skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a bigger factor in police switching to semi-automatics was the introduction to the Glock, which as I recall was the first "respectable", widely adapted service handgun without an external safety. That, just point it and pull the trigger, like the revolvers the police were used to, something previous manufacturers apparently weren't willing to do.

Now, I wasn't paying close attention to this at the time, since I was in localities where owning a handgun was impossible to impracticable and I'd already settled on another model for when I could buy them (M1911), but this would suggest it was a combination of ergonomics and a perception that a semi-auto without an external safety was safe enough for police (and also note things like the extra heavy "New York trigger), plus of course the superiority of semi-autos in combat, in functioning in dirty conditions, etc. (They are more likely to jam, but you can clear that in the field, a revolver jam is generally a job for a gunsmith.)

I'm pretty sure this wasn't all that related to the 1986 FBI Miami shootout, the biggest conclusion from that was the correct observation that penetration is critical, in this case, through someone's arm and then into their vitals.

Ballistics Nerd details: 9mm is much better than stock .38 Special, but inferior to the .357 Magnum, which had been a big thing since the 1930s, and could easily shoot lighter loads equivalent to 9mm or wherever you want to trade off recoil for power, an inherent advantage of revolvers.

4 of the officers were carrying .357s, one a .38, all loaded with a .38 Special +P over-pressure rounds, presumably the "FBI load", that falls quite a bit shy of 9mm. But 3 were carrying 9mms, and the FBI's answer was a very powerful 10mm round, which they then backed off to what became the .40 S&W, and now they say bullets have evolved enough that 9mm is OK (and cheaper, and many say easier to fire).

All that said, the conclusions about the Miami shootout certainly didn't hurt police adaptation of semi-autos.
Sure. But brilliant people generally don't believe dumb things that in their core area of expertise....
A terrible language with awesome libraries. In the language wars, libraries are king.

I hate Matlab, but I've got to admit that the toolboxes are without peer.
Always though that all are old pictures without copyright. This woman is a talented and fine artist.
The industry has been abuzz about these types of structures for years. It would be interesting to see if this is practical at scale: making millions of these types of chips per month with a high yield.
I hate the word Gentrification. I live in Allentown, PA and we have gotten around 1 billion dollars of investment for our center city. It really has been a BIG change for our city of 120,000 people city.

Problems with the city: White flight happened late (1980s) HIGH transient population. 50% of the school district's child will end the school year at a different school then they started the school year with. Over 90% of the district receives free lunches. So much that 100% of students get a free lunch with a 85% poverty level.

Claims of Gentrification: The population was being moved out of the neighborhood. Did I already state that we have a 50% transient population? How establishing a population that isn't below the poverty line in a city full of beautiful Victorian three story row homes (I love mine) and dozens of mansions moving an established population? Matter of fact the local Occupy Movement camped at our city hall and was protesting. A city with HIGH poverty was a 1% issue????

The conversations were hysterical with Occupy in our city about what they thought was the Gentrification in our city.
After having al
I would say he was asking for the technical details...
I work in 'automotive' software industry, and the trend at the moment is to have /everything/ running on as few CPUs as they can... That mean the infotainment and brakes might end up on the same physical die in the near future...

And when you listen to the people who make that stuff up, and almost sounds like a good idea ;-)
John Wiegley on maintaining Emacs and how you can help
The testing capabilities of government labs are handily outstripped by industry capability to create differentiated products. The cost burden of regulation testing is to some extent pushed back to the manufacturers with a big 'comply or else' warning to make sure they take it serious. The 'or else' bit translates into a fine per product sold which means if you get caught cheating that will eat up a very large chunk of your turnover for that market making getting caught something you will want to avoid so much that compliance is the easier way out. And if you can't be compliant then the better idea is probably not to try to sell your products into that market.
What a surprise, not. Many respected experts have criticised Telegram for implementing their own cryptography and using meaningless buzzwords, while also making encryption opt in. Telegram is clearly not a privacy-motivated platform and anyone who thinks so is deluding themselves.

Even the closed source WhatsApp (uses ETE from the Signal guys) and iMessage are arguably less likely to contain cryptographic flaws than Telegram.
Looking good! I like what you did with the water shader and the look of the ship. Now I want to see the robot ;D
Exhibit A: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714990

It is naive not to be cynical. You'll be taken advantage of otherwise.
Yes an in-house compliance department, like a private auditing firm, leads inexorably to agency problems. They don't work for the general public or for investors; they work for the management of the firm. Generally it's best to just live with these agency problems, since we don't want to shut down corporations entirely, but in cases like this the government might need to do more.
Absolutely! Thanks for the reply
That's pretty advanced for someone who claims to know absolutely nothing about math.
Great, thanks for the reply. Can't wait to give the demo a run :)
ALARM: Check Your Mobile App for Social Networks Integrations
EU standards reflect the reality that diesel engines are far more common than in the US, so they are less strict with regards to NOx emissions to begin with. About half the km (or miles, or furlong) driven in Europe are on diesel.

