skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
base 2 is natural for memory capacity because that is how chips are made

I think this is a fundamental misconception. How they're made is irrelevant except for why they're made that way. And that's because of memory addressing: a memory address is signaled by using a number of parallel bit lanes. The power of 2 comes from the fact that every lane has two states. The same goes for aggregating multiple addresses (like page size and cache size): the most efficient (and therefore only viable) way to aggregate blocks of contiguous memory is to mask out the least significant bits of the address, which is why you also get base-2 multiples for memory aggregation.

Therefore, the fundamental expression of memory capacity is the number of usable address lines multiplied by the minimum addressable unit (byte for RAM, 512 bytes for old hdd's, 2048 bytes for cdrom, 4096 bytes for new-format disks).

As for hard disks, they use the same method of adressing as memory does! In fact, the fundamental addressable unit already is a multiple of 2, not 10, as I mentioned above. The main difference between volatile and non-volatile memory is that the number of address lines is set by standard (it's still 48 I believe) so the available capacity must be probed by some other way. And as hard disks are slow anyway, manufacturers can get away with adding a new layer of indirection (firmware) on their disks which hides the address implementation.

But in my view, there is no valid technical reason for storage sizes to be expressed in multiples of 10.
Erlang doesn't have a JIT. BEAMJIT hasn't been released yet.
Years ago I read a short piece called "Lessons for the Living". It was written by a hospice nurse, and said that people dying is like drops in a funnel: everyone starts somewhere, everyone ends up at the same place. Dying people go through stages which are recognizable...

Hmm, looks like it's a film now (kickstarted?). Look for the writeup, which might be a couple pages into the search results.
As long as the market is moving, you can always make money.
Phew! Thanks! You're awesome. I received negative feedback on the design here as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/45sob0/some_feedb...

I guess this can't be postponed and I have to improve it as much as possible... NOW! :)
The 18 Month Plan You Need to Raise Funding
Easy to replace not simply to delete.

Anything that is easy to delete (and just leave it deleted) is superfluous. Don't write superfluous cruft, obviously.

Easy to replace is important in all engineering. A product or structure with easily replaceable parts is better than one without easily replaceable parts, all else being equal.

We'd never say "design a brake caliper with brake pads that are easy to delete". :)
We built our insulated solar shed for $240 Canadian (instead of 3 grand)
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449

http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...
Ask HN: Where have you decided to move your Parse apps?
That's still fine, it will take longer but will still run without problems. A good SSD is recommended though.
The energy that idle chargers use up is negligible, and even then, it's not as if you can just turn that into computational power. You'd still need to consume (significantly) more energy to mine.
Hmmm. The thing is, ultimately, all wealth is extracted from the earth and a significant part of that is from the biome -- the living part of the world, not just the minerals and that type thing. I see a lot of assumption that nature has no inherent economic value for humans and I am horrified by this widespread assumption because if you cut into the health of the biome too much, productivity goes down.

In a nutshell, it is kind of like how America was winning the cold war with Russia by investing something like 3% or 4% of the American economy in our military versus their 20% to 30% of the Russian economy. They were bleeding their economy to death and could not keep up.

So, ultimately, if we really want to continue supporting the unprecedented billions worth of human population, we need more nature and trees, not less. We need our buildings to multitask, with solar panels on the roof and things like that, so we can shrink our per capita footprint while raising our per capita quality of life.

I am just glad technology is emerging that has the potential to reconcile that friction. Historically, it was an either/or choice. It needs to be an and choice and that is increasingly feasible.

Cheers! And thanks for asking. It reminded to me look it up, something I had been intending to do anyway.
Nato has also had the H&K P11 since the 70's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_P11
Should we building a 3rd or maybe 4th LIGO so we can know where the events actually come from?

What's the best timing precision possible on the different reception times, to get better triangulation (if there was at least a 3rd LIGO)?

What's the odds of seeing one event when starting it up, and none since then?

How long will it take for any new events to be announced?
It is remarkable how fundamentally optimistic both Lem and Stapledon (and most science-fiction authors) are about our long-term prospects! All of humanity lives on the thin slime on a tiny rock hurtling around an ongoing massive fusion event. There is no warp drive, no anti-gravity - and not even a glimmer of physical theory that will lead to it.

We send tiny rockets into space, sometimes with robotic probes. That is the limit of chemical rocketry, for now and for the foreseeable future. Founding a self-sustaining colony on Mars appears to be impossible - a colony might exist, with frequent deliveries from earth, but such a thing would hardly qualify as a "backup" for humanity, as it would die shortly after the Earth dies.

And of course interstellar travel is totally out-of-the question with chemical rockets.

Meanwhile, the world (especially the First World) consume the truly unique and precious life-support systems in the bonfire of consumerism. Not to mention that the threat of total nuclear annihilation is still present.

