skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's not a number.

The actually relevant aspect is what percentage of a simulation's time is spent generating random numbers if it's using a CSPRNG. I have had this become a bottleneck in my work, and it's very rare to use CSPRNGs in scientific simulations for this reason.

> What does this even mean? Non-uniform distribution for CSRNG is fatal. What is an RNG that has "better" distribution than CSRNG?

There are distributional properties other than uniformity, and depending on how you use these numbers (e.g. Monte Carlo kernel form) these can be far more important than linear uniformity. The author briefly mentioned this in the article ("CSPRNGs emphasize unpredictability over all other measures of quality, some of which might be more important for your use case"). Look into the work of George Marsaglia, he wrote the test suites that generate the quality numbers most engineers use to evaluate both CSPRNG and normal PRNGs.
Back in 2008 (when I was 16, as the sample data so helpfully reminded me) I wrote a very basic web framework for Io based on _why's Camping framework. https://github.com/cdcarter/backpacking

It hasn't seen much love in a long time, but it was great to be reminded of why that language was so fun to work with!
> Good PRNGs are designed so that their cycle length is close to this upper bound. Otherwise you’re wasting memory.

Why?

Good article. I do have a question for the author, why after a huge amount of time writing this post don't you submit a patch to V8?
What an oddly appropriate comment.
Ha ha! You probably should have been voted down, but OK, let's take a look at your idea.

You are saying 1 out of 4 American workers shouldn't have kids[1].

If everybody followed your advice, a lot of pretty influential people wouldn't have been born: Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Larry Ellison (OK maybe that works in your argument's favor). Jay Z. Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama.

I wouldn't be here, either; my dad was a short-order fry cook when I was born. He worked a second job as a night janitor at PG&E when I was young.

So yeah, you'd better think long and hard about the financial aspects of having kids, but that actually applies whether you flip burgers at Mickey D's for minimum wage or flip bits at Facebook for a $150k annual salary.

Even if the financial aspects are hard, that actually isn't the hardest part of raising kids, even for poor people. And growing up poor isn't nearly as hard on kids as is growing up with bad parents.

If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.

That reason could certainly be financial; I'm not sure that I myself would have chosen to have kids if I was a short-order fry cook, instead of a highly-paid tech worker who is married to another one.

But I know plenty of low-income people who are awesome parents and whose examples I strive to live up to with my own kids.

[1]: http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/pages/demographics
You need to work on organization. I get it hard as hell and their asking a lot, but a lot of what you're "suppose to" do to get good grades and learn is bullshit.
I also considered whether the website reflects the language itself. If it does, I wouldn't want to use the language, because it seems to prioritize faux-simplicity and having a unique design over usability.

Thankfully, the website creator seems to be actively reading our feedback and interacting with us as users, which makes me think the language itself is probably developed with the same pragmatism, humility, and curiosity. Those are all great characteristics for someone designing a language!
Future dads out there, look into this. My wife and I split the year of unemployment-insurance-covered leave (half your salary if your salary is mediocre, and that's the cap) here in Canada and it was the best decision of my life. I got 7 months of full time dad duty in and it changed me.

My company and her school both offered a modest top-up on the government's parental leave benefit, so splitting the year meant we got to double-dip our employee benefits.

So it's not just good family building, it's also good financial sense. It's also the best way to fight the pay gap - an employer wonders which of his female employees will vanish for a year or so. This way, everybody leaves for 6 months or so.
Reply depth reached I guess above, so I'll reply here.

Thanks, definitely never knew that. In that case I'll get on it sooner rather than later!
Stop your crying, and show me a unicorn that actually turns a profit.
> Bidets? No thanks.

Why not?
> not everyone is fortunate enough to have enough savings to be able to miss three months worth of paychecks.

Then, sorry to be a bearer of bad news, if they could not afford or save up in advance for three months, how in the world are they going to pay for a child for 18 years?

Children in modern western nations are incredibly expensive. Often more expensive than a house. They are not a decision to be made lightly, and you shouldn't get pity for having them since its common knowledge how expensive they are.

