skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It should always be a prerequisite to have a proof before one begins an implementation. If one cannot construct such a proof then they have no business trying to design new distributed algorithms. Fortunately there are a few algorithms for proofs of replicated state machines available as previously noted.

Proofs will typically show the limitations of an algorithm, for instance the original paxos paper notes that the contained algorithm does not provide liveliness.

A system based on an algorithm with a proof has some chance of being correct, while a system based on an algorithm with no proof while technically it may have a non-zero probability of being correct that probability approaches zero.

Having worked on such systems and having talked to some people who have worked on debugging issues with paxos implementations at extreme scale while it is virtually impossible to to ensure that the system will be able to make forward progress it is possible to ensure that the state of the state machine remains correct.

When I look at an implementation of such an algorithm to evaluate it I pay very careful attention to the test suites. The more bizarre the tests they contain the more likely the implementation is to handle very weird network edge cases.
So we don't know the age of the universe then?
This entire debate reminds me quite strongly of Peter Bailis's talk at MesosCon last year on designing distributed systems to avoid coordination where possible. It is a really excellent talk for anyone into this sort of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYJnWttrC9k

https://mesoscon2015.sched.org/event/3Aot/keynote-silence-is...
This doesn't really apply to Manhattan, but elsewhere in New York and most other cities there are a lot of 2-3 story buildings still, many of which are single-family homes. Some of those are worth keeping, but in many cases they could be replaced with 4-6 story mixed-use buildings with little objection. That's an instant doubling in density without having to resort to high-rises. Paris, for example, maintains a higher population density than New York or San Fransisco with a lower average building height. European cities also see huge gains in density because they dedicate less space to roads and parking, a practice American city planners are catching on to. There is so much we could be doing to avoid housing shortages if we actually tried. Too bad everyone is so fixated on the value of their property going up.
I don't think it means Einstein was wrong or that one galaxy is moving "faster than the speed of light". It means in respect to each other two galaxies are moving faster than the speed of light. In other words each of two galaxies is going faster than half the speed of light, one of them being us (in relation to the other observed Galaxy).
Aren't there measurement rules that are meant to be followed to allow differentiation between active and passive calls?

I could see smaller apps not correctly following rules if they exist, however you'd hope that someone like ComScore would be making sure the top of their data is accurate.
I agree, but I hadn't seen his name attached to the PS4 work, so I just kind of assumed he wasn't an active member of the team in the last little while.
One answer to this problem is that the night sky isn't dark at all. It's just less bright than during the day. Hear me out. As a species that evolved on this planet under it's particular conditions we perceive day to be bright and night to be dark because of the particular range of light sensitivity of our eyes. Too often science leaves the human observer out of the equation. It lets us feel like gods presiding over our universe but is a big mistake.
All that said it's not unreasonable to question why the night sky is not brighter than it is.
Today you can get 2GB of Google Drive storage for free
But if your emails can be MitM'ed then the text of your emails (the public record) may not actually be what the sender wrote.
I handle this in a way that is more agnostic to the type of revision control, and fully flexible in coloring (using the most powerful scheme available).

For example, I shouldn't have to put up with basic colors if the terminal can do better.

Here is how it works; starting with:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -r ".svn" ] ; then
exec svn diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
else
git diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
fi

...where the "my_colorize_diff" script at the end of the pipe is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# by Kevin Grant (kmg@mac.com)
my $term_program = (exists $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} : '';
my $term = (exists $ENV{'TERM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM'} : 'vt100';
my $is_xterm = ($term =~ /xterm/);
my $is_24bit = ($term_program =~ /MacTerm/);
print "\033#3BEGIN DIFF\n";
print "\033#4BEGIN DIFF\n\033#5";
while (<>) {
if (/^\+/ && !/^\+\+/) {
if ($is_24bit) {
print "\033[48:2:150:200:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2::88:m", "\033[1m";
} elsif ($is_xterm) {
print "\033[48;5;149m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;235m", "\033[1m";
} else {
print "\033[42m", "\033[2K", "\033[30m", "\033[1m";
}
} elsif (/^\-/ && !/^\-\-/) {
if ($is_24bit) {
print "\033[48:2:244:150:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2:144:0::m";
} elsif ($is_xterm) {
print "\033[48;5;52m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;124m";
} else {
print "\033[41m", "\033[2K", "\033[37m";
}
} else {
print "\033[3m";
}
chomp;
print;
print "\033[0m\n";
}
print "\033#3END DIFF\n";
print "\033#4END DIFF\n\033#5";
So what does this offer over simply using vimdiff?
Most marketers are significantly bad.
I think we can agree that given while() and for(), one is sugar because it can be defined by the other.

