skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really doubt this would ever be an issue. Would you have any reason to believe this programmer is directly associated with enemies of the US? If not, a totally indirect chain of payments doesn't put you on the hook for anything; just think about all the hops the money in your PayPal account went through to get there. And also that money (with Bitcoin being a sort-of exception) is a fluid amalgamation that gets split up and reconstituted from different pieces all the time.

Absolute worst case (supremely unlikely) scenario, some chain of transactions does cause a flag to be raised -- you wouldn't be silently condemned. It would be investigated; that's why they'd be flagging transactions in the first place. And they'd see from the context (or if it ever came to someone actually calling and asking) that it's a legitimate payment for services rendered. Just like millions of other payments to out-of-country developers.
A single Dwave is not faster than a cluster of CPUs.

Is a cluster of Dwaves faster than a cluster of CPUs? Maybe at the two problems Google looked at.
Fewer poor and middle class, more rich. This is good news.
Yeah, the demo on the front page where you get to choose from a couple of parameters. From a UX standpoint, there's no reason those samples need to be live-generated. A random pick from a large number of pre-generated samples (i.e. a large-ish pool of static samples, for each parameterized setting) will have the same effect, and give the user a much quicker response.
> Imagine an America in which the poorest families had two cars and a four-bedroom house, in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Would it then be considered problematic if Gates and Buffet became trillionaires?

Yes, it would be very problematic, but not out of any sense of fairness. Unless you can find a way to decouple wealth and power, such an outsized accumulation of wealth (and therefore, of power) would be a threat to democracy. Your hypothetical, even if achievable, is not a stable one because the ruling and capitalist classes would own our government to a degree that would make even our present situation look like a sort of egalitarian paradise. It would quickly become hopelessly corrupt, and without robust representation in government, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of us were remade into serfs.
The author is "Maria Konnikova"...seriously? ...hmmmm...
> Many services already more or less do this...

Those services can't be trusted now where part of the threat model is corrupt, hostile, and/or authoritarian state actors. Unless you think America is the only place you'll conduct business that needs secure communication, that's not a viable "solution."
"obnoxiously large clouds"

Yes, I don't like winter either.
Test this travel app and win up to $2000 in prizes
"Does anyone know of any work being done in this area of Quantum computing?"

Work in this area is still primarily focused on making it work at all. For instance, it isn't called out in the linked blog since by now Scott probably considers it basic background information, but D-Wave only solves a very particular problem, and it is both not entirely clear that it has a superior solution to that problem than a classical algorithm can obtain and it is not clear that encoding real problems into that problem will not end up costing you all of the gains itself. Really pragmatic applications are still a ways into the future. It's hard to imagine what they might be when we're still so early in the process, and still have no good idea what either the practical or theoretical limits are.
Are you guys planning to opensource the core library used to generate the music?
That could work, but Google doesn't seem to have a stake in OpenCL (so it's not a priority). Nvidia has a stake in CUDA, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a top business priority there.
From some of the employee comments in the video, you would think that they are solving all of the worlds problems, rather than an accomodation booking site.
Architecture of Radio
The congenital deaf do think differently which is why there is opposition to cochlear implants in their community. Even if taught to sign, children with implants develop abstract thought akin to the hearing.
This is terrible advice. When teeth are removed, the bone of the jaw has to remodel, which takes months. If you get fitted for dentures right after your teeth are removed your dentures will fit poorly. A good dentist will offer you a temporary denture that is cheap and of lower quality material while your bone is re-modelling then after a few months they'll make a high quality set that will fit much better.
Ask HN: What's so special about HN? Why do you hang out here?
Just curious... why not somewhere else? It's the only community with smart people I know. Are there any others?
Re: the moving-in "trend"

There's been an uptick of post-college types moving in the midtown area, and professionals in the downtown area -- but it's pretty much limited to those two areas, a tiny portion of the city as a whole.

It'll be interesting to see how the midtown-downtown area might (or might not) become more a populated semi-region of it's own, compared to the rest of the city (sans a couple of nice remaining neighborhoods) which still looks very empty.

If you dig a bit on Google you'll find some press on it, mostly local. I think the some bigger papers did a bit or two about it after the bankruptcy.

