skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What useful meaning is there for optimization purpuses?

As far as I know, there is no meaning in pointer-to-const other than it must not be used directly to modify the stored value (if it is you get a compile error). It is always valid from the perspective of language semantics to cast-away the const and modify the pointed-to object, as long as the object is not itself read-only. So, to my knowledge, they could not make any additional assumptions based on pointer-to-const, though they could use it as a hint to look for a possible optimization.
Totally agree with this. We would like to know how much of this is survivorship bias? I have heard enough stories about Gujaratis committing suicide when stock markets or gold market in India go down.
Thats a great writeup. I have a followup question.
It seems like Gujaratis are looking at everything from business perspective rather than "problem solving" perspective like in SV. Is this true?
The article didn't answer the question, and I very curious -- if you're basically taking people's property and keeping 20% of the rake, how do you manage to lose billions in the process? Is it that the 20% is actually allocated elsewhere, or that asset forfeiture is somehow more expensive than I'd granted?
How my doppelgänger used the Internet to find and befriend me
I'm working on a graphics/plotting DSL embedded in HTML5 web-components partly inspired by the ability to do customizable financial graphs. If you're interested in collaborating on a few financial graphs in HTML5/SVG/D3, PM me. I'm also transitioning to freelancing and creating a startup and would like to open source some more code (especially good demos).
In a similar vein, there's a really great talk by Eric Mazur, Physics professor at Harvard about peer instruction — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI

He goes into why he started exploring the idea at first (students got 5's on their AP physics exams and had strong problem-solving skills — plug-and-chug — but poor conceptual understanding), the many iterations of the approach, and the data he collected on the way (significant increases in open-ended, conceptual problems, including at other schools that adopted the approach). Really fascinating.

I haven't watched the shorter version, but someone edited they key points down to 18 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvw68sLlfF8
Give up looking. Don't give up Hope/Faith/Belief whatever you want to call it.
Oil is generally not used to make plastics.

That said, nearly everything else is, at least indirectly.

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=34&t=6
This author seems to be confused as to the realities on the ground, and engages in over-simplified analyses of the actions of various parties. If he really believed what he was saying, he would be shorting oil stocks and futures; but this piece really seems to be more like a Thomas Friedman prognostication (, which is to say a simplistic faux-intellectual self-indulgent scribbling).[1]

He seems to be reading what can only be described as 'the worst microeconomics textbook known to man' if he believes the quote below. All economists I have ever heard of believe that people (countries, and companies) should diversify their portfolios and hedge against risks, and that even if that were not true, politicians are largely mercantilists.[2]

>"Of course, the real world is never as simple as an economics textbook. Geopolitical tensions, transport costs, and infrastructure bottlenecks mean that oil-consuming countries are willing to pay a premium for energy security, including the accumulation of strategic supplies on their own territory."

Then he proceeds to read the minds of oil company executives, which is interesting, because I'm betting they know a lot of things this author does not, and they are no fools. In addition, an oil executive would have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and ignorant to believe in constantly rising oil prices after the last 10 years, and most of them seem quite intelligent and aware of reality.

>"That is precisely the strategy of self-liquidation that tobacco companies used, to the benefit of their shareholders. If oil managements refuse to put themselves out of business in the same way, activist shareholders or corporate raiders could do it for them. If a consortium of private-equity investors raised the $118 billion needed to buy BP at its current share price, it could immediately start to liquidate 10.5 billion barrels of proven reserves worth over $360 billion, even at today’s “depressed” price of $36 a barrel.
There are two reasons why this has not happened – yet. Oil company managements still believe, with quasi-religious fervor, in perpetually rising demand and prices. So they prefer to waste money seeking new reserves instead of maximizing shareholders’ cash payouts. And they contemptuously dismiss the only other plausible strategy: an investment shift from oil exploration to new energy technologies that will eventually replace fossil fuels."

TLDR; This article is just click-bait, and we should all disregard it. This man is no Andy Grove.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_(finance)

[3] http://watercoolernewsletter.com/the-revolving-door-test-how...
That's right. We've heard from developers that they spend over 50% of their development time for an ordanary app to integrate other services via APIs. CloudRail tries to reduce that significantly. 1 API (with some configuration) instead of N APIs for N services.
You're talking about a series hybrid design? I.e combustion engine powers a generator which in turn powers electric drive motor(s), usually with a battery system to allow for buffering generator output and to capture power from regenerative braking.

