skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are algorithms that can have an exponential speedup on a quantum computer, there are plenty that have a quadratic speedup, for example, searching an unsorted/unindexed database takes O(sqrt(n)) instead of O(n) (with high probability of success). Which means that any optimization problem (with a search tree) can have this quadratic speedup too.

Quantum cryptography has some pretty lovely nature tricks that enable no chance of spying/hacking, measuring the state plays so weirdly with the quantum system.
Why do I need to defend the author? He hasn't done anything that needs defending...

I'm merely pointing out that the original comment is automatically assuming that the author's story is untrue. And that the comment makes a clear call for more proof.
Come Vendere Un Prodotto Sul Web
The cases you give are good examples of places where technology was harnessed to solve social problems.

But it is possible to not "care" about these issues: either by working on solutions to other problems or by focusing only on making the technology better.

That is what I meant by "unrelated", maybe I should have used "independent".

> The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?

The most important criteria for technological pursuits, not social ones. People who disagree on political issues can still pursue technology progress together on issues that don't involve those political issues for example (not that this is the case here, I'm speaking generally).
Maximum Performance from Acropolis Hypervisor and Open VSwitch
"I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public."

Let's unpack this.

Are you happy that homophobia is now socially inappropriate? Or are you happy that it is verboten to reveal or express a homophobic opinion?

There is an important distinction to be drawn here. That homophobia is becoming socially backward and marginal is a wonderful thing. That nobody can say something homophobic is not. The way free speech works is, at its most basic: you're allowed to express yourself publicly. The public will then determine how it deals with you. If you say "I don't like gay people" to your co-workers, and your co-workers ostracize you, and/or you are fired for creating a hostile work environment, then you reaped the just results of your decision to speak up. But you should have the freedom to speak up, nevertheless. The choice should be yours.

We should also note that prior restraint and group-self-censorship aren't going to change your co-worker's opinions. Whether or not he's too scared to speak his mind, his mind is made up. Deprive him of the chance to engage in any sort of dialogue about his beliefs, and he'll never get the chance to have them challenged, and they'll remain deeply held.
I don't think any Chrome error mention "certificates" anymore, and for good reason. Anyway, what is the user supposed to do after reading your (totally easier) message? It still lacks any actionability, because there is no clear action the user can take if their system is that compromised.

I consider hooking into a x509 verification stack some orders of magnitude harder than parsing HTML.
Run your meetings / classes according to Roberts rules, move to set out a time limit for each person to make their point, limit each person to 1 rebuttal, and then vote on the issue.

Whenever I had to deal with contentious issues as a chair of a meeting this is exactly how I proceeded, much to the dismay of the people who wanted to argue all day.

The people who cause the most issues usually take their rebuttal early and then the debate can proceed amongst the more reasonable people.
While I agree this is kind of a silly comparison, my brother-in-law has shown using historical records of various infrastructure projects that the real cost of building things (roads, sewers, bridges, Etc.) has in fact gone up over time rather than down as everything else has. He attributes that rise by misalignment between the interests of the tax payer, the government funding agencies, and the engineering companies that do the work.
Se vuoi visibilita' ti consiglio di scrivere in inglese...
also, some people just like to try and be as hurtful as possible, regardless. especially on the internet.

I've certainly been guilty of lashing out at someone with whatever I felt might cut deepest. being impotent to resolve your (technically unjustified) rage can lead a person down a dark path.
As I said in item?id=10595078, I am not happy about the situation but considering we already let go the largest of the criminals, I don't see why we should send people to jail for failing to be big/important enough.

I do think false representation, fraud, malpractice are serious crimes. If someone sells you a copy of Debian Linux or Microsoft Windows and they sell you a compromised copy, they deserve to have their pants sued off of them. To me that is the same level of crime as a pharmacist selling placebos as real medicine. I imagine there has to be a balance somewhere between discouraging fraud and abuse while not coming as too heavy handed.

I certainly won't claim to have the answers. Perhaps I am kicking my position further to the extreme than what I believe is a reasonable compromise. Sorry if I come off as silly or self-contradictory. Part of me writing is to discover and learn what my positions are.
I might be missing it, but I don't think the article ever actually offers any evidence that academic papers funded by Google influenced FTC decisions.

Granted, I would not be at all surprised if Google hoped the academics they funded would help influence the FTC. But this article seems to want to cleverly word things to make the reader think there is evidence for this without actually presenting any.
Ask HN: Is this a good solution for the multi city budget traveler?
Hi guys, I am building a startup that focuses on providing the cheapest trip by finding the best combination of routes you can take to make that trip. For example, if you want to go to London, Berlin and Rome, which itinerary would be the cheapest? Starting at London going to Rome and then to Berlin or the other way around? Would that change if you took the trip at a different time of the year? What about adding accommodation to the equation, would that change the results?

