skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to see someone describe how to do this in practice. Maximizing variance doesn't do you much if your high end doesn't beat the others, especially if you don't know how high you have shoot. If you overlap two candidate probability distributions and know what you have to beat in order to win, you can make a choice. In my dabblings in FanDuel, I've tried to maximize the expected value, and found that this produced surprisingly wild results - I've jumped from the 99 percentile one week to the .1 percentile the next.
As someone who's been working on figuring out a way to transpile or interpret a powerful dynamic language to Lua, JavaScript, Python and Go, the really tough thing to do is non-local exits. If you can solve that, I think that everything else is easy (well, a Simple Matter of Programming anyway).

It's okay if your target language already supports non-local exits, particularly parameterised ones (although even that can be faked with a well-designed global), but if it doesn't then it's a pain (imagine how you'd do it in Go: every single function call will return an additional value, indicating if a non-local exit is intended).

Alternatively, imagine trying to transpile call/cc to JavaScript…
Interesting paper on left-recursion in recursive descent parsers like PEGs and Packrats

http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~todd/research/pub.php?id=pepm08
I think that cljs-devtools [1] also deserves honorable mention. Not only does this improve console output, but it improves inspection while doing interactive debugging (e.g., pause on exception) in Chrome.

[1] https://github.com/binaryage/cljs-devtools
In an optimal sense, I agree with you, but I don't have the skill/time/desire to make a really awesome web version as you describe, and would be quite happy with one that roughly mirrors the printable version. There's always LinkedIn too, which gives some of that interactivity.

Further, this (really the underlying JSON resume schema) could be a great starting point for a fancier web-resume generator working from the same content.
M-Kopa sells solar panels to poor Africans and provides them with credit
Quest for an Offensiveness Detector Part 1
Webserver statistics might give some estimation on OS usage.

Not sure how reliable Ubuntu identifies itself in the user agent of web browsers. But just for fun, I counted requests on my webserver via a simple grep:

grep Ubuntu access.log | wc

grep Windows access.log | wc

Looks like I get 1 request from Ubuntu for about 100 hits from Windows.
This is essentially the same thing as having your password emailed to you and is insecure for all the same reasons. Youre putting the responsibility of security on the email provider, which you can't control.
An HTML Version of a Roland TR-909
Another reason is that is doesn't do all the things that standard Clojure does, which are the actual cause for slowness, it is not the JVM.

http://blog.ndk.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-startup.html
The thing to replace is not so much IMAP (which has its own awfulness of implementation) but RFC822-format mail. It looks easy to parse but isn't, giving rise to bugs. Especially if you step outside the ASCII character set. How many of you have an email with a spurious `> From` in the middle because that has been escaped wrongly by something?

Besides, JMAP could be consumed directly by web apps.
For playing around with languages I'd actually recommend writing your own lexer and parser. It isn't hard, and writing a recursive descent parser really helps understanding grammars and BNF. Before you have a solid grasp of how context-free grammars work, parser generators aren't much of a time saver IMO.