For long distance highway driving, this is less efficient since you have losses between the generator and the electric motors. It can work well for mostly stop-and-go driving and is used in hybrid buses I believe.
Show HN: DomTerm – a web-based rich terminal emulator and console
The case for quitting your job–without a backup plan
This was discussed at length some 7 or 8 months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9515613

However, that discussion is now closed, so any new thoughts will need to be posted here.

It's clearly of general interest, as it has also been submitted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9600347

And here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507279

However, I feel that on HN there is a heavy bias against the way mathematics is traditionally done, and a continuing insistence that it must be replaced with, more or less, computer program sort of notation that no one has yet properly devised, and yet everyone feels must be the way forward. I completely agree that there is considerable space for proof-assistants, and other tools to help prevent all sorts of mistakes, and to assist with effective communication. I can't help but feel that the case is over-stated, and the people who are most insistent that math is desperately behind the times and needs updating, don't really understand how math is done at the highest levels.

I could be wrong, and remain open to being convinced.
Tungia negocios – Cómo hacer marketing Texto exitoso? Cuando se inventaron
Immutable.js practical guide
Surprised to see this on HN! I played this when I was young and it was a great, charming substitute for the Nintendo games my parents refused to buy me, haha.
The book every new American citizen – and every old one, too – should read
The author is about 30 years old, so this is more or less what I would expect.
You can get them here: http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/
I've got to think that Amazon could rent out the roofs on commercial buildings throughout cities pretty cheaply. Doing so could completely moot the range issue as it would enable drone relays. I'm sure there will be regulatory barriers to doing that, but if they can get FAA approval for their delivery program as a whole, I'm sure they can get to a tipping point of municipalities that enable this sort of relay system. It might even be a Google Fiber sort of thing, where people actively lobby their municipalities to remove regulatory barriers so as to bring the city's technological capabilities in line with the state of the art.
I hugely appreciate the whole section that's a "rant" on synchronicity.

Algorithms should always produce the same results on the same inputs. There. I said it.

Relaxing constraints on large graph processing or AI systems because A) threads are hard and B) we're tossing in random values anyway is a mistake that's made research in these areas far too hard to reproduce and reliably quantify, and that in turn makes progress very difficult.

We can engineer better than this. Build random systems with deterministic seeds. Pass the seeds down in initialization trees if necessary; never refer to a global random source from another thread, and providing a whole system with enough "random"ness for stochastic behaviors AND keeping it deterministic and reproducible is 100% possible. When going concurrent, build flows and when there's a merge, sort results before passing on: determinism AND parallelization are possible.

As a personal anecdote, my first forays into ML are covered with rand() calls, and in retrospect, it's head-smashingly obvious that this was a Bad Idea. I spent huge amounts of time re-running the same code, then making a one-character change to a constant or sign somewhere, then re-running it dozens of times again to be sure it had any predictable impact at all. If I had made it deterministic, it would be obvious immediately, and I could have iterated much faster. It would also be far easier to farm out a CI/lab cluster with different (but consistent) rand seeds to gather meaningful results in bulk. I could have saved hundreds of hours of my attention (and sanity), even on small projects.

Once these things become a bar for minimum viable quality in research, we can start catching, debugging, and improving -- stuff like the "kingmaker scheduler" problem the author describes can be made to vanish.

If only we had a video of Ballmer chanting "Determinism! Determinism! Determinism!"...
I witnessed this firsthand getting a B.S. at a state school and a Masters at an Ivy. The Ivy kids were differentiated more by their sheep/robot like work ethic and dedication. Naturally the far majority of them pursued careers in investment banking and management consulting, careers that are essentially an extension of this hoop jumping.

I've decided that I'm not going to raise my kids in the U.S. This absurd hoop jumping isn't the optimum way to raise a successful kid, and it sure as hell doesn't create happy childhoods.
Per pound of cargo I'm sure the delivery truck is way more energy efficient if it's relatively full.
Luxury traditionally means "optional" in this context. People can generally live and work without tobacco. Industrialized countries currently require oil, although this is changing.
Welcome to discussion: React JS instead of GWT in Java Application
This is a two way street. You can't expect with the dissemination of ethnic-based propaganda and "pride" type movements that natives or other social groups not to take notice of your endeavors and starts responding to you in kind.

It's good to celebrate success but not good to determine the worth of individuals or social groups solely on the basis of financial assets or business holdings.

This is the real slippery slope you don't wanna step on.
They really aren't. Or at least if they are it's a terrifying commentary on tech companies because neither of them have ever actually made money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10796567
What are you trying to accomplish? Why are you talking about proxies? Are you aiming for security? Efficiency? What kind of data are you talking about?

