skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my physics professors said that a key skill of good physicist is to be able to characterize a system quickly, prior to bringing in numbers or perhaps even equations. I’ve applied that to a lot of things.

That cuts both ways: https://xkcd.com/793/
> I don't believe C should be a language where the compiler does all sorts of high-level optimisation; it should be a straightforward "do what I say" type of language where you get almost exactly what you write, and the only optimisations should be at the level of things like instruction selection --- the optimisations that a programmer would not be able to do at the source level.

In that case, you're asking for easily 3x-5x less performance in the software you use every day, if not more. You can get essentially this by turning on -O0 and compiling, say, Firefox. This is done in debugging, and it's a terrible browsing experience.

Compiler optimizations are really, really important. CSE, GVN, LICM, SROA, etc. aren't done for fun. They're done because modern software depends on them to be fast.

Writing low-level "post-optimized" code is at odds with good engineering practice. If you can't factor things out into functions and count on an inliner to inline them and then propagate away constants, SROA away intermediate structures, etc. then you're essentially telling programmers they can't factor code out into functions. If your compiler refuses to do the Hacker's Delight integer divide optimization (which, by the way, you need good constprop to make good use of a lot of the time), then you're telling programmers they have to get out their copy from their bookshelf and compute the magic number every time they want to integer divide fast (especially on ARM). This sort of thing puts a huge drain on developer productivity and maintainability.
I too have worked in international aid in Africa, in anti-corruption, anti-money laundering. From what I have experienced, one of the big differences is that Western "Aid" doesn't go towards building palaces and palatial parliaments for the ruling elite, in places surrounded by abject poverty, something the Chinese clearly have no problem with.

http://www.economist.com/node/21525847
Yes arguing from your own ignorance is not the most reliable way to convince someone of something.

In regards intelligence it is the only thing other than work tests that has been shown to have any major correlation with job performance.

Edit. This paper make for a great read on this topic.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_...
Working in say Java doesn't really force consistency, it just pushes the inconsistency up a level. Programmers still get painfully "clever" and idiosyncratic.
Thingsle: Reddit for travellers
This site presented me with five lines of text and a button that grants this site permission to read all my email.

How about no?
> I dislike when Amazon uses USPS to deliver my packages. Usually the package will arrive in the 2 days like expected but it goes to my local USPS office which will deliver the package the next day.

Before I moved West I lived in Harlem, and the USPS was a total sh*t show. The delivery guy for our block would routinely forge signatures to get out of delivering packages to our building, and I'd have to show up at the local post office to claim my packages. Claiming a package involved convincing the postal employee behind two inches of bullet proof shielding that a United States passport is indeed valid identification for federal purposes...
Why the Most Successful Leaders Find a Yin for Their Yang
A club system is hardly something that I would call hi fidelity. Most PA systems are designed for injecting high spl music/audio in the frequency range of ~40-10khz.
Regehr himself "disproved" Fermat's Last Theorem by abusing a non-terminating loop and over-aggressive compilers.

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/140
Hey, just a heads up, that the first link on Goodreads links to each Goodreads user's own book list. Can get the correct link by clicking "share on Twitter" and copying the link from there. E.g. mine is https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015/3669238

Good stuff, though, thanks for sharing your highlights!

Looking at back my own list, a lot of good, but few if any great books on it... The good effect is more in the aggregate learning than any one of them in particular.
Didn't know they started out with Wirth's compiler. Picked the best one. Then market rejected it. Then pivoted to a more successful approach supporting whatever crud was popular. The recurring pattern. Also didn't know they supported that many platforms. Impressive.
Billionaires Are Making Fresh Fortunes Off Terrible NBA Teams
> the whole Dragon book

I learned compilers from Al Aho, and believe me, the class was no better in person. Mostly in-person waxing poetic about his time at Bell Labs...
According to the article, he's coming under legal pressure from various sides who want to stop people from doing this sort of thing. That sounds like an excellent time to shift gears to me.
Ask HN: What did you think of the Force Awakens? (Spoilers)
I always like hearing opinions from people here about politics, code, honeybees, etc. why not the sci-fi cultural event of the year?