In my experience getting a BNF grammar right is something of an art which you pick up after having written a few parsers.
Do what you have to do to pay the bills and keep learning on the side. Either way you'll come out ahead.
Why do certificates need to expire? It causes a lot of trouble for everyone.
Exponentially more difficult than starting a startup? No shit, all you have to do to start a startup is say you started one and give a vague semblance of the idea.
But it seems like to me the "progress" mentioned is more in the hardware than the software, in contrast to the emphasis on Software Engineering from the title.
Do you have any pointers to where I could read more about natural languages being meant to interrupt the speaker? That sounds fascinating.
Last year was my personal year of the Linux Desktop https://jeena.net/year-of-linux-desktop and it still remains that way.
End-to-end encryption is useless without endpoint security, i.e. security of the device you're using. As far as I can tell, all new chips have something like the Intel Management Engine, which allows out-of-band access to the device. It takes about 6 lines of VHDL to modify a CPU so that if it receives a specific combination of instructions, it will transition to ring 0. That could even be added to the microcode so you wouldn't even be able to find it with a microscope. That essentially means if someone knew the right combination of instructions, a simple javascript expression could give you kernel level access to the machine.
I use pyenv on my Mac https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv
Exactly. Cycling in particular puts a person in a fixed awkward position for long periods of time (not much different than sitting at a desk for long periods of time). Cyclists must pay special attention to work the other muscles that do not get worked while cycling or they risk creating imbalances which leads to pain and injury.
Interestingly enough, this man served in the army together with Kim Il-Sung and Peng Dehuai.
I would like to see some progress on the OSx spell checker. I am tired of going to google to get the correct spelling for words. It seems to be much better at correcting spelling.
No, but he sure did think about it!
I don't think soldering's really required. If I was attacking the proposed system, I'd just jam a variation on those nifty miniature usb keyloggers into the path of the usb port itself. If somebody was building devices like this, then somebody else would quickly create such a device that could be quickly slipped into place (possibly even one you could just jam into the usb port without opening the case, like the fake slots that ATM hacks use).

(Or rootkit the "trusted" usb stick)
A word of advice on passport. Don't just throw it in there and not learn anything about it. It's a really crafty middleware/library that is intended to be customized/extended. If you write your own strategies (after looking up the mainstream ones for reference) it'll give you a lot more power in terms of you authentication/authorization schemes.

I think that can be said about most products of scaffolds. If you intend to use this you should learn at least a little about node/express/jade/mongo/bootstrap as well. I feel a lot of people don't I know I didn't when I started web dev (I'm looking at you RoR).
Just transform it to continuation-passing style[1] and call/cc is no problem (neither are non-local exits). Granted your compiled code will be somewhat large and not much like 'regular' code in the language. That can be solved by doing selective CPS transform (IcedCoffeeScript[2] does this), but that gets slightly less straightforward.

Compiling continuations to a dynamic language is actually really easy.

--

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style

2: http://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/
It's a command line version of Smarty Resume (http://www.smartyresume.com/). Smarty is better but only has a PDF export.
How to download the complete genome for an organism
This seems like a pretty weak argument. If the whole argument is to say "No one knows" rather than to actually dig and get more data, that seems like an expectation of defeat.

I'd argue that as much as we think Linux is getting more popular, we (as perusers of HN) are naturally part of the tech bubble, the small segment of people that are likely to use Ubuntu. Outside this group, I've yet to see Ubuntu recognized by many people.
Genesis, the First Book of the Bible
Indian Regulators Suspend Facebook’s Free Basic Services
You got my upvote for this one sentence: Trying to "get rich quick" is also an easy way to "get poor quick."

I bought individual stocks, made a lot of money in a short time, then lost it just as quick. So i moved to leveraged mutual funds. Made crazy money real quick, than slowly lost it as the market became more volatile. Then I switched to just plain old index funds. I make a modest return in comparison to those leveraged funds, but when the market turns, I've lost less than a modest amount, so overall it has proven more profitable.
Going by the reasoning of this article, this is very true. What's more, we're all most likely ardent Cisco users as well.

Then again, marketing rarely makes much sense when looked at rationally, and this is definitely marketing.
It is the formfactor of a portable computer that you could own completely, unlike anything more mobile where at least some of the chips are configured and run by someone else.