It's interesting to watch what will happen given the state of the city.
Exactly! If we the entirety of the middle class disappeared and reappeared in the upper class, how would that be damaging to the country? If every member had no change or an increase to their income, it seems insane that that could have anything but a positive effect for the economy.
Nice work on getting the first couple of users, you did exactly what you were supposed to. Amazes me how many products try and launch without getting any feedback or users.
So I'll just say it. I'm switching to FreeBSD. I'm sick of this train wreck. I don't care what they are developing I'm just sick of how they are doing it. I don't want my operating system to have this sort of mid life crisis.
This is not what article says. Previously they wanted to spin off Alibaba stack but because of tax issues now they will spin off other stuff. Either way, results would have been exactly same: Partition of company in to two. There is zero talks of selling of core business. In fact article clearly says that "activists" investors wanted that but didn't got it. Board says they are 100% behind Mayer and Mayer says she is deeply committed to running Yahoo. In fact she is taking only limited leave for maternity. I highly doubt you actually read article or may be you are just jumping to conclusions but without disclosure that this are your interpretation, not the actual content of the article.
Who knows what random stuff will come up in an interview. I've worked at companies of all sizes and never received any guidance on interviewing, so questions swiped from internet headlines would come as no surprise. This is an old story around here.
Crystal is messing it up these days as I see ads these days with Crystal enabled. I think they are taking money to let ads through. Will Firefox do the same if you get money from Google?
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Quaker here. I can't speak for Pennsylvanian quakers two centuries ago, but I'm very surprised to hear about stocks and flogging in a Quaker context. To be clear, Quakers renounce all violence, including against those who perpetrate it.

The central tenet of our faith is that there is that of god in every person, so it follows directly that violence against any person is violence against god, and therefore unacceptable. Quakers have put their money and actions where their mouth is - they have always rejected capital punishment, and have been very active in prison reform since the 1800s. They set up the Friend's Ambulance Unit so they could serve during the Second World War. Quakers also recognise that there are many forms of violence, and sponsor the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP) training for schoolkids.

To get back to the original question about dealing with violent people, of course you need to use force against them, to prevent them doing more violence. But that force should be as non-violent as possible, to make it clear that society's norms are intact. Norway's treatment of Anders Breivik is inspirational - it is clear that his incarceration is in no way violent - there is no element of revenge, much to many people's fury. But imagine a Breivik sympathiser - seeing a civilised society treating him in a civilised way leaves very little to spur them on to similar acts.

And what about Daesh? They have successfully used resentment against the violence done to muslims to build a society where violence is the norm. This is not sustainable - it won't be long before the flood of recruits reverses, as they discover what arbitrary violence means to them and their loved ones.
Thank you for your response. I was asking the questions because when I was evaluating MySQL and PostgreSQL 3 years ago I ended up choosing MySQL due to its community and the rumor about difficulties in horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL even though I really liked PostgreSQL JSON support. I hear PostgreSQL is getting better at scaling horizontally although I do not know how good it is now.
So there are huge algorithmic speedups just sitting there for the taking? And no one has used these? Color me skeptical.
"more expressive" is often a slippery slope to "I can't read and understand what I wrote 3 months ago"

We read code more than we write it, so optimizing for typing time vs reading time is just losing the war to win the battle IMHO.
Yes, along with the copycats of other various items.
Win a Brand New iPhone 6S Scam – MailShark
I've never been comfortable with:

- working with people in software who hold a title of architect

- being referred to as an architect personally

- having the work that I do referred to as architecture

Design looks much less cool on a resume but is far more accurate and portrays a certain nimbleness. Anecdotally, the people I've ever worked with who did consider themselves "Software Architects" were generally quite poor at their jobs.
Cargo cult science
Remote Work Digest: December 9, 2015
Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9458268
Do I still get that query rate when I have hundreds of millions of rows in a table and database sizes in the Tens of TBs -> PBs.

Do you need more ? For pretty much all of the Fortune 500 who are doing Big Data Analytics. Yes.

There is a reason Hadoop and the related NoSQL databases are so popular today.
tl;dr In short, they're thinking magnesium salt or ammonia-rich clay, but... "As of this week, Dawn has reached its final orbital altitude at Ceres, about 240 miles (385 kilometers) from the surface of the dwarf planet. In mid-December, Dawn will begin taking observations from this orbit, including images at a resolution of 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel, infrared, gamma ray and neutron spectra, and high-resolution gravity data."
Hackathons (Part 1)
Just for clarification (for anyone),

10^8 or 100,000,000 is still a constant factor =)
A few times now I've seen announcements that systemd is consuming some other aspect of Linux, and every thread devolves into accusations that systemd is eating Linux, and the other side saying that whatever it is just happens to be in-scope for systemd because of how it interacts with some current aspect of systemd.