I hope to see it again in the theater. It was very good, given the expectations. I thought J.J. Abrams attempt to remake the moments and themes of The Wrath of Khan was a disaster...the desire to retread the themes of the original trilogy got a little tiresome but still a pleasure to watch, and it seems that the second film has been well set-up to forge its own path.
Ask HN: I create a news aggregator for creative coders
I go to Designer News and Hacker news almost everyday, and see there is a need for a different news aggregator just targeted at creative coding, so I built one myself.

link: http://creativenews.space/

The idea is to create a community just for creative coders, those who loves making robots, blinking LED, arduino project, webGL experiment, open frameworks/processing experiment or anything that is creative using code. I called it Creative News

Let me know what do you think? Is there a need for Creative News? Would you use it? What is lacking right now?
Google testing password-free login system
clang does warn about both of those:

$ cat foo.c

#include <limits.h>
int main() {
int x = INT_MAX+1;
*(int *)0;
}

$ clang foo.c
foo.c:3:17: warning: overflow in expression; result is -2147483648 with type 'int' [-Winteger-overflow]
int x = INT_MAX+1;
^
foo.c:4:2: warning: indirection of non-volatile null pointer will be deleted, not trap [-Wnull-dereference]
*(int *)0;
^~~~~~~~~
foo.c:4:2: note: consider using __builtin_trap() or qualifying pointer with 'volatile'
3 warnings generated.
How to write a sales email
Comcast's CEO Wants the End of Unlimited Data
The Top Forbes Hottest Startups of 2015
I broke it down from a security or auditing angle for all sides here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...

Review was fundamental. It would be costly and take talent. So, like you, I proposed something that was open source but not quite free. Not many in OSS want to discuss proprietary OSS options but I think it's a critical conversation as it could get better stuff on the market. Prior conversations here at least showed the term, open source, was highly loaded with the expectation of free distribution due to its history. So, I'll modify the essay and next discussion to use shared source.

Elaborated more on my concept for a hybrid here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10500298
Sweet! I'll try it out at some point then.
Google's Lightsaber Escape
> He's making an argument that Google can't sign on to

That's only true if Google is unwilling to trade ad revenue for subscription revenue. Google Apps for Work is a product area where Google is making that trade-off, and is presumably not cannibalizing their ad business. There is no reason Google can't offer a consumer-friendly subscription service that would be unbreakably private at similar pricing.
It amazes me that someone would be interested in creating a startup for this.
Why one of Kayak's cofounders took his Tesla and became an Uber driver
How to ruin your life with data
Good luck trying to market health and beauty products. Pretending that men and women share the same values/needs/wants/tolerances when it comes to hair products will only end in ruin.

But maybe I'm wrong, and those selling beard and mustache trimmers are missing out on the untapped women's facial hair market. I smell startup.
Makers of OxyContin Bankroll Efforts to Undermine Prescription Painkiller Reform
No it doesn't. It means you have a lot of free time and can be used as cannon fodder for the startup. You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average.

Let's get real, employers /want/ young naive fresh out of college kids who've never been burned and don't know any better than to give their early to mid twenties to a VC/startup for peanuts. Messing around with a rest API is just a sign that you are potential prey, a fresh kill for the hamburger machine.
I think they mean something more along the lines of Dragonflies. They love to eat mosquitoes and their larvae.

Not that we shouldn't do it, I'm sure they can live off knats just as easily.
Brain Cancers Reveal Novel Genetic Disruption in DNA
There is a text book _Discrete Mathematics and Functional Programming_ (VanDrunen) [1] which can be bought off Amazon for $60 new. (I bought a used copy when they were cheap, for <$30.) Its a great place to start.

There is an older version of the manuscript available if you scour Google.

Then there are also the videos that accompany the text book, which can be accessed by anyone. [2]

Because learning a language like ML is for the express purpose of thinking differently its likely beneficial to learn the language in a domain you might be unfamiliar with - possibly somewhat academically, instead of building an application from scratch. ("Oh I know how to solve this problem... I'll write an if-then-else statement with a bunch of branches!" vs. "Pattern matching in a case statement? List deconstruction and matching? This looks interesting.")

1. http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Functional-Progra...
2. http://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/
If you like Alphine and it works for you great, but it's not always an option. If you use Ubuntu and you still want small containers there are a number of options. DockerSlim (http://dockersl.im) is one of these options. A sample node app container build from Ubuntu is around 14MB.
This is the premise of the classic Jiffy Express SNL skit.
Note that it is far from clear [1] is what needs to be done. [1] introduces sterility using gene drive. Sterility is effective but in a sense self-defeating, and it can only suppress, not eradicate, mosquito population.

[2] demonstrates introducing malaria immunity using gene drive. To attack malaria, it is enough to immunize mosquito against malaria, instead of eradicating mosquito. Immunity is also not self-defeating and can reach 100% fixation.

2. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/E6736.full
The population of the species and reproduction is the system itself. You introduce a new genotype to the population. This new genotype has recessive gene that causes sterility. Because it is recessive and not dominate, this new genotype will produce offspring and further spread the gene amongst the population. A female mosquito with two modified parents will be sterile, bringing about the goal of eradication.

