portable civilization. I never leave home without one, now.
Hardware companies have definitely been lazy and reused MAC addresses. But what's worse is that the total space is as low as 48 bits.

The probability of a collision is orders of magnitude higher than if you just grab some random bytes out of /dev/urandom and generate a type-4 UUID.

For a discussion on the benefits of your approach (a type-1 UUID) vs a random id (a type-4 UUID), check out the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier

Randomness is great because it doesn't require any synchronization or access to some special token.
Read more carefully...
Changing Tack: Evolving Attitudes to Open Source
It is mentioned! Without the `window.` part though ;).
Nope. Not safer. There are ample ways for TVs to sneak onto the internet, without credentials, and those ways are only growing with time.
On a related note, I once tried to access a long path in an ext4 filesystem on one of my USB HDDs using ext2fs on Win32. I hit the path-length limit and couldn't reach the final directory.

So, I shared the directory I could reach, then browsed to the \\share.

It worked. :D
Cooking, storing for long periods of time and (I think) drying all degrade Vitamin C, so don't forget the fresh fruit topping if you're planning on living off of oatmeal!
> Not really.

A statistical test _is_ a distinguisher! This seems self-evident to me. When the test repeatedly fails (with an extreme p-value or whatever criteria you want to apply here for 'failure'), you have successfully distinguished the sequence from random. Also you seem to misunderstand what I meant by equidistribution---uniformity is a different property, and of course crucial. I am puzzled, then, as to why you claim some generators are more 'uniform' than cryptographic ones.

Any pseudorandom bit generator whose next bit cannot be predicted in under 2^n "operations" also passes _all_ statistical tests that require less than this computational effort. This is a well-known result by Yao. In other words, unpredictability and indistinguishability are equivalent. In the case of, e.g., AES-CTR, n = 64 (birthday-bound distinguishers force it to be 64 instead of 128).

Your philosophizing about what true randomness really is does not strike me as very useful for practical purposes. Given unbounded computational power, obviously no such algorithm is actually indistinguishable. But who cares?
Ask HN: What do you enjoy working hard at?
I've always loved this quote from Robert Heinlein and am in some ways still searching for it. Curious to hear what your answer is?

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.
Robert Heinlein
Couldn't agree more; having supportive parents makes all the difference. I'm a junior in a similar situation course-wise (AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C, and AP Comp Sci last year), but my parents have found the balance between being overly demanding and too permissive. With their encouragement, the stress rarely gets to me - unlike some of my friends whose parents have them spend their summers and vacations studying for the SAT.
The biggest problem is that they take up a lot of space. Plus you have to find a good library and vet it (there's nothing in the standard library). Or just write 10 lines of straightforward code.

If you go and look at node-uuid commit history it, too, used Math.random() back in the day.
Show HN: iKatha-2 Story Telling and creation app for differently abled kids
Yeah, agreed. I found myself wondering why he kept referring to "reliability". Perhaps he defines it to include data integrity, but it didn't come across that way to me. I kept thinking to myself "nobody I know uses ECC just to increase reliability".
Do you have a sense (even anecdata) of how common it is to take advantage of that? Do people feel comfortable taking the full period for leave?

I don't know what it would mean if they didn't, though. I think many successful people have trouble believing that their work will be done well in their absence.
I've seen virtual machines having huge problems with entropy speed for random also, it's not just an issue for embedded.
It's easier to generate a random identifier and if the generator is good the probability of a collision is lower than the probability that you HDD will fuck up in an uncorrectable way while storing the identifier (as I've pointed out elsewhere in thread). So the answer is that random identifiers are easier to do in a distributed system and, in reality, have the same guarantees.
interesting! I wonder if you're right, or not. I could see both arguments both ways
This isn't going to be a direct answer, but I don't know that I totally agree with the quote. For example, some people find deep happiness only from traveling, but it's hard to consider that to be work.

I think what the quote is really getting at is this: can you find a way to be paid to do something you enjoy doing anyway?
PCG: A family of better random number generators
I looked for that in the article, but it seems the issue was deliberately avoided. I doubt it will be allowed. My memory on this is fuzzy, and I can't cite authoritative sources for obvious reasons, but I'm pretty sure there are multiple companies that know how to press PS2 discs with the obligatory "copy protection" [1] signatures. I assume the market wasn't flooded with these ~10 years ago because anyone with a DVD burner could be selling the latest games on the street for chipped consoles before a pressing operation was even finished cutting a glass master.