Also you would take your I/O with you because it makes no sense if you hardly trust a device you don't let leave your side to interface with some static hardware that any third party could have modified. Current monitors have more processing power than early mainframe computers and more than enough room to hide rf equipment for remote snooping.
Once upon a time, in the nuclear submarine navy, my shipmate tags out the ship's battery breaker. As part of the tagout, he checks that the ship's DC bus is deenergized - within the battery breaker box itself. During the check, he finds some voltage, which isn't entirely unexpected, since there is enough capacitance on the DC bus to hold it charged for a while. So he uses a specialized grounding probe - about 1/8" diameter copper rod with a reinforced handle - to discharge it. Unfortunately, he has misunderstood what was inside the breaker box and is actually shorting out the ship's main battery! This is a couple hundred volts DC, and a few thousand amp-hours of capacity, and it delivers enough current to instantly vaporized the grounding rod. He's knocked on his ass by the arc blast. Fortunately, he was correctly considering the box to be energized gear and was wearing a full set of PPE, suffering only minor flash damage to his eyes.
why elixir over rust? I'd assume rust makes more sense because you don't need gc
In sports betting, the odds are dynamically adjusted by the operator, who is also part of the game. Not quite the same as poker.

Losing less does not mean you can win, which is the case in poker. To the best of my knowledge, it is the case in fantasy sports too.
Would you write something for biologists entitled "working on Drosophila considered harmful"?
Others might also find interesting this video from 1982 where Brian Kernighan demonstrates building a simple spell checker using UNIX command line utilities: https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=5m15s
AFAIK most of them use some blend of edit distance (usually a modification of Levenshtein distance to support transpositions) and often a phonetic algorithm like Soundex[1].

Dictionaries are most often stored as a radix trie, and a bloom filter can be used to quickly check if a word is misspelled.

EDIT: I'm dumb, you said "from then". Whoops. If I had to guess it was probably similar, as radix trie + bloom filter is a very memory efficient way to store and search the dictionary.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
Never use Wikipedia as a sandbox
One of my math papers I wrote using Wikipedia's sandbox was deleted.

It was deleted for U5: Misuse of Wikipedia as a web host

I seldom visit the page ,and I assumed it would remain safe up there until I eventually would type it up on latex later. Nope. Gone. months of work deleted.

Some of these editors are awful. There is no respect or regard for anyone's work. They see something that they don't like , it's gone. I thought that the sandbox was safe, but it's not.

Feel completely gutted like the rug was pulled out from under me

NOTHING YOU WRITE IS SAFE ON WIKIPEDIA
Thanks, I missed that too. Cool to see Hendricks as the example content.
This post was top on the front page an hour ago. It seems to have been removed. Why?
18 months in review: The birth of a startup
Yes, I implemented exactly this approach. But for the binary expressions I am using Pratt, it is faster and easier to construct left-associative nodes.
ESET Smart Security 8 Username and Password 2015 to 2016
In my country (Romania) HIV was actually spread through vaccinations. Indeed that is how I got infected as an infant. The problem was supposedly not with the vaccines themselves though but with the fact that they were reusing needles.
I always say that BSDs are the most popular operating systems... everyone uses them thousands times per day... Even you windows users, your updates are served from FBSD server.
BB-8 was a great character and I wouldn't mind purchasing the bot with its movie-merchandising premium, but it seems like its customizability has been rendered to something more limited than owners of other Sphero products are used to...can anyone comment on this? https://sphero.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205957950-Q-Wil...
Compiz works with Ubuntu Mate, unsure about specific bugs because I've found I haven't really needed it.
Misleading charts of 2015, fixed
Sure, but the odds aren't 10% or 40%, they're more on the order of 1% to 3%. If you can pick winners at a 40% rate, you're doing orders of magnitude better than even the top VCs in the industry, and your talent is worth billions.

Realistically nobody plays at those odds, the actual odds being played are much, much lower.

Which also means that, even through a long career, you're not taking on enough jobs to get a reasonable shot at a win - 10 jobs with a 2% chance of winning each aren't good odds - you have a 18% chance of scoring a win.

All the while you're giving up a lot of money to do so - BigCo's will pay you easily $100-200k more per year. So even if you switch jobs yearly, 10 jobs = 10 years = $1-2M on the table to play for 18% odds.