Its probably one of the greatest critical failings of our society in modern terms to pressure people so highly to have kids they cannot afford - its not just bad on a macroeconomic level because it makes those parents dependent on the state, and on average results in poverty stricken kids who have had studies prove growing up poor has a direct and negative impact on intellect, but its bad for individuals because it will destroy otherwise healthy relationships if children are too expensive but they gave into short term peer pressure and got long term consequences.
I'd take the entire year off just to fuck with their definition of "unlimited" vacation.
Are you perhaps thinking that all programming positions are as scarce and difficult to get hired for as game development ones? Because that's not the case at all. For general programming work, you're in the same starting place as anyone else recently out of college and with a technical education. Most don't have much trouble finding work without the benefit of a portfolio or a fat github profile.
I suspect it's not so much that he can't take more time off, but that he doesn't want to.
NB: the onion does not run on drupal anymore. Not for a long time. It runs on Django: https://www.quora.com/Django-web-framework/Why-did-theonion-...
I've moved cross country almost every time I've moved and I've moved on average about every 18 months since 2005. Add in the sheer amount of stuff that tends to accumulate when you're married to someone obsessed with physical comforts like furniture, heirlooms, and kitsch and it's pretty much constant mental torture. It becomes extremely bothersome to move over time and constantly job-hopping looks pretty poor on one's resume over time as well. My life is a state where as I'm unpacking, I'm deciding what to unpack because I would have to move it again. Even if you're willing to move constantly though, what will your excuse be to your future employers over the next 30 years with such a peppered employment record? "I don't like the labor laws of any state I move to"? That'll be a pretty short interview.
> uBlock Origin can be used to block requests made [...] by extensions

This is no longer true for the Chromium version. There were changes in Chromium which now prevent extensions from being able to inspect/block network requests made by other extensions.

See: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/338
> CSRNGs make good general-purpose-use guarantees, because those who don't demand much of their RNG will enjoy "living in ignorance" of RNG trade-off

I totally agree! Very few applications will notice if the random number generation takes 100 times more/less time. My point wasn't that CSPRNGs shouldn't be the default, it was that there definitely exist real situations where CSPRNGs are both not fast enough, and don't maximize the right kind of (domain-specific) quality.

The more vexing aspect is that many default random number generators are both slower and much, much worse than some really simple (we're talking 10 lines of C) PRNGs that out score them in every measure of quality. This is a choice that makes absolutely zero sense.
Thank you. I share your view that logic/reason is superior to emotional appeal. However the two are often orthogonal. When dealing with public, it is possible not to sacrifice any logical soundness whatsoever while also ensuring that your message is not ignored b/c of seeming insensitivity to whatever bullshit people care about. Just because something is not often done does not mean it is impossible. Understanding what other people care about is called "emotional intelligence". Possessing emotional intelligence does not necessarily mean that one does not possess rational intelligence (heh, it would be a logical fallacy to say so). The two can complement one another. If you care about having influence in the world, you should attempt to acquire both. Just because some people only have one and some only the other does not mean that no person exists that has both. That was my point.
Quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature in semiconductor wafers
The author makes a reasonable point that there are algorithms that are both faster AND higher quality than the one v8 uses. I think not understanding random number generators and the resulting voodoo programming is the real culprit.
Did you?
I can't believe you're defending "an incorrect assumption" regarding your previous generator, especially after you wrote a very good article showing how badly wrong you were.

Wait, let me restate that. You're Engineering the Disruption of Real Money Gaming and yet you say of some PRNG "no reason the ... implementation ... should not be good enough to not have to worry about"? You're not just wrong, in fact you're "not even wrong", that's how wrong you are. Plus that sentence has three negatives!

Jules Winnfield said it better than I could. Riffing from him, what you were doing was, compared to what you should have been doing: ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport.

Here's something I came up with in 60 seconds. It's far better than what you didn't want to worry about:

ID Quantique hardware RNG [1]
mixed with Intel RdRand [2]

Yes, you're right. That's not seed-able, so you can't create a reproducible sequence of values (e.g., for testing). That's an advantage. You want to test, you replace hardware with software. But if you want to disrupt real money gaming you don't use some crappy software in some random library that wasn't designed for the purpose.

Once again, I can't believe your defense of how badly you failed was the "reputation" that Google has. Real money is involved and you thought it was OK to rely on some crappy PRNG created by Google? For something that is at the heart of, the quintessence of what you are attempting to accomplish?

EPIC FAIL!!!

[1] http://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand
Toto used to be one of the few brands which figured out how to make low-flow toilets which didn't easily clog and which didn't require high pressure (which is noisy). They just have a large diameter flapper.

American Standard now has this technology (but they use two standard sized flappers instead of one large one)- they call it "VorMax". I have one of each- the American Standard has a rimless bowel and is easier to clean.
Show HN: ScanR- OCR as a service
Baby Koala climbs up and cuddles cameraman
JavaScript's Math.random (and most languages' default RNGs) is not intended to be cryptographically secure, so I'm not sure "broken" is correct. It's probably random enough for most uses that don't require a CSPRNG. Are there any scenarios where this isn't the case?

On the other hand, enough people make this mistake that APIs should just use a CSPRNG for "random()" and offer a "fastRandom()" for those who need speed but not "secure" random.
This argument proves too much. A minimum-wage US worker in 2015 has a higher standard of living than the vast majority of all human parents who have ever lived, or even the majority of parents currently living on Earth. Are you saying that almost all human reproduction so far has been a mistake?
Well, I think in non-game positions I have the issue of... My degree says "Bachelor of the Fine Art of Computer Game Design".

I -am- a programmer obviously, but both I'd need to diversify languages I know in order to hit the ground running on day one...AND...I'd probably need more developed gitHub to prove I'm actually a programmer; since the degree isn't something non-Games HR departments would necessarily pay attention to.
Is PlayStation 4 Network Traffic Hard to Decrypt
Um, Soylent? :-)
The point is --- there was no real need to even mention this on an FB post! the CEO is also an employee and he could have done this more privately.

I hate it when top CEOs try to prove that love "work-life" balance when in reality once you reach the top, its always easy to do the "right thing" in any circumstance.

If she would have been pregnant when he just started FB, then would have taken more than 2 days off?
But it's okay for Facebook to bear the burden? What exactly are you objecting to here?
Two possibilities come off the top of my head.

Vitamin supplements.

Start packing yourself lunch.
Tuners on a stick have been around for well over a decade (Hauppauge was probably one of the first consumer focused brands and still sells a myriad of tuners). The problem is CableCard (out of CableLabs, which is run by a consortium of all the providers) and it's amazingly restrictive licensing. This is part of the reason why you can't really get a tuner for things like MythTV... Well, you can - but even though things were relaxed for CableCards (since it was such a craptastic solution for everyone but the cable cabal as a whole) the providers still control the DRM. And so having a cable card on Linux without a relationship with the powers that be results in the bulk of non-public broadcast to be useless even with an "approved" CableCard on Linux.
what gets me is how hard facebook doubles down on the "single account + real name = authenticity" excuse. it's the exact antithesis of authenticity - the more people you have following a single account, the more guarded and lowest-common-denominator you have to be in order to not leak stuff from one area of your life into another.
The only winning move is not to play, as they say. Televisions are overrated anyway.
I am talking about OTA ATSC tuners.
And the irony is compounded by your downvotes. You'd think you hit a nerve or something.
Would you expect them to be happy if their children were mediocre? After all, what are genes for?

I hope you're being sarcastic, but in case you're not, my answer is "yes, I would expect them to be happy if their child is mediocre." It is my hope to not have to explain why.
I took a little over three months off when my first child was born, and am in the process of taking the full four months for my second child.

I know a half dozen people who have had children while working at Facebook and all of them have taken all (or almost all) of that time.

I never felt pressure not to take leave. The hardest part was convincing myself that things would keep running without me.
sneaky ass vizio.. the setting to disable this is buried under a system diagnostics section with the word "Reset" prominently showing as the menu entry. It's as if they want to discourage owner from venturing into that menu out of fear of the Reset.
Yeah, I really would. Source: parent.
I get what these articles are trying to imply but I'm not seeing hard figures.

Is it really worse in these locations and is it really worse than the old days?

Poor rich kids and the poor youth of today is a meme that's decades old, I need hard figures that this time it's different.
In what way? Intel makes the best CPUs in the world and Adobe makes the best photo editing software in the world. How are they mediocre?
Good thoughts. Thanks.

Two questions:

(1) IIRC, some
operating systems, seeing
some ECC errors, maybe
just the uncorrectable ones
or maybe also the correctable
ones, moved to mark the associated
memory, or block of memory,
as faulty, maybe stopping the
(applications)
program using that memory, and continued on. Is this done with current operating systems?

(2)
What would Windows Server do
with a thread, process, address space or whatever the heck that
encountered a memory error
detected by ECC, especially
one that was uncorrectable?

I'm eager to know since I'm
eager to build a server,
with ECC memory, and run
Windows Server in production.
Yes, Why not?, their parents were outliers in their environment and in their time. Mostly they will be worse than their children if they were to do that same now. It is simple stupidity to expect the kid to be like us. Parenting should be giving advice, support and teaching the right things. How the kid grows up is up to him/her. I for one believe that if you do everything for kid pretty much you are live their life and they don't have anything to look back and either be happy about a decision or sad and hence they never learn.
Arms races are rarely good for anyone. This one in particular will only make it harder for everyone to do their jobs. Law enforcement will find it impossible to execute perfectly-legal search warrants. Corporations will be subject to ever-more-onerous demands by their customer bases for security against imagined adversaries with the resources of nation-states. Regular civilians will find themselves bewildered by an array of security choices but no real help in determining what's important and what's not, not to mention will still be vulnerable to theft of secrets not even in their control.

