skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Overdraw

I don't think we're imagining the same things here. Think less '3D landscape with text floating in it for some reason' (e.g. SecondLife), and more '3D landscape with labels applied to it' (e.g. Google Earth). Nothing from the "VR" layer obscures the "labels" layer; the labels float above everything, as if part of the GUI, but following the same scale as the things they label.

> PDFs

I'm actually unsure why a (non-interactive) PDF page, displayed at 100% zoom, can't be baked into a single extremely-high-resolution tile—applied as a texture to a single GL rectangle with plain-old lanzcos downsampling. That'd work for the overwhelming majority of the frames.

You'd only need to re-render the tile when you zoom in enough that it'd look bad; effectively, you could think of the PDF page as coming from a mipmapped texture, but where you only have the current size and will just-in-time rerender when the zoom-factor changes. And then, when the zoom factor makes the PDF not fit on the screen, the "tile" would be the screen size—so you'd re-render sibling tiles when the user moves.

Or, in other words: PDFs can be rendered exactly the way the image tiles on a mapping website are rendered, can't they? Doesn't that approach win over re-rendering all the text from a font-atlas every frame? And if not, why do browser rendering engines use tiles? (This isn't a rhetorical question to make my point; I'm not a graphics dev and I honestly don't see why.)
Well, it actually says that on the website, so I'm not sure what to think.
Cool stuff!

One thing I was looking for and didn't see were maps. I love maps. I'd love to see maps of Native American tribes populations, be it current or historical (or both!). It gives context as to where tribes are currently located and the land masses they once controlled years ago.

Anyway, great resource. Thanks for putting it together.
Well, technically, you can now refer to someone like me as a "native American" to indicate I am not an immigrant, I was born and raised here. I am about 1/32 Cherokee, but most people would read me as strictly "white."

Some people also say "Indigenous Peoples" and that seems to be something that a lot of people do not readily understand. If you grew up hearing "Indians" before that got changed to "Native Americans", then "Native American Indians" helps clarify that you are talking about indigenous peoples of the North American continent without sounding like some stiff academic paper.

/off the cuff pontificating
Anyone have any examples of a desktop application created with Kivy?
Ah. I just wasn't able to understand saurik's joke. Thank you for clarifying these things. Good stuff.
> Which "State" are you referring to? I'm not aware of an organization by that name.

The State is the entity within society that holds a monopoly on the use of force. It uses that power to coerce members of society to fund its exploits through legal theft called "taxation."

You probably know it by a different name, depending on where you live :-)
There's probably also a pareto equilibrium illusion going on. If you screw the one person at the bottom of the stack, but serve everyone else more efficiency, is that 'the best choice'? Indeed, there may be no way to rearrange the order of service so that no one is worse off, but that is not necessarily the 'correct' optimal.
That's a very theoretical approach to democracy. Real democracies are less about the majority deciding things than keeping the people that do decide things in check.

Just look at what the majority of the people think. There are so many wrong things that the majority of people believe, you wouldn't want those beliefs made real through politics. Also nobody can be even interested in all topics decided.
How embarrassing ;)
NFA in a Single Line of Haskell (aka. The List Monad Is Awesome)
You forgot to mention regulatory capture. AirBnB breaks all sorts of local laws and profits from this, but because of its political connections/lobbying efforts it's been successful and stopping itself from being shut down or even fined in most markets.
By necessity, entrepreneurs are self-delusional.

Most are easily intelligent enough to realize how long their odds really are. Furthermore, they have the intellect to appreciate the true effort they have to make before they reach financial payback.

Any reasonable person with the math skills to visualize risk vs. reward will usually walk away --but not the quintessential entrepreneur.

This is not a flattering trait. For this reason, it is rarely, if ever, associated with successful entrepreneurs.
> - Non-native widgets, Kivy draws its own widgets using OpenGL. They're quite customisable, but of course you never get behaviour quite like the native ones.

And this can make the application entirely unusable for some users. I'm thinking in particular about accessibility for blind users, who need to use a screen reader, though other disabilities are also impacted. Basically, to be accessible, an application's UI components need to implement the platforms' accessibility APIs. Most non-native widgets don't do this, because it's a lot of work that most developers just don't even think about. As far as I can tell from a quick scan of the source, that currently includes Kivy. So beware that if you use Kivy and its non-native widgets, you'll be locking some users, admittedly a small minority, out of your app. Probably OK for a game; not so much for an application that's going to be used in a job or education.
Out of everything I said, I'm surprised this is the thing that's contested. Just scroll through his Twitter feed. Here are a few recent ones:

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682787891936948224

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682788969843658752

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682787609446330368

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682787371235016705

He retweeted this: https://twitter.com/kantrn/status/683385220167368704

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682759650362658816

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/682759288012554240

Heck, his Twitter profile pic is a communist logo. His Twitter bio says, "Every loss for a worker is loss for all of us and every gain for a part of the working class is a victory for all." That's a quote from the Industrial Workers of the World[1].