[1]: Scare quotes because these mechanisms don't directly have anything to do with copying. They're designed to distinguish between licensed and unlicensed discs, regardless of the content. Copying the content of a PS2 disc is trivial, as these things go.
The real secrets and "keys to the kingdom" are "Eyes only" compartmentalized deep within ECI/VRK compartments. I sincerely doubt the NSA would ever keep a record of some of the sensitive things they do. The big thing with the Snowden leaks was the NSA did not know if he got evidence of full content collection at first and now that it is apparent he didn't, the discussion regarding the NSA is limited to only "Metadata" collection
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Yep, length could be a problem, I was assuming a longer id.
They're using 22 char identifiers. A base64'd unix epoch time in ms is another 36 chars. But I'm sure you could do better than that.

The chances of a collision must be vanishingly smaller within even a second (let alone a millisecond) even if the random number generation is defective.

I didn't check your maths.
you can on your PC
Do you have any reading materials about the effects the SDI had on the Soviet aerospace program? The only citations I can find from a cursory search don't seem particularly reliable or authoritative in this matter (largely off hand comments by talking heads, even Carl Sagan).

I hear this out economic strategy repeated often as a post-hoc justification but based on first hand accounts (my maternal grandparents met while working on the Sputnik rocket and my entire family lived through this period in the USSR as engineers), my understanding is that although some spending in defense/aerospace rose during that time, the writing was on the wall for the USSR and it's space program by the late 70s. According to my grandparents it was impossible to reconcile the propaganda with what they were experiencing as engineers actually working in aerospace/defense. Apart from the politically doomed Buran, there wasn't even any ambition to try and match the United States except for geopolitical posturing.
Introducing Sd-Event: The Event Loop API of Libsystemd
The Information Assurance Directorate is good at it's job, surely they shouldn't be eliminated
Couldn't the NSA just ask the GCHQ to run specific queries (or entire programs/algorithms) against their data and share any intelligence gained?
not to mention they will want to sell you same games twice
>I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest
Because people love FreeBSD :)
It is mentioned.
Unlike Microsoft was to Bill Gates, Facebook seems to embody Mark's lifelong ideologies (connecting everyone in the world). He has often said he doesn't see himself doing anything with his life other than building the future of Facebook, just in a different form if Facebook hadn't taken off. On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at, when what he seems to really care about is more grassroots philanthropy work.

If he could take two months off he could probably take a few years off, but he would probably just be itching to go back to work on FB the whole time.
I agree; I came back here to read comments to get some idea what the language is all about.

He/She could have just babbled a little about what makes their language special in a static html page with zero formatting, and included a github link, and it would be more effective.
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oh wow who gives a shit. a message? rich people doing regular people things, wow. fuck this industry
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For a large and influential constituency in Iran, this is true. Iran is a very complex, multipolar environment, in contrast to the facile way it is generally presented as a monolith ruled in an absolutist way by mad mullahs or whatever. There are at least three significant camps in Iran.
Personally, I'm using Ubuntu with i3wm, and I'm extremely happy with it. It was my first distro, it works well, both on my laptop and on the server, and does everything I want it to do.

I don't have any experience with others, so this might not be an opinion you're very interested in, but I thought I'd add my 2 cents.
It's disturbing that advocating against encryption may become the latest device for bolstering the perception of a candidate as being tough on crime or terrorism. The general public's poor grasp of encryption makes the political cost of the position small.
I don't understand why they don't go for mersenne twister ?!
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FWIW xorshift1024* would almost certainly be faster than MWC1616 and it has no systematic failures on BigCrush. The only downside is that it uses more memory, but I think we can afford it. If not xorshift64* is also faster than MWC1616 and miles ahead of it in quality.
> On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at

Won the lottery, not really. Bill Gates was a harsh businessman who relentlessly fought to kill off competition by all means possible - it was not by mistake that Microsoft became what it is.

And, I'd dare say that it has very little correlation with how "good" he/they were at all. Most Microsoft software was utter crap till recent history compared to the existing alternatives - the fact that they managed to secure the market and third party developers was much more relevant than anything else.
Yes, it is correct. Although, as with any CIA destabilisation and coup operation, a certain layer of plausible deniability was a key strategic consideration.
This thread is hilarious. Tesla has quality problems on seat belts (!) and the thread is almost absolute positive focusing on how well they do the recall instead of focusing on the quality issues of a security (!) feature. I wonder what Tesla needs to do to get negative feedback on HN.
With all that "blank" space I expected that I shouldn't have to scroll on a 15" screen ..
And puppies. Golden retriever puppies.
Mad Enterprise
Is the code for this available anywhere?
I happen to really like A-star search. So I'll give this a shot just for fun.

