skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, what?

Git doesn't do remote propagation all by itself, so if you're thinking "distributed" like DNS, then yeah of course devs don't do that. Of course we "rely" on a central repository. But if github goes down for good, we change our remotes and the migration is painless.

What else would you want? Propagation would be neat but is completely unnecessary (which is why it hasn't been done). But if the remote loses all my data, well, I and every other dev have a copy locally and we can start working from a fresh remote.

Github repositories are "authoritative" by convention. These things are a feature when you work in a team. In some of my personal projects, it's not the Github repository that's authoritative but my local repository. I really don't understand what you're trying to get at, honestly... git is popular because it covers all those use cases.
There was nothing wrong with Python 3, what they really messed up is to give so much time for the transition. 10 freaking years!!! That's the problem, people won't do anything unless you light fire under their asses.

Ruby f-cked up with 1.8 to 1.9 transition (notice that it was also a minor version change) yet people migrated without a problem because they knew that if they stay on 1.8 soon their programs will stop working everywhere.

Python did everything they could do to help migrate (it even allows you to install all versions (I know there are no problem with anything between 2.4 - 3.5) and have them run without conflicts side by side.

The only mistake they made is to give too large window for migration. People just now started working on migrating to 3.x because development on 2.7 stopped in 2015 (even though 3.x was available for 7 years now). And there are still people who will wait until 2020 (once security patches will stop being provided) until they will decide to move.

There's so much FUD with Python 3, and goes as far as people wondering which version to use to learn it. I mean learning all the difference is at most as couple hours (and I'm being conservative here). For a beginner the only major difference is that the print is a function and not a statement, the whole unicode is barely noticeable unless you are writing code that should work on 2.x which shows it was needed, because wringing correct unicode code in 2.x is hard.
Python 2 is, yep. And Java, and C++, and PHP, and all those other languages that were super popular at the turn of the millenium but now feel really dated.

Actually, C++ has an even bigger claim to the title, because it now has "modern" versions that are much better, more standards-compliant, and have language features borrowed from newer languages...but a number of enterprises are stuck with no-exceptions, no-STL, no-move-semantics subsets because that's how all the existing code is written.
I recently tried to get my mobile provider to set up data roaming while I was away from home. (You can't set up data roaming from home, for reasons that remain mysterious and unexplained.)

The fact I was using a mobile device didn't stop my provider's site from asking three times if I wanted to take part in a survey, or from displaying a floating "Would you like to chat?" dialog that was so big it literally covered a quarter of the mobile screen - and which moved to the same position whenever I try to scroll it out of the way.

It also didn't help my provider provide the right links to the right content.

Eventually I gave up. My gf already had data working, so we used her phone for everything.

The experience was impressively terrible.

Unfortunately if you don't have UI clue, mobile is just another way to get stuff wrong.
Yes, and the core of this problem is that "common sense" is exactly what kills people. The laws are what they are to make things orderly, but as we know, everyone thinks they're above average and therefore can ignore the rules at their discretion.

We're slowly learning, industry after industry, that achieving reliability and safety in complex environments means following the rules without cutting corners. Airlines have embraced this and achieved safety. Construction workers too relinquished a great deal of autonomy, and thus skyscrapers can be built quick and yet they don't fall down. Surgeons are embracing it too, and surgeries are getting safer. But it's not something that sits well with people. It feels like losing something. And people need to learn to trust the system.

Anyway, I hope we won't be teaching self-driving cars to ignore the laws. They're our best hope at actually forcing some reason into human drivers. That is, for the short while before they get replaced altogether.
You mean, other than the form on the web site that says "Sign up to get access"?
Libusb: Maintainer fail
What a very touching and poignant story.

I dated a girl in high school who was adopted as a baby from a Russian orphanage by an American family. She explained some difficulties with adjusting with non-biological parents: the adoptee cannot help but feel like an impostor.

Adopted as babies, I suppose in some ways it’s easier to transition into a new family. Babies typically do not remember much about their biological parents at such young ages.

A theme in her life was to meet and reconnect with her biological parents. After playing “private eye,” she was able to track down her biological mother and her now half-sister. She and her biological parents keep in touch, but the true heroes here are the adopting parents (like the Esparzas). Without them, who knows what would have happened.
Thasos Group / Senior Quantitative Researcher / NYC Based / Full Time ONSITE

What:
Want to help redefine macro-economic forecasting for the 21st century? It ends up location data is a pretty good indicator of economic activity. We source and combine billions of geolocation events daily from mobile devices world-wide. By measuring real-time, aggregate human mobility, we estimate changing fundamentals for companies, industries, and key macroeconomic indicators. The team is world class and founders include Greg Skibiski, Founder of Sense Networks, and Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Head of Human Dynamics Research at MIT. We don't have any institutional VCs and we're excited to own our destiny. The business is growing and we need more curious and capable minds!