I don't know how much more communist one can get.

1. http://www.iww.org/content/iww-greece-announcement-regarding...
+1 true enough! Thanks for the alternative viewpoint.
Interestingly, Friedman, and I think Hayek as well, supported a universal basic income. Friedman called it a negative income tax, but its the same premise. I think a lot of laissez-faire capitalists would get behind that idea, if it was coupled by the permanent abolition of all other welfare programs and most labor regulations. It's definitely an idea I can get behind.

It would require some constitutional amendment for both sides to trust each other enough.
> I'd probably be most tempted to check out Go if I was working on something that absolutely had to wring the best possible performance out of my hardware. I don't honestly know that much about it, but it has a reputation for getting you most of the performance of C++ without the complexity.

Go isn't billed as a language that is designed to do that. It's faster than Ruby and Python, for sure, but it made many runtime performance sacrifices in the name of ease of use and compilation speed.
Design for developers
Affiliate Marketing en Internet  ¿Cómo encontrar el programa de afiliados
A month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10661581

7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9610075

8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404006
I am actually suggesting that we end all economic inequality. The only reason I don't argue for "end all inequality" is that it's physically impossible as much as we know it.
Economy should be about what is good for everyone, it shouldn't contain anything which can be used to exploit other humans due to their "economic circumstances". The current system does allow it, and as long as you can attach a number to any person to get their value or "worth", there will be no change towards equality, maybe less inequality. Which is not enough because while the possibility is open, it will always fluctuate.
Yes, although there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Adoption_Convention
>>Some users would like to see two heated discussions about income inequality on the front page, but I can assure you that many others would not.

Yeah, but how many? We know how many people upvote a submission. We can't see how many people flag it. And flags seem to carry far more weight than upvotes, so we have a situation where a dissident minority squashes the will of the majority and censors discussion.

The other issue of course is how crowded conversations get and how difficult it is for newcomers to join. If a submission has 300+ comments, good luck having your voice heard. Whereas "response" submissions give voice to second and third wave commenters who don't have the luxury of refreshing HN every 10 minutes to catch conversations that are on the upswing.
And now for something completely random (2010)
>When a person uses "All Lives Matter", what they really >mean is "cop's lives matter more"

No, I understand it to be "police can sometimes use force unjustifiably towards anyone, of any race." If a cop murders someone, s/he should be held responsible (sadly, they are not). The reason that more black people get murdered by police is that they (blacks) get in trouble more often (which is NOT a justification to kill them)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
> At least with C++ you can reason that if a change compiles it has not made any dramatically stupid type errors.

And with Python you can reason that if code parses it isn't going to have undefined behavior (for example, segfaults randomly thousands of lines away from the actual problem due to heap corruption, or exploitable use-after-free vulnerabilities).

Type safety only has the benefits you describe if the language is actually type safe.
I'm not saying OP should not be allowed to think about or solve this problem - rather, I am pushing him to think harder and deeper about his solution and its possible consequences.

It's easy to provide a possible step 1 of the solution to a complex problem. Brilliance and wisdom lies in explaining why your proposed step 1 is the best way to get to steps 2,3, and 4.
Vouchers are a mechanism for diverting government funds to individually chosen (government accredited) education providers. They aren't comparable to employer funded private 'insurance' programs. In healthcare terms they more resemble Medicaid. They're hardly an example of rugged individualism.
yes, we should do all the thinking, impact analysis and projections for the government because they are too busy not wanting to change the status quo. ridiculous.
The Definitions of the 3 Types of Business Processes
Kafka is arguably simpler, at least in terms of data model, than Disque. Disque needs to handle acking and queue mutation and things like lock timeouts and dead lettering, all of which complicates its queue structure and API. Kafka queues (partitions, to be precise) are append-only, which simplifies a lot of things.
Given the sensationalist scare quotes (such as there possibly being 30 of these unsafe trucks in existence), I presume the Secret Service is going after Mastercard and Visa for their willful negligence that created this situation?
That wont work in email... I'm generating a usage graph (svg) that is emailed and the graph will not display in the client.. Must be opened in a browser
good question in the blog's comments:

How is this compared to 0mq or nanomsg?
Right, that looks pretty clear then. I guess I meant to say that citing his summarizing of Marx is a pretty poor way to suggest someone is a communist, if you can link to something that literally says "I am a communist". Plenty of non-communists cite Marx.
ha I guess a complaining farmer is a happy farmer?
Are you in the Bay Area? The sheer intensity of everybody constantly asking if you'd consider working for them means that you naturally must put up some defenses in order to stay focused.
It's a shame that chip and signature is used in the states though..
What service or cards offer SMS alerts for any transaction? The best I have it American Express which will alert me only when I have a transaction over $10. V.me by Visa used to offer an alert service for any amount and it was great, but unfortunately that service got shut down.
This was my first thought also. aphyr seems to be the go to for finding flaws in everyone's distributed systems.
>you can die from drinking the previous quantity of this new brand of coffee!

Obviously almost everybody knows about coffee and has already tried many brands in their life (even by going to different restaurants or coffee shops) -- including days when they've drank several times their usual intake. Plus, they've seen countless others doing the same, even before they've started drinking themselves (e.g. their parents).

With magnesium or some random supplement? Not exactly the same case.
> The missing piece of information here is that while the quantity of items may be increasing, it is likely that the severity of those items is decreasing. The truly urgent major issues get identified and fixed early in an app's life.

You can't assume this unless you freeze development. I wrote the essay... the opposite was true: rushed work was creating a runaway defect density while the product was externally experiencing growth, which in turn brought old tech debt to light as for example... things with a few percent defect rate that were easily to manually deal with before suddenly saw 10x-100x increase in frequency.

So... if you allow for a cooling phase, yes... you end up with a "more issues, but less severe" pattern. If you're in a high-growth situation with a development team that's at near 100% capacity utilization... you get infinite death graph doom. :-/
Differentiable Programming
> Which investment vehicles are those?

Hedge funds and the like.

> leads to their valuation, which leads to the return on our hypothetical investment.

'Return' on an increase in valuation isn't a real return. It's exactly like poker.

The way markets are supposed to work is you invest in an IPO, then you get a dividend sometime in the future, and then maybe the company buys back your shares.

The way it generally works for most people is you buy shares on the open market, then someone else buys those shares from you. This has nothing to do with the 'reality' of the company because both of you are speculators, neither has given money to the company, and neither has received money from the company. You're both just playing with poker chips.

> Can you describe how these investment vehicles work such that they're earning a return while being disconnected from the real world? Where does the money come from for the returns?

You buy into the market (non-IPO). When the value goes up, you sell. You're selling to other investors.

So the answer is, much of the money for the returns comes from other investors (not unlike a Ponzi scheme, however since you're both speculating, it's more akin to a poker table).

On a large scale the way it works is that hedge funds and traders are the ones making money, at the expense of less sophisticated traders, like mutual funds, pension funds, and retail traders.

Of course, this doesn't include the fact the dividends and buybacks actually are real, and do represent a non-trivial portion of the market, but there certainly is a large enough amount of investment vehicles which are divorced from the 'real world'.
We can stop amassed wealth from threatening our democracy without limiting wealth itself. I don't care how much wealth people have, but I care how they use it to subvert our democracy. We've been trying to solve this problem with laws, but lawmakers can be subverted with wealth, too.

Instead of trying to stop excess political spending, we should eliminate the incentive to accept excess political spending. People accept money to influence our democracy because they can use that money to get whatever they want from almost anyone, including you. You can't opt out because economic power is invisible. But we can make it visible, and give every individual the freedom to reject economic power that they feel is misused.

This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com/
Does it have to be SMS? My Simple card notifies me every time the card is used. https://www.simple.com/
Order gas straight to your car with my startup, Purple, and avoid the concern entirely.

https://purpledelivery.com/app (LA, OC, & San Diego)
In what way is that a scam?
What's wrong with being a socialist (or even a communist)?
Primate Labs | http://www.primatelabs.com/ | Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Full-time Onsite

C++ Software Developer

Primate Labs is hiring C++ software developers to work on Geekbench, our cross-platform benchmark application. This is a great position for anyone interested in computer performance, high-level and low-level software optimization, GPGPU programming, or cross-platform development. If this sounds intriguing send me a note at john@primatelabs.com.
And you could save even more bandwidth if you changed the PNG standard to also allow Brotli compression. Even more probably if you created a better file format.