Diesel gets better mileage and tends to be cheaper than gas (depending on local taxes), which can make a significant difference with the high fuel prices in Europe.

The oversight is also much more fragmented because it is less centralized than in the US. As I understand it, the oversight is left to the member states, so manufacturers tend to shop around for the most lenient one.
Ratbert is not a bad guy.
Virtualizing APIs with Go and Python
He said he wanted a mail client, not a mail client that requires a self hosted server infrastructure or giving the email out.

> it works like a traditional mail client.

Except it's not just a client.
The solution to this would be embracing wind power again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
If an engine does not meet the requirements and because of this, cannot be sold on a market as large as the US or Europe, this is a big thing.

Unthinkable, that this has been measured and not been reported, but instead quickly and silently hacked. Indeed, even with a new head, there is still something wrong at VW.
The criticism was unsolicited. It was off topic and mean.

There are many places on the internet where that type participation is the most intellectually interesting activity that occurs. Hacker News is what it is because it isn't one of them.
‘Hell, NO’ is the answer you want to get from your users
Properties on purpose
Even more unthinkable that there now is a 'quick fix' that costs very little money per vehicle and will magically make the car meet emissions standards and will not lead to loss of power or increased emissions. If it was that simple you'd think those bad boy engineers would have implemented that right from the get-go rather than to go this somewhat harder route to the goal.
There are quite a few massive cities in wealthy countries where a significant number of people choose not to drive even though they can afford it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
Didn't downvote you, but the CEO of VW America has nothing really to do with the company that actually designs and builds VW cars. He basically just sells their cars in US. So as such he probably has no idea about what is actually going on. The executives at the 'real' VW have been much more nuanced in their statements
They focus a ton on the browser. I use chrome a lot less than Firefox and I still see chrome tab crashes more often. Spidermonkey performs amazingly today, and even beats V8 on its own benchmarks. FF used to be resource hungry, but now is a lot lighter on memory usage than chrome. Beyond current tech, they're investing heavily into Rust and Servo for the next generation, and their ES6/7 support has been steadily growing. By all measures, it's clear that they have goals on the browser and they take those goals seriously. What else can they do?

Third party desktop mail clients are just not a killer feature for the vast majority of users. IoT may not be a winner for various reasons, but I'm sure it can't be easy trying to figure out where to go from here. (let's face it, IoT is going to be the same locked-down, vendor-specific experience that Internet tv has become; and without manufacturing a must-have device or buying out a manufacturer of one, why would Mozilla win in that field?)
Growing up in the 80s, the Cray 2 was my poster computer. Until the day came when I realized it was only 800MHz and had 4GB RAM, and my phone was faster than that.
Pick a language. Write some code. I recommend one that requires minimal building. Maybe python. If you need a build tool, use make. Use a text editor, like nano, gedit, or notepad++. Not a complex one like vim or emacs. Keep it simple. Now - And this is the important part - WRITE SOME CODE. It doesn't have to be complicated, It could just implement cat or something. But the important thing is to write it. Don't bother trying to find the "right way." If you need libraries, go for the path of least resistance.

EDIT: This is important, so I want to say it as clearly as possible. FUCK. ES. 2015. ES5 is actually pretty good. Learn prototypical inheritance, or just don't use OO. People have built real apps in ES5, you'll live. It might be hard at times, and you might have trouble learning, but the important thing is that you'll be writing code, not fixing your toolkit.
oh yes! This I also do not understand at all. They replace the software and all of a sudden the emissions are ok and the unsolvable problem has been solved.
> My guess is that most of the general purpose programming languages are usually poorly suited in one way or another for domain specific programming.

For this reason, Lisp would be ideal for this.
What's wonky about it? I installed vim through Chocolatey, but I rarely do more than a few quick edits then :wq my way out of there. Most of my work is done in Atom these days.
“Warren Buffet” of China suddenly missing, government/police suspected
It's fair to say that this is still a theoretical attack. As authors of this paper mentioned, they don't see a way of turning the "flaw" into a real exploit.
Isn't it in most cases the reverse? My understanding from reading Warren Buffet's letters for a while is that you take money from customers, try to keep underwriting losses to neutral or slight (though underwriting profitability is great), and then really make your returns on time-value-of-money on the float.