The role:
* Build efficient, scalable models to extract real-time economic insights from novel, large-scale data.
Enhance and develop techniques for normalization, noise reduction, and error identification and correction across many disparate data sources with years of historical data.
* Work with portfolio managers to assess financial applications for signals, which may include asset selection, investment timing, and risk control.

Requirements:
* Masters degree or PhD in a quantitative field.
* 3+ years experience in fields related to financial markets.
* 5+ years experience in writing code for data analysis (Python experience is preferred) and applying advanced methods from statistics, machine learning, or related fields.
* Self-starter with a demonstrated ability to devise and build end-to-end solutions with minimal oversight.

For more information, please send cv/LinkedIn, GitHub etc... to careers@thasosgroup.com
Was this the project that had some special plan for making native extensions work? I remember seeing something like that a while back on HN.
Management really believes that the open space is more collaborative and has a better "buzz" that really does feel, to the manager, like more work is getting done.

Of course, employees hate open space. Constant distractions, and the pervasive feeling of being watched by everyone, all the time.

It's really interesting that management is so out of touch. (I say this as a manager who loved big open offices, until I read on HN - 1000 times over - how consistently employees hate open offices).
My two cents: I work for a medium-sized company that has used Fabricator to build UI component libraries for clients. In each project where Fabricator was used, the deliverable source code (CSS and JS) has been both messy and inconsistent. This is due to that fact that Fabricator does not assist or guide the developer when they develop CSS and JS for their modular design components. (See http://fbrctr.github.io/building-a-toolkit/assets.html) This diminishes any ability to reuse components/widgets/atoms etc across projects.

The tool does enforce and encourage atomic design architecture when it comes to HTML. At best, I'd describe Fabricator as a static-site/documentation generator. However, I wouldn't recommend using it Fabricator to generate documentation in the 'toolkit' way that's recommended in it the docs because it tightly couples that static site/documentation generation to UI library source. There are plenty of static site generators that work well for generating docs that I'd rather use (jekyll, hugo, etc).

I'd encourage developers considering Fabricator to proceed with caution. Although, it boasts ease of UI development based on atomic designs, the tool does not aide in code modularity or UI component re-usablity.
Automatic differentiation dates back at least to 1974, in a language called PROSE that ran on the CDC 6600 family [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROSE_modeling_language
It's not only for people hitting reload, it's also for people visiting the app more than once such as slack, gmail, facebook or inbox. Pretty cool. It doesn't solve the first load though that's ok for web apps.
And Cornell Tech campus in NYC starts running business in 2017.
Yes we have an interpreter for C to run C extensions. It runs real C extensions from Oily PNG and PSD Native 3x faster than native, due to inlining C and Ruby together.

http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/

People are now working on an LLVM bitcode interpreter instead, as this should support many languages not just C. There will be info about this at FOSDEM.
Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.
Image recognition requires AI. It used to be believed that it was simple. A famous AI researcher in the 50's once sent a bunch of grad students to solve it over the summer. They then started to realize just how complex and impossible the task was.

60 years later, we have finally made general purpose learning algorithms, vaguely inspired by the brain, which are just powerful enough to do it. And because they are general purpose, they can also do many other things as well. Everything from speech recognition, to translating sentences, or even controlling robots. Image recognition is just one of many benchmarks that can be used to measure progress.
I think that the fail of Amazon and their AWS would have far worse consequences. Half of the internet would stop working (the half that's not using Google's and Microsoft's services, anyway).
There is always the option of a throat microphone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_microphone
Ask HN: How do I report DDoS attacks?
Is there a good link to what to do when getting DDoSed in the U.S.? I’m not interested in the technical things, but who do I call? Should I contact my webhosting partner first? Is there a hotline or federal department I should call? When should I be calling authorities, during or after an attack?
Tesla Model S Bursts into Flames, Burns to a Crisp While Charging
This characterization is often put forth to explain how the poor can support the Republicans:

>> These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have.

In my experience, coming from fly over country, the real thought process could not be further removed. Where I came from, self reliance and self determination were prized. We might be poor as hell, heating our home with wood we cut, and eating food we grew and shot, but so was everyone else in our area, and there was nothing wrong with that. We weren't taking hand outs and getting along just fine (embellishing and paraphrasing try to make the point here). The idea being, everyone could do this, but were too lazy. We were poor, but not impoverished.