My observation is that while it's possible to say there is sugar, it's not possible to say which of the two is the sugar. That is, the while() can be defined in terms {language - while()} and for() can be defined in term {language - for()}.
In a world where people disable their antivirus because a piece of malware told them to, a red broken padlock or even a scary error message will not help a whole lot.
Hey guys, as someone learning to work with both UIkit and TVML I know I need to bounce ideas off of other people working on Apple TV apps. Hoping those who join will find it a helpful community!
I've also had a long-time question around this point. I've asked various university physics professors, and they all stutter and disagree (which means either we really don't know or I'm going to all the wrong universities). The underlying question is: When we say in general relativity that particles can't travel faster than light, what is that speed measured relative to?

If it's photons emitting from flashlights pointed in opposite directions relative to each other, then are they compressing space as they travel so as not to exceed the speed of light? Or even massive particles accelerated to over half the speed of light at different times around an ellipse so there is a moment when their opposite directions make one traveling at greater than the speed of light relative to the other? (Or even particle accelerators on two different planets already expanding away from each other - does this just mean that space is really twisting and turning all the time to make sure no particle ever exceeds the speed of light relative to any other particle?)

It has been my understanding - and appreciation at Einstein's unbelievable insight and brilliance - that relativity is truly relative because there really isn't any such thing as an arbitrary particle or space that all other motions are measured from. But if this is true, does that really mean that space is really so constantly twisting and turning that SOL can't be exceeded?

I'm sure there are great answers to this, but I've always wanted a definitive one. Anyone have any comments on this?
Show HN: I'm Open-Sourcing My Node.js App
>this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads

You say that like it's a bad thing. If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest.

When online advertising-as-we-know-it finally chokes to death under a mountain of its own waste, maybe we'll see a drop in blatant linkbait lowest-common-denominator garbage that drives up the S/N ratio. There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result.

Not that I particularly care which way things go, I run adblockers on all of my machines from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
Eventually, Kanye went on to craft some astoundingly original sounds and beats. We don't all just appear like Athena bursting full-grown from the head of Zeus. Kanye would never have become the incredibly successful musician he is today without going through that period of mediocre practice.
Man killed by meteorite in India
A lot of people write books for free, in most cases, they aren't worth reading.
How does this recruitment service differentiate from Hired.com?

Your landing pages are eerily similar.
Comcast, Dish Now Padding Pay TV Numbers with Streaming Users
I'm bewildered that such enlightened people as Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin don't grok the value of this resource to writers.

Just an anecdote: the other day I heard a story about an FBI agent tasked with eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Malcom X. Due to the nature of the assignment, his job was to listen very carefully to everything he had to say. The agent wound up coming around to his perspective.

This story came with a quote but no reference to the book, but someone on Twitter thought to search in Google Books and quickly found it for me. This is an amazing power, unimaginable in the days when research meant Dewey Decimals and microfiche.
The galaxy isn't traveling faster than c away from us, but space is being created in between. So, nothing is actually accelerating, there is no problem, Einstein is still right.

In fact, space is being created everywhere, including yourself and the computer screen. However the amount is so small that you don't notice and local forces nullify the change anyway. With large distances, this amount accumulates, and overwhelms the force of gravity and starts to create the apparent acceleration of distant galaxies away from us. Further explanation from paulddraper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068125
Good point! Although the most dangerous issue for most un-careful computer users is identity and/or financial theft, rather than losing baby photos. That can arguably have as severe an impact as many types of auto accidents. But the point that it won't kill you is a good one.
I don't think it has to be truly language aware. A diff tool that looks for matched braces, quotes, and indents to figure out where the blocks are would do better most of the time.
Just so you know why Thomas here has singled you out, specifically regarding video games:

* http://archive.is/tNSGc

* http://archive.is/XBQ8k

* http://archive.is/dyvm5

I find that if you search ones 'timeline' for hash tags and other buzzwords you get a good sense for their stances on subjects.
More likely than not, the Big Crunch will not happen. From Wikipedia:

"Recent experimental evidence (namely the observation of distant supernovae as standard candles, and the well-resolved mapping of the cosmic microwave background) has led to speculation that the expansion of the universe is not being slowed down by gravity but rather accelerating. However, since the nature of the dark energy that is postulated to drive the acceleration is unknown, it is still possible (though not observationally supported as of today) that it might eventually reverse its developmental path and cause a collapse."
GYF for iOS – Create a GIF in under 10 seconds
Their SSL seems to be broken now as well.
I'm not a writer or web designer. Have no opinion on that aspect. For IT and QA, this is terrible advice. You shouldn't just try random stuff over and over. Instead, you should first look for people who get the job done on a regular basis. Look for what principles or techniques they used to do that. Start there. Observe in your own work or field reports what problems people run into with what solutions were tried. Reuse what worked, experiment with what didn't in new contexts, and so on.

Essentially, get a good start using what's already been done then use creativity and scientific method to quickly become better. Publish lessons you learned from solving problems with certain goals and constraints. Contribute back to this overall process of learning.

Alternatively, people can try the author's advice and re-create the modern web experience from HTML, JavaScript, C, and assembler via trial-and-error, exploratory programming. I'll pass. ;)
I'm curious as to why they're using atomic clocks in space for a high resolution time source, rather than an atomic clock on earth... Latency?
In defence of pretentiousness
In the pre-internet days, I had a watch that I adored. Swatch watch with a transparent face so you could see the movements. A kid asked me if he could borrow my watch one day, to see if he liked it. I said sure. After class, he disappeared. He told me he lost the watch. A few days later, he shows up to school with my watch and tells me his mom bought it for him. I was a big, nice kid who was always afraid to hurt someone. That was the moment when I was pushed past my limit.

I waited until after school and then beat the crap out of him until he admitted what he had done and got my watch back. It was my fault for being that naive. It was his fault for flaunting my naiveté in my face.
> >> I think this comment by patio11 is very relevant here:

> > "We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not allowed to.

> I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue: they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a $1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably required.

> This shoots red flags, so I'd like to share:

> Anti Money Laundering:

Negotiating a price isn't money laundering. If you have records of your customers, then you have proof you weren't laundering money.

> Anti-terrorist financing:

If you do what SQLite does (they either sell their software for $1000 or give it away gratis), then this isn't an issue.
Although very different than a traditional Linux distribution, the init system for RancherOS might be worth taking a look at. It's written entirely in Go as well.
https://github.com/rancher/os/tree/master/init
Nicely laid out in the flow chart style. I agree that the middle part is essential in the conversation. Also on the point a good coach should show value!

Now and then I see 'self-help' or motivational type pieces encouraging a type of "Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses" which can be applicable in a lot of arenas. However taking on that mentality fully strikes me as missing an important long-term perspective. I say this as a person who was really deficient in one digit's dexterity (pinkie) and instead of just kinda shrugging it off, I spent many years and sessions trying to bring it up to par. Now I'm happy to say I can really only remember it as a past weakness, due to the focus and attention to improvement!
You could try to design the tax code to try to distinguish people who were getting rich from zero-sum games, versus those who were getting rich from taking risks and creating wealth. In practice, there is a lot of subjectivity in doing so, and it would make taxes more complicated and unpredictable. In general, the more subjective and complicated government policy is, the more room there is for powerful and unscrupulous entities to manipulate the system to their own benefit. Complexity almost always favors the parasites.
Instead of the fencing token, could the scenario in the blog post be prevented using a good hashing function?

When you perform a write, instead of the token, send a hash of the object previously read. The storage can then compare this against a hash of the resource's current state. If it doesn't match the lock expired and the write is not accepted.

This would reduce the state to keep track off to the resources themselves.
The galaxies themselves are not moving faster than the speed of light, their relative distances are because of the rate of the expansion of the universe.
It is very common in London. I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford a place on my own, but almost all professionals seem to be living with someone else - either a partner or with roommates. I actually am thinking of switching to a roommate living situation entirely for social reasons, as this seems to be a tough city to make friends in.

My ideal situation would be to have my own bedroom/bathroom, high end furnishings, but a shared living space (living room/kitchen). But alas, most people have roommates entirely for economic reasons, so this seems to be tough to find.
No, he only gets to the point in one of the final paragraphs:

The problem is of course that moving things from http: space into
https space, whether or not you keep the rest of the URI the same,
breaks any links to. Put simply, the HTTPS Everywhere campaign
taken at face value completely breaks the web.