My business holds an E&O policy from USLI, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. We pay them $2k a year for the privilege. I think from reading their annual reports that they earn a slight underwriting profit and make an absolute killing on holding hundreds of thousands of dollars from other firms for years before paying it out to the one unlucky winner of the lawsuit lotto.
So "PS" is metric for horsepower. Who knew. (it's German for horsepower, but German horses are just as powerful as imperial ones, and not particularly metric: PS literally means "Pferdestärken", i.e. "horse-powers")

The metric measure would be kW.
not AFAIK, but I am not an expert.
Me too! I have never written a line of Julia, but the headline indicated the language was about to die, and I was surprised how strong my "Oh no!" reaction was.

Apparently, I have great hopes for Julia and what it means to programming languages, even though I have only mostly skimmed articles about it.
Alibaba Buys the South China Morning Post
If someone crashes into you with a heavier car, then that's the responsibility of the owner of the heavy car - just like if you knock over a cyclist (or it should be). The ideal would be everyone driving slower in smaller cars, since reducing kinetic energy saves lives. To achieve that you reduce taxes on the smaller cars and increase taxes on the heavier cars and cars that drive at higher speeds. And change the law so if you kill someone with your big, heavy car, you get a more serious punishment.

It's the end of days for human-driven cars anyway. With self driving cars, it seems as if the cars will be bought and owned mainly by large companies (and hired out to end users), so the companies will be able to experiment much more aggressively with different designs and force manufacturers to make them.
An ML algorithm that can be reused for both recognition, generation, and novel generalization tasks is already a step above most of the entire field.
Code Galaxies Visualization
"Besides, you can’t change the regular expression language accepted by a program after it has been released, because that would break all the scripts that used the old language."

Lie. In my world, this is commonly referred to as an "option".

Many command-line programs have options that disable or enable some standard to perform their operations.

And guess what program does that? Grep.

Grep option switches allow the user to choose between basic, regular and Perl expression engines (-E -F -G -B options).

Breaking the existing scripts would have been caused by setting another regular expression by default in findstr, which is basically something that nobody would ask.

The real reason findstr is not improved is because Bob left the company and probably took the source code with him.
Car tax in the UK is based on carbon emissions. The table's here:

https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...

It used to be based on engine size; for years I would get cars with as small engines as possible, simply because it would drop my tax by about 1/3.

As for car sizes... it does seem to be having an effect here. A lot of people I know go for small cars, preferring the little five-door hatchbacks. My last one was a Honda Jazz, with a 1.2 litre engine and an absurd amount of space inside; under the new tax system it'd be classed in category D (£110 a year), but I'd be totally unsurprised if the next model made it into category C (£30 a year). My father has a diesel Nissan Note, about the same size, and that is in category C. He's very smug.
And now they're moving to 9mm, which 3 of the agents in the Miami shootout were armed with, but certainly not the more effective loadings that the FBI in part uses to justify this move. See https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10716811 in this discussion for a few more TL;DR details gleaned from the Wikipedia article.
Themis trading wrote a report saying HFT is evil? This is about as persuasive as the taxi industry releasing a document saying that Uber is worse than Voldemort or the hotel industry saying AirBnB is the devil.

Furthermore, many of the issues described there are fairly innocuous in reality.

For example, flickering (aka "quote stuffing") is a software bug which costs HFTs money: http://zacharydavid.com/2014/04/on-hft-part-ii-bugs-features... https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/quote_stuffing_is_a_...

The issue of HFT being a zero sum game in the race for latency is predominantly caused by the subpenny rule: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.htm...
What bothers me is they fail the reguntaltions for such a high margin that i cant belive all other auto makers complay with them. I mean, can X be 400% better than VW. Are their engineers 400% better? This is atonishing at least, hardly belivable. There is no such a difference with the state of the art in any industry.
Because Church (probabilistic Scheme) has been mostly discontinued, and Venture (the next big MIT probabilistic programming language) is currently somewhat hard to work with.

Go try out the release tarballs and see.
> even the most reasonable criticisms of racial preference policies

It's not reasonable. It's the same tedious concern trolling that appears in every single similar thread.
Bollocks. Given fund managers are obligated to obtain "best execution" under MiFID (and regulations in general) if HFT were impacting that then they would raise merry hell. The fund management industry is orders of magnitude larger and more influential than all HFTs.
>There are heaps of evidence HFT ruins markets, economies and nations, so I call BS.

HFT itself isn't "bad", period.