The gp's characterization is actually quite offensive to these people.
> who would want to write an OS in Rust?

It looks like there are a lot of fast moving projects on this now[0], namely Redox[1], and a lot of research and study demo codes. Looking forward to seeing how these efforts come together.

0: http://wiki.osdev.org/Rust

1: https://github.com/redox-os/redox
That operational experience dies out the longer we don't apply that hard-fought knowledge.
Very clever technique! It seems more true to letterforms than SDF. Seems like it might need more texture bandwidth/dependent reads than SDF, but less texture memory as a whole?

I've been looking at different text rendering methods for a VR engine. I wonder if this technique works in 3D space? If so I'll give it a shot, benchmark it against SDF :)
1: I quit fb because the culture in the team I was on was toxic as fuck. Backbiting, backstabbing and oneupmanship. Ain't got no time for that. Fb does not need you and everyone makes it very known.
2: Dunno, dont read about FB since I gives no fucks about them.
3: The team I was on was stagnant as fuck. Lots of bragging but little showing.
4: Probably if you want to put the effort in to get noticed.
5: Cant say for sure, the question is largely subjective.
6: Definitely feels like a large bloated company to me.
7: Lots of politics. Blahhhh.
8: I work for a consulting company now. Much more freedom. Every project has huge impact and I make about 45% more than I made at FB with potential to accelerate my compensation by delivering sooner than deadlines.

TL:DR Fuck FB.

edit -- I worked at FB for two years.
Tintri - tintri.com | Mountain View | Full-time, onsite preferred

Tintri is leading the charge for VM-aware storage and currently hiring across the domains, including filesystems, kernel, platform (linux/x86), and more (virtualization/UI/UX/etc). I'm more familiar with filesystems and platform teams, which are very dynamic and close-knit but ping me to apply or know more about other teams as well. We are looking for freshly minted to senior-level engineers, with zeal for technology in general.

Apply here http://www.tintri.com/careers or ping me (ntrivedi @ tintri).
Can you run PowerShell through this?

Also, you probably want PowerShell if you manage a windows system remotely. (Ok, you specifically maybe not, but many users do)
At the time this post was written, there was no good autodiff implementation for any language that anyone actually used for ML, meaning Python, Matlab, or Java. That's changed now; for example, Python autograd [1] is quite seamless and plays well with the entire Numpy stack.

The bigger trend, though, has been towards DSLs such as Theano or Tensorflow (and Torch to a lesser degree) that include autodiff as a first class design consideration. The ability to build complicated networks out of modular parts, and have the gradient calculations automatically fall out, has been a major driver of the recent explosive progress in deep learning research, as has easy portability between CPU and GPU execution. It'll be exciting to see what happens as these tools mature and especially if they find applications in other fields.

[1] https://github.com/HIPS/autograd
interesting, but already posted a few hours earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817481
Never heard of it before. Thanks, 'Tomte.

Some resources for Common Lisp I found:

- AD in Lisp paper: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/ADIL.pdf

- A library: https://github.com/masonium/cl-autodiff (basics seem to work, but it definitely could use some love to grow)
It's worth noting this is far from unique to Erlang. Any language that models lists this way (Haskell and Lisp immediately spring to mind, but there's plenty of others) share this property.
You might like Mike Padlipsky's Elements of Networking Style.

Out of print but so worth a read.
>>It's also not clear that the model of background apps requesting the user's attention works. How many iPhones have you seen with a red circle containing "23" on the home screen, indicating that 23 apps need updating...and it's been there for months?

I would argue this is working as intended. The advantage of background notification rather than modal is that the user gets a choice. The user could very well decide that your EXTRA SUPER URGENT notification is, in fact, unimportant, and this right here is a perfect example.

No, I don't care if your bullshit app that I've opened a grand total of twice needs a 200 MB update. If anything, there should be an option to force old notification circles to go away after two weeks or so except for legitimately important apps like email and messaging.
Further into the article:

According to USDA data from 2012, intermediate-size farms like mine, which gross more than $10,000 but less than $250,000, obtain only 10 percent of their household income from the farm, and 90 percent from an off-farm source.

The words "like mine" here are misleading, because this farm is nothing at all like the farms the author is referring to. For one thing, virtually all the farms the author is comparing itself to are an order of magnitude bigger. But then:

One day late into my second season owning the farm, a customer walked in while I stood behind the counter spraying down bins of muddy carrots. The man asked how things were going. Financially, I mean. He held a head of lettuce in the crook of his arm, a bundle of pink radishes dangled from his hand.