My question is now: What isn't in scope for systemd?
It's the promise of something better -- just about to arrive -- that has the biggest impact on happiness. Seriously.

"We're going to have a baby!"
"I just got engaged."
"We just hired this great engineer."
"We're going to Hawaii for Christmas."

I could go on, but you get the point. Once you've had Google's free food and other perks for a while, they become baseline. They're just part of what's normal.
The Obligatory “Flame War” Phoenix vs. Node.js
Personal Thoughts on the Current Functional Programming Bandwagon
> Even if you aren't going to be hacking on your router much, it still definitely pays to ensure you're using hackable hardware.

This seems to contradict itself - how does it pay if you're not going to be hacking?
I've kind of been thinking the same thing, this feels like a takeover by the freedesktop people.
Most wallets these days implement micropayment channels, which eliminate the need to pay transaction fees on microtransactions. But even without micropayment channels, bitcoin transactions are cheaper than you think, because most of the time a transaction fee is not required at all.
Australia wins 'fossil of the day' for Julie Bishop's speech at climate talks
Thank you. It made me feel better! I would like to host you/have a coffe with you if you come to Istanbul again. On the subject of direction of Turkey, there are more objective and problematic indicators like press freedom. And then there are superfluous statements made by Erdogan just to get some more votes, just to troll opponents etc. Don't mind the latter. Those words are just sauces and masks, not the real stuff. Most people vote for the lesser evil, and Erdogan's party only won in the early elections after forming of a coalition has failed by other parties. Most of the people live modernly and want to live modernly. So I don't think the direction will go to extremes.
Sure. But you can do that with MySQL and MongoDB as well.

These support JSON data types, access via Nginx (with Lua) and caching data into RAM. Also for small data sets you can run data directorties on RAM disks.
538 breaks this out with more nuance and context here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-arent-mid...
There are cheap places that offer dentures in a day, or a few days but you wouldn't want to go to one of these places. When your teeth are pulled your bone has to remodel which takes several months. This guarantees that dentures done shortly after getting your teeth pulled will not fit.

Generally, the dentist will take a preliminary impression, that is used to make a custom tray. This custom tray is used to make a final impression. Then the dentist will make rims that shows the lab where the teeth should go. The lab uses the final impression plus the rims to make a wax try-in that has teeth so the dentist can make sure the teeth are where they are on the denture and the patient approves. Once the wax try-in is adjusted by the dentist, the lab takes it and makes the actual denture for the patient. It generally takes several appointments.
The open source release has been pretty amazing so far, and I believe it's without precedent in Apple's history (with the possible exception of ResearchKit).

I was afraid they would just toss a snapshot over the wall and leave the community to struggle with maintaining it (if anyone cared to). At best, I thought we might get some regular snapshots and discussion.

Instead, everything is out in the open, the team at Apple is apparently pushing to the same repository we get to see, they have an open bug tracker, they're actively soliciting and discussing proposals from the community, accepting patches from the community, etc.

This is business as usual for most open source projects, of course, but to see it coming from Apple blows my mind a bit. It's really great to see.
I'm still impressed by my bank's handling of copying and pasting account numbers with spaces in them (you know - they way they themselves present them on their pages), by truncating the paste and then accepting the form, leading to failed payment attempts to short account numbers.

It's amazing how bad most things around payments are.
Or you don't give up type safety. TypeScript compiles really fast and has generics.
The weapon is physically there tho
Also, remember that even building a "simple" web app (comprised of a browser (client), web server, and database) counts as a distributed system. Concerns over event ordering, lack of global time, and data consistency models are all alive and well even within boring LOB systems.

To put it another way, distributed system does not necessarily imply a massive research cluster connected via MPI.
This is an amazingly good description on the difference between the digital and real world. Thanks for linking this.
No, they're saying it's not actually faster. The purpose of this research is to experiment with problems and push the hardware to discover limitations that can inform their design of the next generation of hardware.

Quantum computing is a lot like fusion research. Nothing we know how to build will break even but we still need to build something so we can learn how to build something that could break even.
That makes sense. I actually never use daemon mode because I don't want to share buffers. If want a faster start up time but don't want to share buffers you may want to look at use-package[1] which will lazy load plugins. Also, if you want a easy way to cycle through buffers that also works in the terminal I recommend iflipb[2]. When you start cycling, it shows a list of buffers in the mini-buffer. Both of those are available as packages in Melpa.