Even in this simple example, there are many possible ways to visit the very same places and for the multicity budget traveler the best option would frequently be the one that costs less regardless of other details.

The route search we are currently building will find the best itinerary for you considering all those factors, but our MVP will include only flights for Europe.
What do you guys think about this idea? Do you think it solves a real problem? What do you consider to be the early adopter of this solution?

Would like to hear your thoughts on this matter.
Thank you all!
I don't know the right answer, but this sets up some perverse incentives - police might be urged to be "more careful" around rich people than poor people, since wrongly arresting rich people has more penalty.

Conversely if you set a fixed dollar amount, then you incentivize poorer people to provoke a false arrest in hopes of getting a payday (similar to common insurance scams seen today.)
You should really examine why you automatically assume the author's account of his own lived experience is false.
You're going to have to explain this - how are Macbooks tivoized or crippled?
Why Blog Comments Still Matter (Perhaps) More Than Ever
The main take away message though is the proper isolation you get in the Apple one.

And that's the actual conclusion of the author. Don't buy the other one, not because the extra stuff in the Apple one is worth it but because the others generally cut a corner too far. ( or worded differently, if you don't have the skills to assess the safety of the design from the cheap one, buy the Apple one )
All of these issues albeit, crucial and important, are social not economic. A liberatarian in the traditional sense of the word would favor a more egalitarian economic system without the interference of the state than the established casino capitalist system of today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626210
> All the same, people seem to wish that servers could say to clients, “Here are my expected keys, and you should fail to connect to me if I seem to present different keys, even if the person who owns the computer wants to connect anyway.” That would be beneficial in that non-consensual proxying would be exposed sooner and with somewhat more certainty. But if a server could get such a guarantee, it could also be used in ways very much counter to the open Internet we know and love..

Thus putting up a warning when the pinned cert is being overriden:

1) Does not prevent all instances of non-consensual proxying, but
2) Allows better discovery of some instances of non-consensual proxying, and
3) Makes semi-consensual proxying (e.g. antiviruses, corporate firewalls) visible to the average user unless the proxier explicitly takes steps to hide the warning.
4) Does not allow the servers to force clients to use a specific key.

Wouldn't this solve all the relevant issues?
Show HN: Format – a Swift 2.0 formatting kit
I guess if you're using a company's computer on that company's network, assume it's their best interest to monitor some of the stuff.
Black holes are ultra hot balls of fire
It's for people that don't want to handle the backend - whether they know how to work with it or not. Also, firebase provides client libraries for some environments, completely hiding the networking layer from the user of the library. You're using a high-level model while firebase actually does all the heavy lifting for you, which is extremely appealing for people that need to get an mvp out as quickly as possible.
Cheers, have a Happy Thanksgiving :)
I am very happy to see psutil support in OpenBSD.

I was puzzled by the line above regarding source. Like most (all?) BSDs the system is easily checked out and built:

http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html

or, basically:

# cd /usr

# cvs -qd anoncvs@anoncvs.ca.openbsd.org:/cvs get -rOPENBSD_5_8 -P src

# cd /sys/arch/amd64/conf

# config GENERIC.MP

# cd ../compile/GENERIC.MP

# make depend bsd install

# cd /usr/src

# make obj build

# reboot
Freedom is not their goal, the goal is equality of outcome.
In firebase is there backend logic or is it all supposed to take place client side? I glanced over it yesterday but I am going with DynamoDB + Sails.js on heroku currently as it seems like the quickest platform to build a backend API for my app MVP.

I have experience in JavaScript and the app is react native but server side code is newer to me so if HN has any wisdom I am looking for development speed foremost with maintainability and performance as a lesser priority.
In that case, you can have a redux state reducer look for navigation actions, and set current thread. Either way works well with the flux/redux mental model. And in either case, you'll have to implement logic for mapping route -> current thread and vice versa ...
You know, I included a specific example in my earlier comment of what I was talking about.

The general prison population is subject to more pre-conviction scrutiny before it ever gets into court. People aren't charged with crimes by drawing straws from a hat -- but capital crimes are closer to that model than petty crimes are.

Your response doesn't address anything in my comment, unless you think people are assigned public defenders before being charged with a crime.
I wonder how many geniuses there have been in the world that never had the opportunity to expand their natural skills because they were to busy just surviving.
I love this.