Most small family farms are not walk-up retail operations; they work through distributors and co-ops.

Modern farming is also intensely technical. There was a time in American history where you could make a living as a wheelwright, too. It's not an outrage that you need to be a major corporation to build vehicles today.
X86, X64 Instruction Latency, Memory Latency and CPUID Dumps
Good point.

The behavior documented in the videos (refreshing the page) could make use of session storage as well as local storage, which might buy a bit more space. But unlike local storage, session storage is not shared across tabs/windows nor persisted over browser restarts. So session storage isn't really useful for the bigger problem.
How to Hire
Why do you assume that professional farmers out in their empirical fields aren't intensively trained in much the same manner as the employees of Dupont? People get degrees in agriculture.
Call the police and they'll sort it out.
10 Most Recommended JavaScript Scene Articles of 2015
As soon as Microsoft open sources PowerShell I'll be more than happy to take a look at it and perhaps add it to MSYS2. Until then for me and many like me, it's neither half bad nor half good, it lies orthogonal to the scale on which I judge software.
MNX Solutions | Monroe, MI | https://www.mnxsolutions.com | ONSITE

MNX Solutions is a server management and cloud hosting provider (https://mnx.io). We are looking for an experienced Linux admin to join our team.

Please reach out and introduce yourself via email to hr@mnxsolutions.com and reference this posting.

Additional information at https://www.mnxsolutions.com/jobs
Its a concern of mine with AWS, no downtime but a $30k for the day of fun bill. Got to tie up this loose end before I wake up broke one day.
Precision NanoSystems | Vancouver BC | Full Time ONSITE

PNI’s mission is to accelerate the development of transformative medicines. Our proprietary technologies solve critical challenges in discovering, developing and manufacturing nanotechnology delivered drugs, called nanomedicines. We work with leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic groups to develop novel nanomedicines and bring these cutting edge therapeutics to patients.

- Software developer
- Senior Mechatronics Engineer
- Mechanical Engineer

https://www.precisionnanosystems.com/about-our-company/#care...
Can you provide sources for the claim that government support for farming is inaccessible due to bookkeeping and compliance expense? I'm a local food person (for reasons other than "food justice") and an investor of sorts, and nobody in this field in Chicago has ever told me that before.
More Female Heroes Appear in Big-Budget Games
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a book about coder's block (procrastination)?
I've had the procrastination problem for some time. Recently have found solution to it. I would like to share the knowledge to many people. I'm wondering if any of you programmers would be interested?
Spin model checker open sourced under 3-clause BSD
Here is an example of how hard it is to run your own mail server these days:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/
Huh?

No matter how susceptible someone is to something, a decision they make is their own.

Trying to absolve the decision maker of responsibility for their decision is a sure way to disaster. If people at large start to feel that they are not to be blamed for their actions and it's considered acceptable to pin the blame on some corporate overlord, things will get out of hand real quick.
Actually, their lives intersected, not just their lifespans: Aristotle studied under Plato.

If you can agree that religion is merely institutionalized ideology

I do not fully agree, as not all ideology would qualify as religion, even if institutionalized. For example, capitalism is not a religion yet it is both an ideology and thoroughly institutionalized. I would agree that religion is a form of institutionalized ideology, but not merely.

But I (think I) understand what you're saying. You're saying that because Plato considered fundamental truths unknowable, he made his vision of the world subject to dogma concerning the interplay between the unknowable and our reality. That is certainly true, but I'm unsure how much prescriptive dogma is in Plato's works.

Regardless how his theories have been adapted by Christianity later, for as far as I know Plato himself:

- never declared empiricism as futile,

- did not give his "Shapes" any agency in our reality,

- did not create his own narrative of good vs evil.

In fact, Plato was quite direct in his approach to morality: people should do "good", because doing good things would bring happiness, and doing bad things would create unhappiness. That is a quite utilitarian approach to civilization, and I would not call this a religious stance. Plato did consider the soul to be immortal, but he also said that learning would begin anew in the next life, so I don't think he subscribed to any form of afterlife judgement.
OP here, I've just added multiline support and... dropped YAML lol. I found the YAML syntax for multilines quite weird. I just wrote my own parser so the users can keep writing in the next line.
Ten acres is just a big garden, not a farm.
>no you can't just use a bit to store gender.

Why not? The bit can store male/female and you can leave it NULL for "prefer not to say".
But cygwin seems to have v7.1 too. Is it "just" a build that doesn't depend on cygwin.dll? (Although I can appreciate that's probably a nontrivial porting job). Genuinely curious about what's new here.