Of course, in reality, anyone who moves to HSTS also adds a rewrite rule that redirects incoming http vistors to the https URI. In fact, Let's Encrypt even does it automatically: https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/blob/master/letse...

His complaint is completely spurious.
The Tech 101 Series: JavaScript
So since it depends on the correctness of the underlying system is there a TLA+ (or other) proof for that? Last time jepsen ran on redis it showed that it was broken unless something has changed in the meantime.
There's no easy install methods for small simple scripts that doesn't involve multiple manual steps, have an automated upgrade path, is cross platform and is consistent+familiar to a large subset of developers.

Of the options out there for the above, npm - while hassle if you don't have it already installed - is probably the closest balance of maintainer and end-developer convenience.
I completely agree! This is one of the reasons I'm bullish on Rust; in the long run it will be nice to have a (more-)secure-by-default systems level language.
Something fishy is going on with new HN accounts created right after this was posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ajax_freak

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hws100

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rivalz
If you think that simply having access to an online resource is as good as having personal tutors and a lifetime of educated parental involvement, then you are pathetically tone deaf. Most poor kids don't have a computer. If they have internet access, it's through a cheap cell phone.
'Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers'
At a guess, they need a very small number of clocks (for uniformity) and they use the existing clocks in space because that signal distribution was more effective than new terrestrial infrastructure.
Here in Boulder CO it seems like a temporary 'getting on your feet' type of move. Many of the listings I see for shared living are along the lines of "I just moved to Colorado and need a shared living situation while I get on my feet and find a 'permanent' living situation." Rentals are highly competitive in this area so it makes sense because many leases are filled very quickly - already living in the area helps when you're trying to find your ideal living situation.
I wish we could filter these out of the review and rating results.
I don't think any product exists that's going to remove the need for ops experience. I haven't used Parse, so I can't comment on its reliability.
"When we say in general relativity that particles can't travel faster than light, what is that speed measured relative to?"

It's a theory postulating that a particle can't travel faster than the speed of light in relationship to a particle that isn't moving. In practice all particles are moving in relation to some other particle thus it's not something you can visibly measure or see. At least that is the way I always viewed it.
But they do have to employ moderators, admins, marketing, sales, software developers, IT... as well as paying for hosting, bandwidth, office space, equipment...

What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?
Twitter has shown for quite a while that they don't care for freedom of expression (which they might be legally allowed to do, that doesn't make arbitrary censorship of users a morally acceptable choice).
Absolutely. I had it installed for some time and mostly thought "this is really neat but I could live without it." And then there was a monster merge with significant conflicts all over the place. I don't think it would have been otherwise possible to pull it off with as little damage as there was if not for this tool.
And on the other end of the spectrum, his drone and human names can be impenetrable. I can never keep them straight, even within a given book.
that's not correct. Government is not a passive actor in the inflation game, it is not true that simply through inaction does less to help out the poor.

Government takes an active role in creating inflation for several social engineering reasons. The fiscal reason is to pay for government spending above what it takes in in income taxes. The monetary reasons are to lower the strength of the dollar and create competitiveness in international trade and to modulate employment, and the investment reason you state (basically that's a writ large transfer of wealth to the rich). There's also a third reason in that if it doesn't, the current system of fractional reserve lending will collapse catastrophically (but that's complicated)

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hig...

"It’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."

Parse that really carefully and read between the lines. The policy reason for inflation is to cheat wage earners and laborers out of the real value of their earning (out the gate, not as saved in a bank) in order to bolster employment numbers.
It was my understanding that this is true from our perspective in time right now, but the Big Crunch could still be plausible if the universe turns out to be young enough (which it seems like it is) that not all the fusion fuel has been exhausted. Once it is, we'll have big clouds of nuclear waste interspersed between black holes, and perhaps in this environment the Big Crunch could still occur.

I think another question for the Big Crunch is what type of "fuel" is needed to create an exothermic fusion reaction comparable to the Big Bang? For example, the sun compresses hydrogen to produce helium and release massive energy. Black holes are undoubtedly compressing helium enough to make Beryllium, but this doesn't seem to release any energy that can escape the gravity that created the pressure required in the first place. So for the Big Crunch - Big Bang cycle to hold up, what type of matter (and how much of it) has be be compressed (and is gravity the only force that's compressing it) to the point where some type of "fusion" reaction produces enough energy to escape the compression forces?
Evolving Software Architecture by Cheating