Let Q[(Node, Cost)] be a priority queue.
Let G be a graph. (This makes up the search space.)
Let V be the set of Nodes visited by the algorithm.
Let S be the starting Node of G.
Let F be the objective Node of G. (Node we are searching for)

Let D(N1, N2) -> n be a function (computes the number of edges between N1 and N2.
Let H(N) -> T be a function that computes an admissible heuristic cost for traversing N. (eg, taxicab distance)

Let Search(G, Q, V, S, F) be a function that finds the lowest-cost path to F:
Add (S, 0) to Q

While there are items in Q:
Pop (N, C) from Q

If N is equal to F:
Return the path from N to S. (Trivial parent traversal)

Add N to V

For each Nc in N's neighbours:
Set Nc.Parent = N
If Nc is not in V:
Add (Nc, H(N) + D(N, Nc)) to Q

Return an error, a path does not exist.

I have to admit this ended up taking longer than I thought it would. ~20 minutes. And I'm not sure if it's correct.
Ubuntu.
Arch.

In that order.
Ubuntu - getting things done.
Arch - satisfying the desire for bleeding edge.
Yes, maybe.

That's a fair comment. However, it's countered by the fact that an awful lot of people are going to be doing basic labors. The basic labors need to get done, and someone is going to be doing them too.

Given that, it's it realistic for very large fractions of us simply not having kids?

Does not seem that way to me.

Anecdotally, the janitor at my school as a kid was not a smart man. Not dumb, just not intellectual. But, he was a pretty great dad and his family did well. They didn't have much, but they turned out just fine. Some of his kids ended up moving up and out on to better things too. I've often thought about that dynamic.

We never know how this stuff turns out. I, myself, grew up in relative poverty. Not just lacking luxuries, but sometimes basic needs. Honestly, didn't do me any real harm, and I'm sure glad I'm here as are my peers and family.

To me, the problem is one of how we value people rather than their decision to start families. People always start families. This is primal. Inherent feature. We need families. Most of us do anyway. Some of us don't. But that doesn't align with the job / value problem.

We need the janitor. Somebody is going to do that work, and what basis is that for denying them basic human dignity? Or, maybe we don't really need the janitor? Ok, that means we do a lot more ourselves. Wouldn't some people make the case they are wasting their time having to do that stuff?

Of course! As they should, and that is precisely why we need to value the janitor. The labor isn't sexy, but it serves an important purpose, even if that purpose is to free some research scientists to cure cancer faster.

If somebody is working full time, maybe that needs to somehow be enough to live a modest life, and to me, that life includes a family. Maybe both parents work. That's OK.

Should we actually put weight behind that idea of waiting to have kids in a time of relative financial security, quite frankly, way too many of us won't be having kids! Worse, that means way too many of us are deemed unworthy somehow, and is that really the right thing to do?

Given we need those basic labors done?
If soft errors are rare, parity checking, without correction, might be more useful. It's better to have a server fail hard than make errors. In a "cloud" service, the systems are already in place to handle a hard failure and move the load to another machine. Unambiguous hardware failure detection is exactly what you want.
This is all true but ... AFAIK gpus are optimized for graphics and therefore suck at general purpose programs. Sure it would be fun to get some general code to run on them just as it's fun to make a gameboy or toaster run Linux.

There's also the issue the gpus are not premptable which kind of makes preempitve multi-tasking hard
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If you want to do something as trivial as an unbiased Fisher-Yates shuffle of an array, however, Math.random() is broken. And Math.random() doesn't have to be broken for things like UUIDs. Python and Ruby both have PRNGs that are suitable for such things.

We fucked up by not vetting the algorithm, that's definitely the primary lesson here. Mea culpa. I'm sure you would have done things differently, but V8 is a modern system and I don't think assuming a modern PRNG was completely unreasonable while quickly getting to MVP at a new startup.
No, I mean that the fact that /dev/urandom "reseeds" in mid stream means it is not strictly speaking pseudo-random, since it is not completely deterministic. Maybe I'm wrong, but the comment I was replying to was arguing that /dev/urandom was the only CSPRNG, and things like stream cipher algorithms are not.