You may think you've described clearly what you're doing and what you want, but you haven't.
50 miles is more than enough for a car with a gasoline backup tank for most use cases. Average car users use below 50 almost every single day. Something like 98-98% of trips are under 50 miles. 95% of people commute less than 40 miles.

Adding more weight and room for only a small percent of rides is probably less efficient (economically and ecologically) than just popping into gas for 5% of trips.
Probably thanks to SDL.
The authors of golang understand that tabs would be the right solution to this, but only if the entire toolchain makes the same choice.

Everyone else uses spaces because spaces are better than a mix of tabs and spaces and it's extraordinarily difficult to keep spaces out of your files.
yeah this article pretty clearly states what I was trying to get across: "The Justice Department says it's not suspending or shutting down the program — just that it doesn't have the money to pay police departments right now."
This was very touching to the heart. An amazing open source project using open source projects with collaborators everywhere.
IEEE has gotten a bunch of things wrong, but they have gotten a bunch of things right as well. How many other vendor-agnostic technologies are there that work as well as Wifi? For the most part my wifi-enabled device will work with any device made by any manufacturer, from the high end ones down to the cheapest junk. That level of compatibility is rare in a standard in which participation is entirely voluntary.

I think the IEEE struck a balance between simplicity and ease of implementation and features. I don't think the goal was ever to design a standard that could handle thousands of endpoints on commodity hardware.

For what it is, wifi works great. It falls apart when you try to make it do what it wasn't designed to do. There have been missteps along the way, but overall I think the good outweighs the bad.

Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How is civil forfeiture(cash register justice) not a constitutional violation?

The 4th Amendment declares that citizens have a right to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" and that no warrants may be issued without a statement of probable cause "particularly describing…things to be seized."

The 5th Amendment says the accused criminals shall not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

The 6th Amendment ensures that people accused of crimes must be "informed of the nature and cause of the accusation,"

The 8th Amendment forbids the government to impose "excessive fines" or "cruel and unusual punishments."

Opponents of the change have little more than 'the ends justify the means' as a counter argument.
The article ignores some realities. 1) The major OPEC producers need to recover far more than their lifting costs. Their oil revenues subsidize the rest of the economy and is their bulwark of social stability. Some estimate that Saudi Arabia needs $90/bbl. 2) Technological adaptation to the low price regime is happening as we speak. The years of $100/bbl oil developed expensive innovations, and now we are seeing those prices reduced to their marginal costs. 3) Almost no other country can use these new technologies as profitably as the US and Canada can. The US and Canada have a private mineral ownership regime, as well as a production and refinement infrastructure no other country will be able to match soon.

The US has a LOT of small- and intermediate-sized oil companies competing actively right now, on all these dimensions, to lower their costs so they can continue to operate profitably even in the current price environment. Most are succeeding.
Could we call it computer-assisted writing? Simply calling it "not writing" doesn't really recognize the way writers and other artists have used algorithms as part of their respective processes for many decades.
You've omitted the previous paragraph:
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, to enable your use of the Platform, we do need to inspect portions of your code, communicate parts of it (e.g. the dependencies being used) to the Snyk servers, etc. For that purpose, by uploading or posting content to...
> ... for a finished product

Well, this was your first mistake :-) One of the pictures [0] in his series clearly shows that this is not a finished product. This is definitely a side/weekend project.

Agreed on being a cool project.

[0] - http://oswatch.org/img/how_to/assembly_2.jpg
What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, that honestly is challenging, unless you live in suburban or rural area.

However one, more interesting and probably lucrative part that should be easier to implement would be transport between major hub to nearby delivery point. Since these points can be built out and/or prepared, you can have deliveries coming non-stop, through FAA approved route, and then delivered from there. It doesn't even have to be dedicated Amazon employee, they can offer pick up or delivery by Uber or something like that.

For me this part can be very creative and I am surprised that Amazon doesn't see this as promising area of investment.
Regarding #8, has a situation ever occurred where a large majority of people assumed there was a bubble, reacted accordingly, and created negative outcomes, despite there not being a bubble?

And I hope (7) Twitter's death will be quick, and not painfully slow.
"it means that if and when the program is reinstated"

I'm saying it was never cancelled
British government clampdown on council divestment is an attack on democracy
Have you driven an electric drivetrain vehicle? (Serious question)

I've driven the 2014 ELR (for a week) and test drove a Tesla. The Tesla of course had much better acceleration[1], but even the ELR was satisfying to drive.

With an electric drivetrain you don't have to downshift (or wait for a downshift in an automatic transmission). You don't have to wait for a turbo spool. You don't have to wait for any lags at all. Its really amazing, and I think it must be the future of automotive.