Which is also why investors who are able to choose well win - YC for example invests in over 200 companies a year. Unless you're switching jobs every week you're not going to be able to raise N high enough to make a difference - at YC's scale a 2% chance of winning for each company means there's a 98% chance at least one company wins.

The entire idea here is that nobody has predictive power high enough to the degree of 10% vs. 40%. Realistically when choosing between two competing startups you're choosing success odds in the low single digits.

Not to mention the rash of articles in the past week about the low payouts you're likely to get even if the company succeeds. Engineers don't walk away from modern startups with 7-figure payouts, low 6-figures is more likely. So realistically even if you are able to pick companies at a 40% accuracy (again, astronomically higher than reality) your expected payout is lower than the $1-2M you're leaving on the table in order to play.
Reviewing 20 years of email clients
"Why not just...?"

I enjoy that you offer up a quite complex, confusing, often insecure, and error-prone methodology with this phrase.
Do you actually believe this accomplishes anything… This data is still in their server logs[1] (and streamed directly to NSA).

USE TOR BROWSER FOR BROWSING. DON’T STAY LOGGED INTO GOOGLE. Anything less is just a waste of time.

And seriously, Tor in 2015 is fast enough for 1080p h.264, there’s really no excuse.

[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-trig...
SFI Marketing Group
And im just going to lie anyway. How many people tell the truth on those?
Librelist
That 450VDC electrolytic capacitor wasn't the worst failure I've experienced with such a device. I had one let go about 3 meters away from me. It sounded like a shotgun had gone off, and left my ears ringing for a few minutes. There wasn't anything left but the terminals.
In the future I believe you are going to see less emphasis on the aggressive speedup of C code for traditional CPUs. Instead you will see many more gadgets with simpler processors that run C code slower in the effort to save power. GPGPUs and algorithm specific hardware (e.g. video, crypto, network, DSP, neural nets) will fill out the rest of the chip. At some point GPUs will have enough raw power and GP features for it to be possible to run an instance of a late-80's operating system within the working set of a single GPU processing element (perhaps with virtual memory emulated as in jslinux.) At that point the need for a power hungry CPU and artificial CPU/GPU distinction will start to fade away completely. Along with Peak Oil we will have Peak CPU.

So, in general I am saying that the road to better performance will not be in aggressive compiler optimization, but rather in higher level design tools to manage totally new software/hardware abstractions. Binaries will be specified at a higher level and look more like source code. At this point my crystal ball becomes admittedly a bit fuzzy.
See I don't even know or remember what Compiz is anymore. My mom doesn't know what Compiz is. I guess that's when Ubuntu switched (12-14 or so release?) to the new start launcher and "search apps by typing their name", and everyone hated that? Yeah I remember being annoyed at that for a while, but then got used to it and now like it more. I don't even remember what old desktop looked like.

But I also noticed at the same time, my hardware on the laptop worked and the UI was smoother and more consistent. So saw enough improvements with each release to keep me happy with it.

Maybe at some point I stopped being a Linux distro hobbyist who was interested in what individual packages were called, and what kernel version each ran. I used to love that stuff. I started with Mandrake Linux, used Redhat, Gentoo for a while. But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.
All of our infrastructure is CentOS (or derivative) in every single place I've ever worked. I used a mix of Mac and Windows at home and work. I don't want a linux distro with UI overhead.
Stabilized Falcon 9 first stage landing footage
Source and technical discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3y171w/stabilized_f...
Why all the criticism this is a great tool, it might not fit your needs, but it is a great tool none the less. He did a great job building it and its useful to some, and its open source and people can tweak it for there own use cases.
Try :mssage instead of :message and see if you get a compile time error
The next big thing didn’t show up this year
I don't know - I'm not familiar with the topic and found the original article vague and uninformative so looked up some more info.
> This released profuse magic smoke and severely damaged the power supply.