EDIT: Regarding the last sentence, two recessive parents are not guaranteed to produce a modified phenotype offspring. My bio is getting rusty. :)
Interesting. I use Radicalie for Cal/CardDav. Maybe if I get some bandwidth, I could look at potentially contribution a JMAP extension.
I'm hesitant to even run it locally and try. I looked through the source briefly and didn't see any dead giveaways, but with how obfuscated, etc. you can make code it almost seems like it'd be safer/faster to re-implement it with help from the code than to try and determine if it does anything tricky.
Isn't the popularity of Beats (not to mention default iPhone headphones) proof that Good Enough is fine for most people
All consumed as audiobooks.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America - Colin Woodard;
I learned much about early US history.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer

Find Me - Laura van den Berg

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

The Dog Stars - Peter Heller

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing;
I was fortunate enough to read this right before Seveneves, so the references made immediate sense. Endurance looks to be popular on this list/this year. How many were inspired by Seveneves?

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age - Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson;
I highly recommend this book. Like The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but for the transistor. Lots of background on John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. I was unaware of the great legacy of John Bardeen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes;
If you have not read this book, read it, just for the summary of discoveries that lead to the atomic bomb.

Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage - Anthony Brandt

The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen - Stephen R. Bown

I am looking for other books similar to Crystal Fire and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, that cover the history of scientific and technological discoveries. Any recommendations?
You said it yourself, these candidates produce exceptional work. The fact that they may be underpaid is a problem with their (group) ability to negotiate pay, not a failure in hiring manager's talent recognition.
Is that used heavily in production? Looking at a container based on usage, and slimming sounds very risky to me.
What is meant by "rules" is, of course, dependant on the definition, but in the field of SLA (second-language acquisition), "rules" are commonly understood to be like rules presented in language classrooms, and separate from "some kind of internal systematic (implicit) knowledge of language".

What's the role of rules in language acquisition is being debated. Check this essay Against "rules" by SLA researchers Jason Rothman and Bill VanPatten.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263791085_Against_r...

EDIT: This non-expert article by the same author is more approachable: https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/images/TLE/TLE_Oct...
I am pretty sure they were talking about people. From the Nature article

"The ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes is that you have more people. That's the consequence," says Strickman.
I'd pay $500 more to only receive packages via UPS. Where I live, USPS and FedEx are so bad it boggles the mind.
For anyone wondering: double -> uintx_t is indeed undefined in C and C++ for values outside of (0, UINTx_MAX), which is kind of a gotcha since, double -> long -> uint8_t is fine (assuming all integer parts of double fit in a long).
Does this replicate/clone Gmail's search engine and spam filter? Those are the only things that could differenciate Gmail from other solutions...
As a fractal artist myself as well, I've been ranting about this to myself lately. I've been thinking that the problem is inherent to algorithmic art in particular; I guess I can actually see some worth in renderings of e.g. Pixar characters, but maybe that's because I have kids who appreciate them, or because I've browsed Pixar art books.

What I've noticed is that in order to make fractal art that typical art gallery-types find worth their time, you have to take on a kind of Simon Cowell role and inject your own intuition or library of culturally-attuned sensation memories into the creation phase, turning it into more of an audition phase. "This one just sucks...this one is OK...this one needs a little tweak and it'd look great, kind of like a rainy summer day." In order to make your product useful to other humans, you have to typologize, sometimes really brutally, and especially moreso since your computer can just keep pumping this stuff out.

If you go the other way and shun the story, shun the critique, and say "typology is for the closed-minded," you can end up in scientism, completely free of such hyperbolic typology but lacking a compelling presentation of a set of convergences. Lacking a story, lacking any depth with which humans really identify.

No matter how much machinery goes into computing scientific results, the results are still somewhere along a normal curve, and unfortunately that's not super useful to humans. But psychologically we find extreme typologies very useful. As a group, we'd rather say "ooh, a sports car" or "oh wow, dripping ice cream!" than "oh, it's a blob that could be any number of things."

At its most vain, the typology-free approach can end up as a sort of pornography, an obsession with process to the exclusion of context, and to the deep satisfaction of barely anybody.

That's why I really get frustrated with fractal art or generative art. After a point I have to put on my designer hat, and I might as well have painted the thing from scratch anyway. Or I might as well have used the software more like an artist would use Alchemy, as a sort of imagination cue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYYSxZZzgjc
There's a lot of wishful thinking via anecdotes here. Is there any real research to look at?
Similar to that, when he mentioned constantly interrupting = egomaniac. I've noticed that I'm fairly bad about interrupting people, but I don't think it's because I feel I'm way better than everyone else and my opinion is so important, but that's what my parents and some of my close friends do as well. When I do it with people besides them, I usually stop myself and maybe apologize, but by then it's too late.