The nuclear arms race went ok because both main parties were rational, realistic professionals with no desire to see chaos reign. That's not the case with all parties seeking nuclear weapons today. Nobody's worried about MAD anymore, but the chances of someone, somewhere detonating a nuclear weapon on a populated area is just as high as it ever was. There's no reason to be embracing anything, however inevitable it may look.
The logical extension of this argument is that everyone on earth should be forced to have as many children as possible all the time, because - gasp - think of all the wonderful human beings that we're missing out on. In fact, all those women of childbearing age you see walking around without a baby in their womb are guilty of a certain kind of murder. Strap them down and get to work!
I don't think what you're saying reflects reality. Anyone who is responsible for making payroll is experiencing a kind of pressure that most people will never know.

"United Continental Holdings Inc's (UAL.N) new chief executive has suffered a heart attack, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, barely a month after he took on the job of improving the airline's profitability and reputation."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-unitedairlines-...
An apple and a cheese sandwich? That's decently nutritious, and easier and cheaper than going to McDonald's.
Well, in part I agree.

But I think there is (or at least will/should be) a difference between a trained astronaut and a space tourist.

I mean, being an astronaut is more than just going to outer space, isn't it? A space tourist might do a lot of the stuff that astronauts do, but I think there will still be a fundamental difference. Astronauts are there to do research, push the limits on human capabilities, etc.

After all that is settled, then the tourists can come.
> Children in modern western nations are incredibly expensive.

You hear this all the time, it just doesn't gel with my experience. I'd love to know how the various headlines that say "OMG 250K to raise a child till 18" come to that figure.

Because, really, they don't seem to cost much at all. They eat less (and hopefully for free for at least the first 6 months), their clothes are smaller and cost less (though yes, they do need them more frequently). Depending on where you live (Aus ftw), public schooling can be good and free.

Sure, when they get old they might piss and moan and "Want" various luxuries but that's the key isn't it - needs vs want. And by the age they start "wanting", typically the answer is "get a job".
Well that certainly is disappointing.
I think that approach had some value in setting up a very different atmosphere than MySpace in Facebook's early days. Especially since this was before people started to realize what kind of scrutiny those accounts would face from employers etc.

However, I think at this point they would be better off dropping it. Facebook's tone has already been set, and the most common impact the real name policy has at this point in time is its use as a weapon against transgender users and those who need to maintain anonymity for fear of personal safety.
Correct. Since employees don't accrue vacation hours, companies are not required to carry the equivalent pay on their balance sheet as a liability. It varies state by state, but California (where most startups are currently located) does convert this liability to an employee cash out upon leaving the company.

Unlimited vacation means no accrual so no balance sheet hit. It's a sketchy way to save money while effectively hinting that you're not supposed to take vacation. At first, people took unlimited vacation at face value. Now, the industry largely knows that it is industry speak for "2-3 weeks vacation but up to manager discretion."
Brutal honest opinions. Noone here is gonna bother replying anyway.

The snake game in your portofilio was cool btw. They're all far professional but for an indie, its good.
You said it perfectly.

Allow me to address the larger, hurt feelings behind this post, with a reminder of the difference between a cult and a religion:

> If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it’s a church.

> If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it’s a cult. [1]

The phrase "Cult of growth" comes to mind. While I don't know if it actually exists ( ask PG? ), I do believe that the way communities censor humor can shine a light on their insecurities. As in, the community may be actively avoiding an uncomfortable truth by stamping out the slightest whiff of satire.

Not always, of course. Sometimes, the community wishes to remove "kidding in the square" or other insidious sleight-of-mind tricks from their discourse.

For me, restricting the band of humor is fine if it arises from a thoughtful & honest discussion, as opposed to knee-jerk emotion. The more the latter happens, the more insecure the community perhaps (and vica versa).

In any case, I'm glad to know that most people here don't seem to be flipping out over a fun neologism.

[1] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006152.html#00... (originally seen at http://www.fluff.info/blog/arch/00000127.htm)
If company executives behave like workaholics, it raises the pressure on everyone in the company to also be workaholics. IMO they have a duty to demonstrate work-life balance.
This might still be on the complex side, but I've been doing this diet on and off for about 2 months. I created a webapp to do the simple math of counting calories and other macros, but a simple spreadsheet would also work.

Breakfast: Coffee

Lunch: Turkey and avocado sandwich (1 Avocado, 4 slices bread, lettuce, cucumber, 4 slices of sliced smoked turkey).

Afternoon snack: 1 banana and 43g pure almond butter.

Dinner: Varying meals made in batches to make up ~2000 calories per day. This week (qty per day) was turkey chili: 1 can red kidney beans, 8oz ground turkey, spices, and a few corn tortillas.

I started out with much more complex recipes, but simplified the diet to minimize preparation time. Also the lettuce, cucumber and bananas I get from work.
We're talking about SpaceX here.
Noahpinion: Unlearning economics