Magic smoke needs a magic fume hood or being outside ;-) I can't say for sure, but I would err guessing a lot of smoke coming out of exploding or burning electronic components is not good for you.
I don't think that's a good reason to choose CentOS over Ubuntu really, since Ubuntu can be installed sans UI overhead and Centos can be installed with UI overhead.
Seems like this puzzle might be a candidate for solving using Donald Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm. Setting it up, however, might be as much work as solving it manually.
Why didn't you use Google Docs, or Evernote? Or even email it to yourself? Or just create a fake FB account, and add it to your FB notes?
I plan to hunt for business problems this break. That for me is harder than learning a new language or technology stack.
You are still missing the point. Yes, compilers obviously should not intentionally produce unnecessarily destructive behaviour. But that is not what is happening. What if the code contains "x/y"? Now, the compiler can try to prove that x and y can never be 0 at the same time. But what if that proof doesn't succeed? Maybe x is user input, so who knows what the user will enter at runtime? Now, the language spec could specify that the computation of 0/0 always results in a runtime error. But if it did that, there might be target architectures where the code that would need to be generated to check for that case would have a 300% performance overhead versus code that does unpredictable stuff when it gets fed 0 for both x and y, but in every other case performs a perfectly predictable division. That slowdown would be inacceptable for computation-intensive code where a 0/0 could never happen by construction, even though the compiler can't prove it. And that is why the standard simply says "it's undefined behaviour".
Early on in my 'take things apart for fun' youth, I knew that capacitors held a charge long after power was removed. So when disassembling a camera with built in flash, I popped off the small board holding the 330V capacitor and thought it would be a great idea to discharge it using the end of my needle nose pliers—for the tiny capacitors I'd done this to before, it might've caused a tiny spark, but nothing more.

Well, I learned a valuable lesson that day; even relatively harmless camera flash capacitors can pack quite a charge days after a battery's been removed!

The giant spark made me jump back and fall over my chair, and my pliers still have two nice molten burn marks where it touched the contacts. I'm just glad the pliers had rubber handles!

I'm much more cautious around capacitors these days.
You use the work hack but I do not think you know what it means.
That's what I'm doing now for all my other Wikipedia sandboxes. I just assumed it was safe up there, and it was for almost 2 years, until I checked recently.
Musk's comments about using nuclear weapons to warm Mars were an offhand joke. It confuses me to see many people take them seriously.
Can you explain what the advantage of the gene drive system is here? Looking at the paper, I see "Cassette exchange progeny" was only successful 0.05-0.38% of the time (table 1). So they need ~10,000 flies to get 10 mutants. Then in Supp Figure 3 I see detection of the "modified" DNA in the WT flies, and Figure 1c shows a good proportion of WT flies (denoted as "+/+" in that figure) were infertile as well!

So it seems if we just select those pre-existing infertile mutants we can get the same effect as using all these gene modification and gene drive techniques. I don't see what the advantage is supposed to be.
Ask HN: Practical applications for bb8
here's what i am pondering with at the moment: what would be a present day application for bb8? if it were to exist, would it have things it could do today or it only makes sense in a SW universe or long distance future?
It really depends on the tea, if we still have it or if we can still reorder it from the producer. It will be pretty much impossible for a Shincha (new tea), as they are usually limited in quantity, and quite short lived. On the other end of the spectrum roasted green teas (houjicha) live much longer, so we can usually reorder them from the producer if we are out of stock.
Wow, someone who gets it. Science has really become the religion of our time, "scientists" are the priesthood. We should trust their recommendations unconditionally, without question.
The more domain expertise you have, the less luck you need to identify a worthwhile niche in that domain.

People tend to think that startups are for young people, but most successful startups are actually founded by 40-something year-olds for this very reason.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-age-of-founders-fo...
1) Think positive thoughts, 2) Get exposure to bright light, 3) Exercise, 4) Take tryptophan (not foods containing tryptophan) though this is considered to be a drug in some countries.
In similar vein is valideer: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/valideer