1. In my opinion the 2014 ELR was a beautifully styled high-luxury vehicle with mystifyingly poor performance. I don't know what they were even thinking. The 2016 was a bit better, but still suffered from (I assume) beancountering.
Doesn't seem so crazy. If your industry isn't viable any more: liquidate rather than hang around. We all know what Alphabet (Google) would do if it owned some company that was in decline.
Thanks. I understand that. I'm trying to pass files efficiently, with less bandwidth. It's so I can pass all the info to my phone without paying so much for the data plan. I'm talking about all forms of data. The proxy is for the relay between the server (C) and the proxy (B) and my phone (A). I want to very quickly use B to download from C and send in the smallest way I can to A. I've been working on a two way hash for years with no success. I'm trying to make a service that will let phones use less data on their data plans. That's the efficiency I'm looking for.
I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the lifespan of oil using transport. A car might have a 15 year lifespan so we can't see a massive change in petroleum use until that time.

However boats, trains and planes have at least double that lifespan.

Because of capital investments, surely an alternative to oil is still 20 years away?
But the art project has made a billion copies and yet the market price remains what it was before it started and people are still paying nonzero sums for copies ... ?
But I have seen a solution to this problem, back in subversion days. With help from perl-tidy and php-tidy.

Pre commit hooks, combined with an appropriate *-tidy program for your language. Code is formatted according to the repo tidy config with a pre-commit hook and formatted according to the developers preference on checkout.

I'm missing why whitespace style mapping is not a bijection, you do have to accept some limits to code style in terms of completely rigid indentation rules, and it is obviously language specific. But it seems to be a bijection to me, what am I missing?
this is good! i'm mostly homebrew on mac these days, but every once in a while i find myself on an apt-based linux system, and i've always blown away at how obscure and unintuitive apt is.
> Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2015?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
SHA-1 Certificates: A History of Hard Choices
Massive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10783711

Some of the other submissions - there were more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10783748

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10783752

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785119

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785200

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785223

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785286
Great post.

How do you deal with schedule slip? You have some things on there (like analyst briefings) that I've found take more than 2 weeks to schedule. This means nailing down a launch date 6-8 weeks out, which in my mind leaves significant engineering slip risk.
CCC uses aruba wireless, at the end of the conf the have a talk where they discuss the network/power setup.
There are a bunch of easy technical critiques on this blog post. Here's a pragmatic one: name me a REST API in a real-world piece of software that doesn't have at least one chunk of special product-driven logic in it -- one with customers, I'm saying.

As soon as you need to own even the smallest bit of backend logic, assuming you're using a framework where everything else is done for you, you've cargo-culted your way into trying to shoehorn the most degenerate case for a problem into a generalized framework.

Like, god forbid you want your backend to talk to another internal service. Or use third-party auth for managing access to privileged data. We should definitely just send that to the client and let JavaScript sort that one out. Love that idea.

Anyhow, this is a blog post that doesn't really do anything new, but presents it in a way that claims it's evidence that something that a lot of people stake their careers on isn't necessary. I'm happy to dismiss it in kind.
OK this is the seventh time this has been posted to Hacker News. Please stop posting this story to Hacker News.
I had always thought the Volt was a series hybrid, but I just checked [0] and it turns out there's a mechanical bypass mechanism that can connect the gasoline motor to the drivetrain, under control of the engine computer. Sounds like at low speeds it operates as a series hybrid, but at highway speeds, once the batteries are drained, it turns into a parallel hybrid. Clever!

EDITED to add: dwhall posted a link with much more detail [1] -- very interesting!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt#Drivetrain

[1] http://gm-volt.com/2015/02/20/gen-2-volt-transmission-operat...
Either you've made it out the hood or you haven't.
> Another possible improvement is to include a programmable logic device on the CPU chip.

Given that, earlier this year, Intel plunked down 16 billion to buy #2 FPGA maker Altera, this might turn out to be the most interesting improvement.
We are building a graph processing library on GPUs: http://gunrock.github.io/
Our publication explains why our library runs faster, and in one word: load-balancing, since fundamentally, graph problems are irregular problems. If you look at the road map section, we are moving towards dynamic graphs and also planning to try out asynchronous method by using MIS/coloring. Please try it out, any kind of contribution is welcome.
It's pretty simple, tabs are clearly superior in theory, by a decent margin. And spaces are superior in practice, by an enormous margin.

Go is making a play to make tab/space mixing work nicely in practice and that's quite interesting to watch.