So, despite all the interesting talk about Stapledon, the fact remains that it is an optimistic fantasy that distracts us from the stark truth that the laws of physics conspire to prevent us from living anywhere but in this one biosphere, naked to whatever calamity befalls us.
I've run into this with cell-phones too. Someone was reading an alphanumeric value to me, and one letter reliably sounded like one number. It was really odd, but apparently some of the compression techniques for phones use speech models and it seems that the person on the other end had an accent that hit a poor spot in the model.
I've learned the hard way that the only legitimate use for XML is to maintain compatibility with things that already use XML. It doesn't have a direct translation to any sensible data structure other than DOM. It sucks as a markup language since document writers find syntax errors anathema. I've seen the idea of XSD schemas used as a defense since then you at least have a schema unlike JSON. However, experience has taught me that in practice everyone does XML wrong so that's of limited value at best. I guess there is a limited situation in which you have pre-existing XSLT to translate between two pre-existing XML interfaces but eww.
Russell Napier predicts economic meltdown, now
I'd also prefer those be replaced with a template. IMO, reading a config file with placeholders is much easier than concatenating it in my mind as a series of _lineinfile_ commands.
BeamNG.Drive: Steam Early Access Trailer
For even more fun: Grafitti
That weapon is mentioned and linked in the article already though, no?
Well look what the cat brought in :D

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xta1/t31.0...
"Doing just one thing and doing it well" -- which is better at this, Unix programs or Emacs functions?
I'm a big fan of EPUB because it's a pretty neat example of the Unix philosophy "worse is better".

A proprietary or custom format might have been more suited to creating e-books (drop-caps, for example, would probably have been easier), but using HTML and CSS as the basis means it's open, easily understandable, and pretty simple to make corrections to e-books or even begin making your own.

The fact that a teenager with a little bit of interest and a small amount of knowledge can play with an e-book, then view the results on real devices, is hugely appealing. I realise that they could also be making a website, or doing `real' programming, but to some people the ability to correct typoes in _Ender's Game_ or reformat _Dune_ to their preferred layout is just so much more appealing and empowering. When I started playing making websites at age 14, I'd have killed to be able to use those skills to make an e-book.
The article has pictures and details of a Russian weapon that was new in 2013..
... we can expect to have bases on the planets in this century ...

Lem wrote this in 1986, a year when the Cold War space race was still in full effect. The Soviet Union had just built the Mir station and the country's miserable economic state had not yet been fully revealed. NASA's Challenger disaster looked more like a tragic bump in the road than a systemic failure of the Shuttle program.

30 years later it feels like we're actually further off from having bases on other planets than in 1986.
You're probably looking for one of the newer Pebbles then.

The Pebble Time Steel can last up to 10 days with average use and the regular Pebble Time up to a week.

Pebble Time Round only lasts two days and the older Pebbles are prone to hardware failures so I wouldn't recommend them.
Perhaps the cash burners burn more on PR to get into the news?
The problem is that campus SJWs declare any view other than their own racist, sexist views to be racist, sexist hate speech. It has always been dishonest but now is reaching the level of delusion that turns into vicious psychosis.
3 was partly answered in https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/45g8qu/we_are_the_lig...

>How many signals we see has to do both with how sensitive our detectors are and how often events that can cause waves strong enough happen; because we observed one of these events in 18 days of observation, we can tell that there are between 2 and 400 of these events per year per gigaparsec cubed events like this in the space around us.
> The student-loan bubble is also a massive debt overhang that could cause huge repercussions, but I don't see a trigger that would cause it to burst.

Especially, since people can't default on them.

So the hangover will stay with us for as long as people who took student loans are alive. (Or perhaps even manage to pay them off.)
Different people like different things, OK? A 40 year old flamewar is boring and old. Just let it die.

[1] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/986/what-are-the-pro...
Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me
URL broken: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-secret-...
computer people can't define them to mean something else

Well, the "computer people" did in fact do that, through natural language extension, which is often irregular and inconsistent.

It is this committee-designed "kibi", "mebi" and "gibi" which are prescriptive. And for that reason they are broadly rejected in the industry.

"Mega" is just a foreign prefix that can flexibly serve any purpose you want, just like a Greek letter in mathematics.

Just like the Greek λ can be "anonymous function", "eigenvalue", or "air/fuel ratio", the Latin "mega-" can be 1000000 or 1048576.

Nobody had any problem with this whatsoever, until storage manufacturers started lying in order to sell you a 781 Mb drive as 800 Mb.
Ecce: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...

I'm considering OpenBSD for many reasons other than the init system, e.g. harmonious, lightweight, stable, understandable system, workable by default (no need for distros), very good docs, seasoned devs, etc. The only problem is that I need the ath5k driver, that FreeBSD has and OpenBSD doesn't.

The problem with systemd is, from my perspective, a desktop user that uses mostly emacs and xombrero, on arch linux nowadays, that it is too complicated, to maintain and to understand. I can understand an rc script, and a crontab, but systemd comes with lots of concepts and a complex hierarchy of files and lots of conventions, commands, tools, etc., and it does nearly everything. So much so that I refrain from fixing issues on my system, rather, I work around them, because I need to learn way too much before I can do so: I copied the suspend-sedate.service thing from Arch wiki, it doesn't work, but I'm really afraid to investigate, because I'll fall into a whirlpool of tutorials and man pages which says alien things like unit files, services, this, that. So I just hibernate the computer manually. Systemd looks like a good thing for big systems, but for desktop, it is superfluous and overkill. And the anti-systemd sentiment is because if you don't want to use systemd, you either have to fork your distro (forks exist), switch to a rarely-used one, or build your custom linux installation.
no it's because they don't make enough revenue
Except that mechanical strength of the toys is less when 3D printed than when injection moulded and so pieces are more likely to break off when chewed?
If it's stagnant, you can still sell options.
Advice for Mentors: Building on a Theme
What the fuck ever happened to good old-fashioned bipartisan horse-trading?
and yet, this article was pretty good
Can someone not write an article about a technology they love? There was no flaming in there.
We've had micropayments since 1997. Anyone remember CyberCoin and DigiCash? [1]

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=0TsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&lpg=P...
Excellent points, and it's also worth pointing out that respectable publishing does, of course, cost a fee, and a far more exorbitant one at that. It can be easy to fall into the trap since that's not a red flag.
> try finding a PC that can run operating systems from 1984 all the way through 1996

Why would this be hard? The x86 CPU boots into 16-bit real mode, the video card emulates the IBM PC text mode, the hard drive supports ISA, and everything else is ignored, right? The PC architecture is notorious for supporting weird old backwards-compatibility stuff.
These unicorns are not really tech companies tho'. What tech do they sell? They are ad companies or regulatory arbitrage plays, with an app and a website, that's all.
I'd consider a byte to be like a mole: it's the base unit that we actually use, and it's proper to apply an SI prefix to, but it's defined as a specific multiple of a smaller unit (8 bits vs 6.02 * 10^^23 particles).

"Giga inches" sounds wrong for two reasons: first, that larger distances like that are customarily expressed in units more suited to their scale, and second, that that measurement system generally doesn't use SI-style prefixes.

"KiloCM" sounds wrong because you're applying two SI prefixes to one unit and using the wrong capitalization for both "centi" and "meter". kcm could technically be represented by the "dam" unit, although it's more common to show things in that scale just as meters.
Which is why cars, which are now 100-year-old technology, come with their hoods welded shut and you need special manufacturer-authorized tools to even change the oil.
XSLT is actually insanely cool, it's just poorly executed.

For example, XSLT lets you decouple the content structure of your document from the presentation structure. XSLT makes nested <div> obsolete. It lets you have responsive HTML—you can serve different stylesheets to differently sized browsers (or switch them on-the-fly with JS). In general, what it can do is cool, but using it is not. If XSLT weren't something of a trainwreck the web would be in a better place.
> Ignoring the inappropriate ad hominem...

Seems appropriate to me, you're trying to spin a shit "benchmark" into some sort of conspiracy theory against your pet language and for your arch-nemesis or something.

> Why not type the loop variable as int64 in go?

Have you actually read my comment? 1. why not indeed, maybe because it's kind of a pain in the ass to do? 2. and that's got no relevance anyway, it changes pretty much nothing to the runtime

> Why not just use an int, which would default to int64 on a 64 bit system?

Because leaving that stuff to random half-specified defaults is a terrible idea when you have exact-sized integers you can be certain of.

> Why not just use sum := 0?

Because if integral numbers don't default to 64 bits or more or arbitrary-size integers, you get signed overflows.
I think this is a misreading of the article!
Use npm scripts instead of Gulp/Grunt
You only listed impairments with no excuse that are socially unacceptable but done all the time by everyone and statistically usually ends well almost every time anyway. There's another class of impairment that make no interesting clickbait and no social signalling... Kid sick in the back seat or just naughty, unexpected construction reroute, dark, bad weather, digestive impairment or other sudden onset illness setting in, the purpose of the trip might be highly distracting (funeral, sick relative in hospital), crazy unanticipated traffic jams, maybe the car is mechanically starting to act up.

Those stories make terrible clickbait unless there's a GPS involved, then the GPS can take 100% of the blame as if there was nothing else involved, and it makes itself insta-clickbait.
Why Igloos Work: Catenoids, Crystal Structures, and the 61-Degree Melt Point
At least Unix programs don't suffer from dynamic scope. (Unless you use bash to glue them, of course.)
Jamie Dimon: Bitcoin doomed while Blockchain is for real
Buddy, it already happened. It'll take a year to catch up to most of you, but the "point" already "tipped" months ago. If your job fundamentally relies on inflated financials, prepare your butt and your resume. Maybe apply to work somewhere that is very well established and clearly has positive noncyclical cash flow.
But. It sounds like the 8th amendment applies to events after conviction, even if you're not guilty. So the letter of the law has been applied.

I'm afraid I don't follow you. If you're still being punished after evidence comes to light that you aren't guilty, then you're being "cruelly and unusually punished" by any sane person's definition. The Eighth is applicable, and should have been cited by Scalia to draw the opposite conclusion that he came to.
I have also reached this sad conclusion about myself, and also others around me: my wife, my parents, brother, friends, and now I'm also starting to notice how my kids are slowly becoming addicted.

Having quit smoking and TV, I sure hope I can quite my smartphone too, and get my family also to kick the habit.
How open source makes Swedish startups stronger [video]
They are planning on building more sites, see:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-india
Video Overplay
> You could do some height + colour thing to get the same effect, but then you're just building a crappy cartogram.

Yeah, that's what I meant. The spectrum for a cartogram has total geographical fidelity on one end, to total abstraction on the other. The latter would basically be a bar chart in which the geographical data has been basically ignored.

On the more abstract side, the Guardian did a radial chart for U.S. gay rights...the positions around the circle corresponded roughly to regions, i.e. "Northeast" is the top-right of the circle. Of course, it has all the problems inherent to radial charts...but it's a nice example of something that could be a bar chart (a horizontal array of blocks) that attempted to include some geo-positioning data, even at a very general level:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/10/data-vi...
You probably don't know how easy it is to push your code to another machine through SSH and share a Git repository that way.
Indeed! I was actually raised by a pack of vims, and I like both editors. I used to use evil-mode in Emacs for a while until I reset my muscle memory by switching to dvorak.

I have no interest in old flame wars. Our generation has its own set of flame wars to fight ;)
Stapledon is not exactly optimistic, his book has multiple descendants of humans coming close to extinction several times while still on this planet, as culture, technology and biology are manipulated.
Kommute for iOS – offline access to your favorite websites
I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this:

Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim!

With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs!

I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually quite frustrating.
Would love to see a ruby binding for this, right now we're stuck with XSLT 1.0 via libxml.
You Can Now Play 'SkiFree' and 1000 Other Windows 3.1 Classics in Your Browser
Emacs is a fine editor to use until you write your own. It's the only way to make your primary interactive tool work exactly the way that you think it should.
Here's a link for this villa near Coates, and for Vindolanda, the fort shown in the featured article, using a rendering in which I've tried to emphasise the fine detail, from my map as mentioned in the above linked thread;

Coates: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SO9645000358

Vindolanda: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=NY7705366344
Last and First Men doesn't feel enormously optimistic to me... [Spoilers] It's a long history of struggle, humanity barely existing, occasionally bursting into brief civilisation before destroying itself through accident or hubris. And when humanity does finally attain some kind of peak existence, it finds it can't escape the solar system and is doomed anyhow. Despite its long history, humanity warrants only a footnote in history of the whole cosmos (sentient nebulae onwards) given in Stapledon's Star Maker. So given your pessimistic outlook, you might rather enjoy it :)
Pro tip: Nobody else cares what text editor you use.
Hoefler and Co.'s New Typewriter-Inspired Font Is Crafted for Coders
When we took this, IIRC, the primary perceived risk wasn't necessarily the government coming after us, but rather the school or teachers finding out.
Some people get in early (7am), some people get in late (11-noon). People generally put in roughly the correct amount of hours, and it evens out - sometimes you do a short day, sometimes a long day. If you get done what you need to and it doesn't disrupt your clients, it's pretty flexible.

(big-4 consulting company)
Why would you choose the 538 map to pick on when it's one of the few maps of this kind that actually allows you to zoom in on each area? That's as good a solution to the problem you're referring to as cartograms are. If not better.

Maps will always have inherent demographic bias, that's just how it is. And, sure, anyone who makes maps should be always looking for good solutions to these issues. But a smug Medium article proposing the use of cartograms, as if that's a new idea, doesn't help anyone. Except perhaps you, the author, if you're looking for some kind of attention or recognition.
The resiliency of nature and the speed with which it rebounds is both astonishing and important. What a great piece of journalism -- so rich in detail and beautifully written.

The hum of the generators is replaced by the river singing in full voice, shrugging off a century of confinement like it never happened. Nature’s resurgence is visible everywhere.
The key technique at play here, which you're helping illustrate:

1. Say something uncontroversial ("no hate speech please")

2. Believe something tendentious ("Condolezza Rice coming here is hate speech.")

3. Keep claiming that there's no problem or controversy at all and declaim that anyone who disagrees is a bigot who loves hate speech.