Does it have bad actors, stupidity, corruption, inefficiencies and is sometimes a waste? Yes. What industry is immune to this?
Incredible libraries, yes. But you may want to check out python with numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, etc. There are bundles like python (x,y) that bring them all together. Probably still want to stick with python 2.7 though (as most of scientific computing still does). This removes the tedious stumbling block that is forced unicode.
For people who do use watches, it works great. The battery hasn't ever died once on my watch, but if it did, like most people I also have a phone, so the situation you're afraid of doesn't arise.
Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media.

Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems.

In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than we could possibly need)... So we struggle to allocate capital properly. We just blindly follow trends. The people who are getting rich now are not those who want to make the world a better place; the winners are those who just want to make quick cash (short-term thinkers who take insane risks).

Does society prefer Snapchat or a cure for cancer? In the current economic environment, investors prefer Snapchat because Snapchat is pretty likely to get a ROI within the next 5 years.

The return on investment for a cancer cure is probably small (especially given the large amount of recurring revenue that big pharmaceuticals are currently making by selling cancer drugs). Also, it's much riskier than Snapchat... Could take 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.

Ultimately, we are satisfying people's short-term 'wants' at the expense of their long-term needs. We're a society of addicts who just want to get a quick buzz.
Metric horses, though obsolete, are 98.6% as powerful as imperial horses.
BI 4.0: Is Business Intelligence Entering Its 4th Generation?
Sure! My e-mail is jasonrdecastro (at) gmail.com
I work at a place exactly like this.

They give you 2-3x the work you can complete, then tell you "you get paid the big bucks" (which we don't) so you need to work as many hours as necessary to get it done. Oh, and don't get behind on any of your other work as well.

It's why my last day is coming in the next week or so.
Thing is, though, when the US has been literally acting as an occupying army in the sandbox as of late, they have much more restrictive Rules of Engagement; in the ones relevant to this sort of thing, as I recall they're not that bad.

Perhaps best explained by Marine General James Mattis, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet", one of his rules to live by for his men in Iraq.

I personally have no problems with their equipment loadout (it's too much like mine!), it's the attitudes, it's their actions, in too many localities their arrest quotas (see the very highly recommended http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...). The equipment has no agency.
I had a very similar problem with Ruby and some of our workloads. I ended up utilizing this evented parser [1] to process smaller subsets of the JSON document and then clear them from memory. The result is a memory usage that is at most the size of one of these subsets (plus some overhead).

I have been wanting to generalize this approach with some open source software for some time, but I haven't gotten around to it. I think an attractive solution is for a user to specify a JSONPath [2] upfront about the types of subsets they are interested in. In the case of Ruby these chunks could then be yielded by an iterator and cleared, but I wonder if a more general-purpose CLI program which prints the subsets to stdout would also work if the subsets are small enough. But this adds another serialization/deserialization step.

[1] https://github.com/dgraham/json-stream
[2] http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/
Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users
Yeah but anyway those gases are far more powerful than CO2
I didn't know that! Maybe that's why I can't recall how any of it sounds, short of a disconnected beep and boop here and there.
I did. I'll trip load thanks
what good is hardware video decoder block to you if it ships with GPL violating binary blob that only works on android with some ancient kernel?
Sports startups find warm welcome in St. Louis
My startup tried to solve exactly this problem in the Electronic Design Automation domain. We provided VCS and compare functionality focused on the needs of this industry.

We pivoted. The main issue we faced is the way the electrical engineers work and how difficulty it is to change this. It was incredible hard the explain these people how to properly use a VCS. We focused on a simple interface and tried to optimize on the way electrical engineers work. No chance!

Obviously the same applied to LayerVault [1].

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/03/11/layervault-the-version...
> Are you saying up-goer five is a good example of simple word usage or a bad example?

A bad example (because of the resulting verbosity and inexactness). It's an example of how simple words are inadequate to explain complex ideas succinctly

> You can in fact write clear and concisely in a phd thesis

You ignored the rest of my sentence. I did not say [you cannot write a "clear and understandable" PhD thesis]. I said [you cannot write a "clear and understandable" PhD thesis in Linguistics while avoiding five-dollar words]

> But since the author assumes the reader has a large background knowledge in the field, it will still not be accessible to the average reader

Who exactly is the "average reader" of academic writing?

It sounds to me like you are making a blanket statement: "jargon is bad". I am saying jargon provides useful ways of expression.
Car calls 911 after alleged hit-and-run, driver arrested
Well, a theoretical attack is worse than no theoretical attack. Especially if there are perfectly fine protocols available that are IND-CCA2 secure.
Thanks for this comment. While trying to track down the source of the quote, I ran into this interesting, if a bit oddly formatted, blog post:

http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/02/aristotle-and-accur...

There are a few good comments there, too, followed by a bunch of me-toos.