That's not free anymore, but it's technologically easily possible to drastically reduce the amount of resources we use. What holds us back is that it's hard to get other people to do stuff like supporting new file formats or even have a better output in their image manipulation program.
There are a lot on their showcase web site.
I enjoyed the essay, but I completely disagree that the 1945-2000 represented years when America was most cohesive. That seems like a perfunctory reading of history. American history of mid 20th century is that of strife, disagreement, political battles, fights for race and gender equality, etc. America today seems much more cohesive to me than ever before. Does a New Yorker today have more or less in common with someone from Texas or Alabama than 50 years ago ? I think way more. So, I think the rest of the esay falls down like a colossus with feet of clay, once you demolish the central thesis of cohesion
The man is asked to give the decimal of three sixteenths. That's not a memory quiz.
Someone else could also do the analysis, Jepsen is open source
This was what came to mind when I read the call-to-action at the bottom asking for what I'd do first.

I'm a software project manager. I'd push for focus from the team, and tough decisions from management. If there are 10 "areas" of the app, each with 10 feature requests, I'd pick 2 or 3 of those areas and do an amazing job developing those 20-30 requested features, and close the other 70 issues as "not fixing".

We'd maybe lose some customers over it, but make the remaining customers all the more loyal. If the issues were truly problems, they'd come back up again in issue tickets over time. I bet most were nice-to-haves, and not having them is the price we pay for good software.
> As an exercise, try to think of something non-niche that costs around $5k, the price of the Apple II, for which there isn't some form of financing (auto/home/college loans and such). I'm hard-pressed to think of something and I believe it's because there's an increasingly small number of people that can afford such a product.

If someone can afford something with financing, they can afford it without. The difference here is not wealth or income, it's spending and savings habits.
These guys are criminals. Someone should be going after them. But the secret service?

This should be handled by the CC industry. US pumps should have chips like they do in most every other developed nation. It's an arms race, but prevention is easier than investigation.

And do not blame "the attendants". I worked as a light mechanic at one of the last truly full service stations. The pump/retail guys are payed minimum wage on flexible shifts to do a job that is actually rather dangerous. Only one of possibly a hundred attendants may know anything about the skimmer install. The guys who own/run the stations should also not be above suspicion. My bosses were some rather shady characters.
What? Why on earth would they have that?
If you look at the last paragraph, it seems aphyr has been involved in the development:

> I was not alone during the past months, while hacking with Disque and trying to figure out how to shape it, I received the help of: [...] Kyle Kingsbury, [...] Redis Labs and Pivotal, and probably more people I’m not remembering right now. Thank you for your help.
...if after swapping buffers around, our input cursor hits the mark again, we just hit the refill path again to generate more zeroes. (This is why the copying code uses memmove).

This misses one more optimization: if you consume bits by shifting them off the end of your word, then you are shifting in zeros in their place. If your semantics are that all reads past the end of the buffer return zeros, then once you have hit that end, you can just set bitcount to LOTS_OF_BITS (an arbitrarily large constant).

That is, you pretend your 32-bit word has a lot more than 32 bits in it. Then you're extremely unlikely to ever hit the refill code again. For extra points, you can make the constant something that can easily be represented as an ARM immediate, like 0x40000000.

We do this in the bitreaders for Theora, Opus, and Daala (thanks to Simon Hosie for contributing the idea to Theora back in the day).
Erm in that case why do the Rothschilds run RIT Capital Partners - which is explicitly set up to allow non family members to invest (as I do )
I don't think many people are saying that income inequality itself is the problem. It is the level of inequality and rate with which it is increasing that is the problem.

Also you can't say poverty is the only possible issue related to wealth distribution. Due to technology and globalization there is a tremendous amount of wealth. Exceedingly disproportionate distribution of it, far beyond effort/brilliance/whatever is unfair for the majority and IS a problem.
To give Rands the benefit of the doubt, I'm assuming the shields analogy is from the employer perspective. I don't believe he's suggesting that protective psychological barriers are consciously (or even subconsciously) raised to protect an employee from the temptation to join another employer.

Employers are unbelievably vulnerable. The single biggest commodity in the tech industry globally, is talent. When you employ people who do a good job you immediately become vulnerable. You attempt to cultivate and craft the perfect company culture. You try to ensure the work is pushing the boundaries and challenging the great people that are bringing you closer and closer to profitability. You convince yourself that its worth paying your staff ridiculous salaries because if you don't, someone else will.

The single biggest challenge in the tech industry globally, is retaining talent. You spend every waking hour questioning whether or not you are doing enough to keep your people happy. You assume they have shields when in reality, they just want to be happy.

Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not because you failed to keep them happy or because they believe another employer can make them happier, but because they are people. No-one will ever craft the perfect company where employee turnover is 0%, it's literally impossible but personally, I love the fact that so many companies are trying because ultimately, it means they are trying to make people happier.
SETI@home Version 8 has been released