I know I must be annoying, but surely that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer.
Since, according to Chandler Carruth, the aim for Clang is to not do optimizations based on undefined behaviour without a corresponding instrument in ubsan[0], I don't see much traction on this well-defined/boring C effort.

You know, in my experience, things would be great if people actually turned on warnings. I write all my new code with -Weverything with a few noise categories turned off. Everybody should build code at this level from day 1.

[0] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer.html
I thought it was great. I enjoyed the humour that they put into it. It seemed like they really cared about what the fans thought of the movie and that made me happy.
With multiple gene drivers you can drive a species to extinction - the power of CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive system is that you can make multiple different drivers easily.

Yes you can use gene drivers to create immunity in mosquitos against carrying certain diseases, but that only targets one disease at a time. Better to remove the vector rather than try to make the vector less dangerous.

This paper by George Church is a pretty good overview [1].

1. http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/07/17/007203.f...
And, before you know it, we'll have realized the dream of Urbit, in JS ;)

Always bet on JS!
They will end the year with $20m revenue and the deal is $20m cash plus incentives. So effectively a 1x deal at the outset, rising to 2x if they meet performance and retention goals.
Remedies for Dandruff Problem
I was thinking about this. You beat me to it. Great video basically showing those are gambling sites and the only people who make it big are mathematicians with tons of spreadsheet and custom R scripts.
PixelBlock – Block email open tracking in Gmail (v 0.0.17 released)
You would not release a gene into the wild, but the CRISPR-Cas9 system. The long tail risk would be tremendous.
40 Resources from 2015 Guaranteed to Make You a Better Startup Founder
GCC has an intermediate representation. It's just not exercised as a separate project (like LLVM). It's far from "single pass"
Would you like to share your experience about audio books?
I've been noticing the same thing with their third party couriers. They get a lot of complaints from people too. I complain every time, I look through the forums and see people complaining. They are essentially these shipping companies that formed purely to undercut UPS and work with Amazon. I wouldn't even be surprised if Amazon had some type of stake in these alt couriers that are coming out of nowhere. They all have horrible reviews and nobody likes them, but apparently Amazon sees this as acceptable because they are the biggest and the best and losing a few customers probably doesn't hurt them.
Financial scams in China nabbed at least 24B in 2015
And if you gave even 1x prefs on that vanity raise, then you've turned your "okay not great" outcomes into bad outcomes.

Rule of thumb: if somebody raises at exactly or just over s billion, they did it because it feeds their ego and every other excuse is just an excuse.
But what if they move to bing!? :)

Yeah "google" may be good since the intent is to get around pay walls. That or some sort of phrase like "search url" or something less awkward that I apparently can't think of.
> it becomes much quicker to simply query the information instantaneously yourself rather than having to go through a third party.

But we are still going through a third party to make that query. We are not doing it ourselves. Information is more centralized than ever. Google itself organizes it into a hierarchy. It may be more fluid than a bunch of people shuffling papers in an office or government building but the basic structure is still there. Besides, raw information is only one small part of the story. The other half of information is generation which is still boxed by responsibility (a long term information store in human form) that is most often, even today, most easily navigated to through a hierarchical organization. It might not look like the old hierarchies but that doesn't mean they are not there.
Really? Let's see, we got the Baht, Dong, and...kip (laos is very dollarized also, though). None of those are particularly appealing. You could argue for the Baht maybe.

The only reason the Cambodians are using dollars anyways is (a) no trust for the riel, and (b) a peacekeeping operation in 1993 injected a lot of dollars into the economy, and the people just went with it. It doesn't get anymore organic than that!
> You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average.

This is what glassdoor reviews are for, and is entirely dependent on the company. Besides that it's a two way street, you bolster up the resume and if it turns out it's not what you expected than you now have the skills to find an environment that is what you're looking for. Alternatively you could of course spend your early-mid 20s being homeless and join the gutter punks in trying to sell weed to those VCs around The Haight instead, but that's not as fulfilling or lucrative IMHO.
They recently added support for SHA-256 (both full digest and truncated to 160 bits) hashes in their codesign system. I haven't seen it on iOS yet and suspect that it is only for OS X at the moment.
Sure, but if you have a general graph (network) of more than a few nodes all trying to communicate meaningfully with each other you quickly run out of bandwidth.