I've been thinking about a very similar issue for a while now, and I'm still trying to organize my thoughts into a blog post or something, but here's the basic idea:

Hire more juniors. Or cross-train people from other departments[1]. Doesn't really matter who. But they should be pretty darn close to beginners.

Assign a relatively small issue to them. The kind of thing that would only take about an hour for a more senior dev to look in to. Plan more than an hour for the junior. Probably a lot more. Also plan some time for one of those more senior devs. Sit them down next to each other.

Point the junior to the readme. Ask the junior to ping / poke / bother the senior every time they hit a roadblock. Every single time. Ask them to be relentlessly persistent. (Not everyone's good at being relentlessly persistent. So encourage them. Create an environment where they feel like they can be relentlessly persistent.) Then leave them alone.

Give it a day or two. Watch as interesting things start to happen.

Watch as the junior dev learns how to be a better communicator. Watch as they learn how to make problems visible. How to get help. And as an added bonus: how to program.

Watch as the senior dev goes insane at first from all the questions. Watch them start to wonder how they can avoid going through this every time somebody needs to touch their code. Watch them remove obstacles. Or at least reduce their number. Watch them automate things. Or speed up things that are already automated. Or improve processes in ways they had never even considered before sitting with the junior. Also watch them learn how to be a better communicator.

Do this a few times. Watch for magical things. Code quality improves. Onboarding times plummet. Hiring friction melts away. Teamwork starts... working. Productivity skyrockets. Job satisfaction goes up. Happiness prevails.

-----

[1] See also https://twitter.com/patio11/status/657902663686754304
I used to write ASP apps from 1997 to 2001.

Management required that I use VBScript and ActiveX controls, but I had to use JavaScript in cases when VBScript was too slow. Each new version of Internet Explorer would break compatibility and require a rewrite. For example using and programming for IE 4 would break when IE 5 came out and even the AcitveX controls would not load properly. We had to switch from some ActiveX controls Kodak made to use Lead Tools instead to load TIF images of the employee pictures. Then IE 6 came out and broke that and required a new version of Lead Tools and other stuff.

There were people with Macs, OS/2, and Linux that could not use the ASP made websites because they couldn't run ActiveX and VBScript. So I suggested to management that we replace the ActiveX objects with Java objects and use JavaScript instead of VBScript and we could then make it so that the Non-Windows systems could access the Intranet web apps. Management hated that idea and ordered me to never use Java because it wasn't made by Microsoft and they didn't understand it.

But yeah each new IE version broke compatibility in the way management wanted me to develop web apps. I can see why companies want to stay with an older IE version and older Windows, because of the time and money it takes to upgrade the websites to the newer IE versions.
The feminists you are dismissing as irrelevant have every bit as much social currency and power as the ones who are vocal, they just aren't using it as often, which is why it's so short-sighted of you do dismiss them. The public debate on this isn't going to be won by men dismissing feminism: that's just going to radicalize more feminists. And even if it could be won that way, that is that what you want: for men to control the public discourse and women be trivialized? That's not what I want. I want actual equality.

More likely, the path to reason is for reasonable feminists to hear how important this issue is from reasonable men, and start taking our side.

It's political suicide for a man to publicly stand against radical feminism. It's not political suicide for a moderate feminist to stand against radical feminism.
Medium for Apple TV
This is a non-sequitur, or as the saying goes, the Germans kept the trains running on time?

If ISIS begins collecting taxes to fund road construction and terrorism does that somehow white wash terrorism? Of course not, yet the same tired argument is being made here because of misguided belief in American exceptionaliam, double think is alive and well when people can speak of road building one day while condemning torture the next. Those who work and fund the US government are funding genocide, you must accept that fact, you can down vote all you want to bury the truth but it remains the truth.

Disgusting hypocrisy on display, utterly disgusting, and no real counter argument has been made.
Post-IPO non-profits
Probably because you used "spamming". Or you spoke poorly about someone's favourite tool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10624759
To some I might seem like Captain Obvious, but to me this article gave me a big insight. I mean I know social capital is important. I know it really well.

Nevertheless, I didn't know that social capital is that important. Even Einstein needed it. I had no idea. I only thought he stood on the theories of others, but a lot of other people also helped him?! I never knew.

How about Stephen Hawking? Did he receive significant help from fellow physicists as well? Are all popular scientists not lone geniuses? Are they all, for lack of a better term, group geniuses?
Thanks, glad to hear it's working right in your company!
Some of these, like reified generics, would be great, and it's sad it's too late to add them to the JVM. Some of these, like more expressive imports, seem pretty pointless given that we use IDE's. But some of these are quite un-Javaish.