[1] - https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package
[2] - https://github.com/jrosdahl/iflipb
Hipchat-Maker Atlassian Prices IPO at $21
>So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?

There was no "before capitalism".

>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.

Labor without capital is the same duck. Creating a business is risky, and someone has to be on the hook for that risk.

>Crediting the super-rich (A very few exceptions aside) for creating wealth is nonsense.

The super-rich are a sideshow. Most "capitalists" out there are people like you and me putting money into their 401(k) every paycheck.
I never thought the "flying" part was the core technology... it seemed to be the invention some non-traditional, low-noise, propulsion & power source that could levitate heavy objects. I don't think we have that ... if we did, the expensive and practical part might be solved and we'd have them everywhere :)
Perhaps you didn't intend this, but using nuclear physics as your threshold example certainly prioritizes a particular kind of academic merit over other kinds.

Between one person who is better at calculus and another that's better at chess, which is more meritorious?

Depends on whether he's applying to a chess or physics program, no?

After I tell you that merit isn't a scalar and invite you to consider measures of merit that are somewhat orthogonal to each other, the best you can come back with is to say it depends which (orthogonal) field of endeavor they're seeking to enter? Pretend the answer is neither, they're competing for the last available place in a medical school.

My whole point here is that facility with calculus or chess both demonstrate cognitive ability, but there's no universal standard for asserting that one is better than the other - we can only talk in terms of what sort of utility it is that we wish to maximize. Likewise, absent universally agreeable standards of merit, we can't easily say one group of people is better than another while neglecting structural biases. It might be that people who are good at calculus would in fact make superior chess players if we were to invest in some remedial chess lessons to rectify the shortcomings of their strategic education, so to speak.
Pew was quite precise with its language and used the phrase "middle income"; it was the press that was sloppy and said "middle class".
Please, please tell me that link is satire...
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There is a distributed systems Slack group. Sign up here: https://dist-sys-slack.herokuapp.com/ There is a channel for links to papers.
Far more important were the western diseases they had no idea they were carrying
Wikipedia tells me that of Apple's 43,000 U.S. employees, 30,000 work in Apple stores. That's probably an above-average retail experience, but it's retail. Customers get angry. Long hours. Pay is what it is. I'd expect that a blend of Apple's HQ talent (very satisfied) and its store employees (hmmn) is the explanation.
> What problem is all this stuff solving?

RH's lack of having their hands in everything
(only kinda kidding)
Horizontal scaling comes with a who range of tradeoffs that you need to make and exactly how you horizontally scale I think has alot to do with how your application stores, reads and writes data.
First: I didn't say that Go was good for that subset of cases. In fact, I said that I wouldn't want to write that kind of program in Go. I said that Go wasn't the wrong answer for the reason you stated, namely immutable data.

You want an example? Here's a video router for a TV station, which has multiple sources of user input (human-pushable control panels on two different data buses, plus serial data coming from multiple automation systems). You need to keep those control panels and automation systems updated with what's connected to what, even if they weren't the source of the command that changed it. And you need to keep the actual hardware switch up to date, too. And commands to the switch can fail, which you need to report back to whoever made the command. (One way the command can fail is if someone else locked an output to display a particular input.)

Faced with that problem, we implemented a single "state of the switch" data object that mutated as commands came in. But you could think about trying to implement it with immutable data. That would mean creating a new copy of the state of the switch for each (successful) command that was processed. That would mean copying a fairly large chunk of data many times a second, which would have been a challenge for the processor we had. That would also almost certainly mean a garbage-collected language which, when you're trying to respond within one TV frame (1/60th of a second), is a really bad idea. More to the point for our discussion, it would also mean that threads, which in our design only had to respond to one source of control, would now also have to handle state-of-the-switch updates pushed to them from other threads (or from some master). That seems like significant additional complexity to me. (Yes, I know that data races have their own complexity, but for our design, it was very clear how to prevent that. And if you're going to say that we could have had a separate thread receive the updates to update the control panels, now we've got a race as to who owns the hardware control bus to the panels.)
I think chrisseaton is making the distinction between "social class" and "economic class", which is pronounced in many countries, but in other countries (USA for instance), there's little distinction.
No alien laser signals seen from strange star
You'd run out of disk space before you even generated "Hello, World". Assuming ASCII only, that's 96 bits. In order to save every possible character combination you'd need about 9903 yottabytes [1] of storage.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte