skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm referring to the article, so I'm referring to what it means by syntax, which is "your decision to use curly braces is of utmost importance."

I specifically added this statement to help clarify: "It's not that the future has no textual syntax at all, of course." The difference between a text file and a database is not that the database contains no text, but rather the relations between items is discretely managed.

What I'm saying is this: storing a program as a text file was understandable in the 1970's but now is what a brain-damaged, drooling Bonobo might do.

Would you store your payroll as text? Really? "Bob is too be paid eighty thousand a year;" (And I sure hope the compiler catches the misspelled 'too' or he might not get paid.)

Structure is syntax

No, structure is semantics represented by syntax. And that structure is all that counts, so we want to get there as discretely as possible. We want to get there as data. And when we do that, the syntax can be a decorator pattern; it can be what you want it to be and something else to someone else, all without modifying its core meaning. And what happens when it's just a decorator pattern? It loses its importance.
Snark, indignation, and drama always get upvoted. That is a bug in human nature, not evidence of comment quality. HN is a site that tries to care about quality and thus is not driven solely by upvotes. Think of it as a constitutional democracy.

I said your comment was unsubstantive (not 'unsubstantiated') because it didn't contain any information, just a snarky putdown of hypothetical other users. Such a comment is merely a status move and those are always uninteresting, despite their popularity.
Ah I see it. Yeah it's still not perfect, that's why I open sourced it.
It happens often. See "Mr. Nice" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Nice_(book) - he was a pot smuggler who had never entered the states and was not a UK citizen but the DEA managed to extradite him anyway.
Would water volume itself be an issue here? If the device is built in-place so that just a cylinder edge and the bottom is mined out, the rock can be used immediately without having to mine it out or replace its' volume with millions (?) of gallons of water. Also it should be able to lift higher than water without a tank to hold it.
Patents affect both the digital and analog parts, but analog hardware is tricky to develop. I don't find it odd at all that the radio parts of a smartphone costs more than the cpu/gpu SoC.
>It doesn't (or at least shouldn't) attach value to that and take a stance/opinion.

But it does, by its very nature Google removes some websites from its results and attaches a value to websites it does include in the form of Google search result rankings. It appears in other cases the court also found issue with the autocomplete functions produced by Google. Also it would not appear anyone expected Google's algorithm to determine truth as you suggest, at least in this case the Doctor was in communication with Google and she gave Google multiple opportunities to stop publishing/promoting the false content.
Works for Firefox as well. Great tip.
I suspect that you, like most others, are asking for quick ways to be able to estimate times and schedules accurately without doing any work.

That won't happen.

Here are a few previous discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=software%20estimation&sort=byD...

If you're serious, start by reading some of those articles, especially the ones that HN contributors have said are valuable, useful, accurate, or otherwise "good."

Then summarise what you've done, and come back to let us know. People here will then add their experience and expertise.

Don't expect a quick fix - there isn't one. Accurate estimation can be done, but it's hard work.
> So utterly absurd that those things can be patented

Your comment was posted just 30 minutes after the comment listing the patents, so am I correct in guessing that you are judging based on the titles, or perhaps the titles plus the abstracts?

If so, then you very likely don't have anywhere near enough information to figure out whether they are absurd.

A patent title just tells you the very general area that the patent is in. If patents were books, the title would just be telling you what section of the library it goes in.

Continuing the book analogy, the abstract is like the description on the back of the book. It will give you a better idea of what area the patent is in, but still doesn't tell you what is actually patented.

You have to read and understand the claims to know what the patent is actually covering. To understand the claims you must read the specification, because the claims are interpreted in light of the specification. In particular, the specification can narrow the meaning of the claims.

If you really want to be thorough, you also should get the "file wrapper" for the patent. That's the collection of documents associated with the application. In particular, the file wrapper includes copies of any correspondence between the examiner and the applicant. In such correspondence the applicant may say things that narrow some of the claims.
>See why ISPs don't like Netflix?

No, because the $50 was almost entirely profit. You would have to subtract a much smaller number.

Also bandwidth costs drop dramatically over time as we build better fiber endpoints.

And in the real world Netflix will connect directly to your network at a cost of $0. They'll come all the way into your datacenter for free.

Edit: Okay, you changed your post around a bit, let me respond to that.

>Obviously the cost of bandwidth is a lot less than $50/month. But even at 1/10th that figure, it's a big chunk of the variable expense of the service.

The ISPs offer different plans. There's usually a minimum plan that's something like 1-2mbit. Just to reach the tier where you are capable of pulling down 10mbps, you have to pay an extra chunk of money, and that covers the cost of equipment and domestic bandwidth all by itself.

If those minimum plans are sold below cost, that's their problem, and they should stop gouging at the high end to make up for it. If those minimum plans are not sold below cost, then something isn't adding up.
What ISP do you have? Mine is Time Warner and it started with $35/month (after applying their first-time subscriber discount) >4 years ago. The first 3 years, it was 15Mbps, then it was increased to 20Mbps. But the cost eventually increased to $55/month in 2015 and by then, I cannot justify spending that much for an online access as a grad student (usually am not home), so I told them to downgrade me back to 15Mbps for $35/month just a few months ago. Overall, I do not notice much of a difference in speed decrease, but I wish there is more ISP available in my area other than Time Warner, who seems to have a monopoly here...
considered the Chinese version of the Nobel Peace Prize

Not by any Chinese, or by anyone who knows anything about it.
Yeah, I like it a lot, but I still wonder about its accuracy.
Isn't that the whole point? I get the impression that Zimbabwe's policymakers have a terrible reputation, so they are deliberately tying their own hands in order to restore confidence in their currency.
There was also the Handspring Visor Phone (2000) and the Qualcomm PDQ (1999). And then there where a bunch of phones from Nokia, the Windows CE phones, etc. Apple wasn't the first, we all know that. I'd say that the iPhone has as much a spiritual debt to the Newton as it does to the touchscreen phones that came before it.
Once you've hit hyper-inflation, your options are already equally limited.
Let's just say I started yesterday, and I'm already happy that I can recognize all the letters by now. "Reading" as such (in the sense of reading a book) comes later ;-)
>But when the DOJ imaged the servers, they got Schmitz's mail spools, and they have Schmitz and his employees in black- and- white discussing payment systems that disbursed cash to users specifically based on pirated media.

This is very similar to the emails from YouTube's early days where some of the first employees are openly discussing how to get more pirated material.
I agree, the term "mission" has become a hackneyed startup cliche. A better way to put it might be, "you think the problem the startup is trying to solve is an interesting one and you are motivated to help solve it".

Great startups don't necessarily need an important problem to solve, such that solving it might be described as a mission.
There are some really good tips here but I think it only glosses over the most important one which is purpose. I've been reading how important it is to have an intellectual need when learning maths even if that need is just to solve a current problem (instead of being given the concepts first without struggling).
That is so cool. Now I want to install a hydraulic piston under my house. During the day excess solar production lifts the house, at night as the house slowly sinks it provides power. Zero foot print chemical free energy storage.

Would make for an interesting front walk, that basically would turn into a staircase as the house went up :-)
Tail Blazer, the log tail program has a new release
Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
That was a painfully bad explanation of why random errors cause an over-estimate of distances. There's a much better visual explanation:

Suppose you have the true location for both points. Draw a circle with a center at the first point that goes through the second. Replace the second point with a circular distribution of errors around the original location. Any error outside the original circle increases the measured distance, while any error inside the original circle decreases it. More points are going to be outside the circle, since that's the direction it curves.

This explains a qualitative feature about the formula given - that the error tends towards zero as the distance between two points increases. It also maps well with the case where d approaches zero, where any measurement is simply the result of the random effect.
> Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making.

Not really. Its good for applying established processes and resisting change, which includes being good at making quick decisions on situations that have been anticipated (but, also, often very bad at making quick decisions outside of the realm of pre-considered possibilities.)
Thanks for the offer! I'll bear it in mind.

I found a book at the university library that aims to teach Koiné as if it were a living language - i.e. instead of translating Euclid et al. from the get-go, one starts with simple life-like conversations; also listening and speaking are included in the curriculum. I'm working my way through that at the moment.
It looks like colored paper covered with black pigment, then then black was scraped away to make the lines.
+1 for marshmallow - most of the serialization libraries are 80% there, but marshmallow has it 95% down - all the weird corner cases about nested models and lists of nested models and all that. Plus the dev is very helpful and courteous on github.
Looks good! There are some "apps built with Electron" lists you could add this to (like the one on the frontpage of electron.atom.io).
We're in luck, Animats: a group is reviving and modernizing Modula-2. So far, most of their decisions sound very rational in the FAQ:

http://modula-2.info/m2r10/pmwiki.php/Project/FAQ

One of few I enjoyed reading on new language work. The design goals are sensible, too, given Wirth languages have already achieved them. I'm still for ditching the uppercase and letting editors take care of that part. Don't want carpal pinky syndrome hitting shift or caps lock all the time haha.

Anyway, some good news seeing Modula-2 get revived and with a M2-to-C compiler in works given its my favorite C alternative. Has a nice compromise between their simple, low-level, high-performance needs and my preference for safe, easier-to-integrate, maintainable and compiles fast. Your thoughts?
Megaupload Founder Can Be Sent to U.S., Judge Says
What do you mean cutting employees out? Cutting them out of what? Their were no returns made on the investor's capital. There's nothing to be cut out from.

Taking investor's money and building a company that is only worth the value of what the investors put in and then being pissed you didn't get rich in the process is pretty nuts.
Takes me back to the past when Metrowerks created a Modula-2 compiler for the Mac:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrowerks
In a language with macros that might be ambiguous, since there will usually be a phase called "macro expansion".
The simplest parser style is assembly code: one line, at most one statement. But there's always some desire to get a little more code density than assembly, it's just a matter of how one wants to go about the problem.

The syntax of older-style BASIC, for example, hews close to the assembly parsing model, just adding a few special cases for different keywords. Algol syntax has a tradition of design based around algorithm description first, with generalized power second. The Forth or Lisp approaches, because they are very generic and powerful, naturally pull those languages in the direction of extensive metaprogramming.

In that sense one can see that the more sugary syntaxes treat the programmer more like an end-user, because they direct the workflow. Generalized ones encourage a DIY approach to everything. There are tradeoffs to each strategy.
Does that mean Apple stole Ericsson's technology? (at least that's the argument Apple used against Android OEMs in the past).
tldr did a story on the Ripoff Report.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/40-the-flower-child/
You may want to consider that Google allegedly had knowledge of Ripoff Report's practices, and had already suspended their AdWords account because of unsavory business practices, but refused to remove the defamatory content against her: http://www.authorizedstatement.org/statements/authorized-sta...
But in an "average" area I can't walk across the street to get a new job as an engineer. There's a LOT of safety that comes from that.
Pyrasite. When you have a running python app that is behaving oddly and you can't replicate the bug elsewhere, you can run python code inside the running process - without any preparation beforehand - to display stack trace, output vars,...
It’s incredibly annoying when a big multinational ISP asks you to pay 120$/month for a connection with throttling, data caps, and blocked services of competitors, while a small, local business manages to provide the same for 30$.
> the MO for said agencies to compromise OSS projects is to play the long game of making numerous benign commits

Are there examples of this actually happening— that is, a nominally trusted committer intentionally adding a backdoor to a widely used OSS project? If this is in fact "the MO for said agencies", then there should be several examples you can point to.
Do you have some sources for your first claim?

It seems like an irrational thing to do, putting a valuable scientist in danger doesn't advance the war effort.
>Plus the lowered-bar (i.e. cloud) to starting a large scale company

This, I think, is a good point. It's much easier to scale a startup these days, and scaling is one of your major headaches as a founder with a good product.
This also varies by the target audience.

Stuff that is released via publically-tracked torrent (i.e. for mass-market audiences) often targets around 1.5-2 GB for a feature-length movie in 1080p. In contrast, releases aimed at Usenet (the technical crowd) are often 6-7 GB and sometimes as large as 11-13 GB for the same movie.

On the other hand the situation is much more equitable for audio. Lossless audio torrents are pretty common even in the torrent world, and due to the typically greater number of torrents available the overall selection of lossless files is probably at least as large as on Usenet.

I would assume that private trackers tend towards higher-quality releases.
oooh duodecacorn :-)

Palintir is one of those companies that strikes me as one that really never goes public. If someone ever built The Machine, I would expect it to be them.
iOS: Let’s Build a Network Abstraction Layer
(rewritten after looking up Linux's adaptive mutex)

Assuming you mean something like http://stackoverflow.com/a/25168942/582, you basically need a full mutex anyway, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use a mutex directly. I don't think you can really implement this adaptive mutex in userland because you can't just use a spinlock + a mutex (you'd have to lock the mutex every time anyway, which defeats the point of having the spinlock) and syscalls are not considered public API (the kernel is allowed to change syscalls between versions, libc/libsystem is the only public API for them).

FWIW pthread mutexes were sped up 2-2.5x in "new OSs" to compensate for spinlocks being illegal (https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/676852111527706624).
In practice, writing code consists mostly of reading; either to (re)understand how some other part of a large system works, or to figure out why the code is incorrect.
> According to the proof the fractions are in Q not R.

That's a circular argument. During the proof this is not given, only after the proof.
This is not an attempt to avoid say, knowledge of what a house looks like. If anything, Professor Duffy is more than happy to have the legitimate information about her reputation and this case out there. The problem is with the placement and publicity of false information. She's made multiple public statements and attempts to broadcast her side of this, so it isn't the sort of thing where the Streisand Effect would apply.
>We also remove content in response to valid legal requests

>If you want to remove a photo, profile link, or webpage from Google Search results, you usually need to ask the website owner (webmaster) to remove the information.

It seems she didn't get a judgement against Ripoff Report first. Google is not to blame here.
The problem is that it's not an easy thing to estimate. I know I've had equity grants that I thought were worth $x but turned out to be worth $x * 4. But you don't sell all of it at once, and you don't pay all of the tax bill when you sell, so it's a very hard thing to know. $200-300k after taxes is, I'm sure, not a rare outcome over a 4-year vest.
US Christmas lights use more energy than entire countries
> It seems like an irrational thing to do, putting a valuable scientist in danger doesn't advance the war effort.

Nobody claimed it was rational, and just because they were scientists doesn't make them immune to "patriotically" endangering themselves "for the war effort."
> Anyone who follows the work of Randall Wray and Bill Mitchell knows this is a terrible idea.

Retiring the domestic currency is an existing policy that this article is only tangentially about.

Adding the yuan to the set of currencies support by the government for public uses given the absence of a domestic currency is the subject of the article.

> Relinquishing sovereignty of your currency (or pegging it to another currency or commodity) only narrows domestic policy space.

Once your currency has so little credibility that no one is using it in practice, its advantage in terms of domestic policy options is minimal, anyway.
> You aren't allowed to just tear up people's yards and run cables through them,

That’s why you put PVC pipes to every house and run the cables through them – to replace the cables you just have to tie the new one to the end of the old one, and pull the old one out.
Google has forward caches with many ISPs.

https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html
Lafferty has his own niche ... some of his stories won awards, http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/honors/
They are completely abandoning their currency, which is a strange way of restoring confidence in it; it may be a measure to restore confidence in the economy, at the expense of the currency.
From the article: requires "Possibly compact, homogeneous rock with little tendency to fracture." That's rare geology. It's rare for a tunneling project to find nice hard homogeneous rock through which a tunnel can simply be bored without supports. Both the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland and the NYC East Side Access, although in areas where such rocks exists, ran into incompetent rock.

In practice, they'd probably have to line both the hole and the plug with something like tunnel lining segments.
If it's unlikely that they'll go public, how do the investors hope to get their money (and more) back? I know there are other ways, but I don't have a feel for which kinds of arrangements would really be likely.
It's true that the economics of bandwidth depend on the hour.

I don't know about surge pricing, but I'd definitely join an ISP that just offered uncapped off peak speeds.
Engineers demo first processor that uses light for ultrafast communications
It's simple to me because Rails doesn't know or care about the websocket server, it just understands that it needs to POST data to an end point with certain data. I can have 1 or 100 Rails instances posting to the single Faye server.

The Faye server doesn't know or care about Rails. It just needs to do its job of broadcasting the event to subscribers.

Sidekiq is there for me to easily monitor the events processed, and in theory the Rails app may not be in the same private network as the Faye server, so I decided to make the POST requests happen in Sidekiq. It seems like a good spot for that, since it's a "send it and move on with life".

The Faye server pretty much runs itself, it's been going for months and months without maintenance. Sidekiq gets updated once in a while because I'm using it for other things too and sometimes the app code for it changes, not a big deal tho.
Heh, I was just in Zimbabwe. The US dollar is the de facto standard currency. Even the ATM machines dispense dollars.
Hey man, just telling it like it is.

http://www.slashgear.com/google-buys-fiber-internet-system-i...

Google would not have bought an entire municipality's local fiber for so cheap unless some shady deal was going on. IIRC, Kansas City's deal required Google to wire up the schools with 1 GBPS internet for example (definitely a "local government deal").

I have no idea what backroom deal Google made with Provo, Utah, but something similar HAD to happen for Google to win the fiber for only $1.

Politics is politics, no matter the players.
The tale of the Snowflake Man
RNTS Media buys mobile ad network Heyzap (YC W09) for $45M
So in the last paragraph the author imagines a dystopian future where you have to plan which movie you are going to watch tomorrow so Netflix can pre-download it for you during the night, and for some reason he thinks that it would be a desirable scenario. LOL.
Quoting:

Andrew Kosove, co-CEO of production-finance company
Alcon Entertainment, was sent the “screener” copy ...
signed for by an office assistant and later shared
... been able to pinpoint Kosove's copy of the film
as the source ... from a watermark on the DVD ...

"I've never seen this DVD," Kosove tells THR in an
interview. "It's never touched my hands. We're going
to do more than cooperate with the FBI. We're going
to conduct our own investigation ... "

Indeed, it is likely that Kosove is a victim in this
leak rather than the perpetrator. ...

So, no, it hasn't been traced back to him, and the article explicitly says as much. So the title is a lie.
A web-based version by Vi Hart and Nicky Case of the segregation model:

> http://ncase.me/polygons/
Check out their $1M job
https://angel.co/palantir-technologies/jobs/95978-deployment...
awesome work!.... no more robomongo :)
After all these years, I'm still not really sure what Palantir does exactly.