Structural typing would really go against the grain of the language, and i have a very hard time believing it would actually be useful. What method name is currently widely used with the same semantics across many classes, without being specified by an interface or base class? I can't think of one. There used to be close(), but that's been dealt with. Are there others?

Collection literals seem like a poor idea when there are so many different collection implementations. If i say:

List<Integer> list = {1, 2, 3};

What kind of list do i get? ArrayList, as that's the usual go-to? A foot-shooting opportunity for anyone doing concurrent programming! And a frustrating missed chance for anyone with a functional bent who would prefer an immutable list. Moreover, it seems unnecessary when you could easily just add constructors or factory methods like:

List<Integer> list = new ArrayList(1, 2, 3);
List<Integer> list = ArrayList.of(1, 2, 3);

Which leave the choice in the hands of the programmer for only a minimum of extra syntax.

Maps are a bit harder, because you need a way to describe pairs. In most projects i work on, i end up creating some helper methods that let me write:

Map<String, Boolean> map = map(entry("Java", true), entry("Go", false));

And i wish there was a better syntax for that.

Something like algebraic data types would be good, though. You can already implement un-extendable classes using mild hacks:

public abstract class Shape {

private Shape() {}

public static class Circle {
public static Circle of(int radius) {
return new Circle(radius);
}

public final int radius;

private Circle(int radius) {
this.radius = radius;
}
}

public static class Rectangle {
public static Rectangle of(int width, int height) {
return new Rectangle(width, height);
}

public final int width, height;

private Rectangle(int width, int height) {
this.width = width;
this.height = height;
}
}

}

Because the constructors are all private, so putative subclass can't call them. But you don't get pattern matching, and of course it's all rather verbose.

There are various madmen out on the edge of town trying to create terse approaches to this by meddling with forces beyond mortal knowledge:

https://github.com/poetix/mtuples

But i can't see that going mainstream.
> If I shoot you purely by accident most people will agree that I shouldn't go to prison. It was an accident, I'm not a danger to society.

That probably depends on how reckless you were. Stupidity combined with fondness for dangerous objects can be dangerous to society. Jail-time might be good idea.

> If I mean to murder you but my aim is off, or modern medical science manages to keep you from death, how is society better off exactly by keeping me in prison for a shorter time just because I wasn't successful?

Results surely must play some role. Let's imagine a world when tech is so advanced that murdering a person is really hard. Should all who attempt be punished same way as those that really put in the effort to get the job done?

Should a person be punished as if he murdered you if he was trying to kill you using voodoo magic or consciously trying to give you heart attack with insisting on you eating additional burgers?
If the ceo at my company likes to tango and donates to a tango club,

...this would of course be in no way analogous to the activity Eich was supporting.
Qubicle – A professional voxel editor
You can try to be an independent state, if you'd like. Good luck against the US Government though, they have a bit of a resource advantage.
What I've started to realize about people is that you can't influence them all with deterrents. No matter how long the sentence, or how permanent the memory of the justice system (8 months in prison for robbery, 50 years later), none of that is bad enough to actually stop people committing crimes in the first place. Essentially, people aren't rational. They don't act in their own self interests.

I saw this also when I was a teacher. No amount of detentions or removal from class would change the behavior of some students. Saying clever thing to them however, would. Many people respond more strongly to their animal instincts than to logic. You could trick a student into not distrupting class (eg offer them two choices and a minute to make a decision - they somehow forget they really have more choices), but for many, you couldn't incentivize them.
Have you attempted to answer this question yourself?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/affluenza-dui-case-deposition-tapes...

I'm sure there are many cases with people getting away with murder.
> The epistemological method in use in the class, so for instance in theology appeals to faith or words written thousands of years ago would be acceptable, while you'd probably want to reject appeals to logic/rationality.

Theology, while its foundational principles may be established on the basis of revelation such as scripture, often proceeds from foundational principles by logic.
There is an open issue regarding this: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ava/issues/115

In the meantime, there's Wallaby: http://wallabyjs.com/
Web sites with high page rank
first load of this page had an obnoxious popup tab requesting a http://www.musixhub.com download!
Just a vent and kind of warning: I've got cat for 1.5 year, and this confirms my impression that they are horrible animals to be pets. Clawing everything, chewing on expansive stuff, peeing, vomiting, defecating on bed, sofa, chairs. If you're considering having cat, please think twice.
Even back in 1997 JavaScript worked differently based on what OS and web browser you had.

I had open sourced this script to detect the OS and web browser so that it would run JavaScript code using if statements for each platform to solve compatibility problems. It should still work today but the ActiveX detection is broken because of the way JavaScript changed.

http://www.javascriptsource.com/repository/javascripts/2005/...
A Simulation in Emoji