skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Optimization often involves making code less clear, more brittle, or with a more pasta-like organization. Frequently optimization requires writing code that if looked at out of context, doesn't make sense or might even look wrong.

I don't agree with that. It may be true for very low level micro-optimizations, but isn't usually the case for higher level optimizations that give the best performance improvements.

A lot of times code can be sped up significantly just by using a different data structure or caching a value that's already computed somewhere else. For example, I've seen production C++ where the code was using a std::vector to keep a list of items in sorted order and remove duplicates. It was trivially converted to a std::set and saved several seconds of run time.
Where is the world's Wi-Fi?
>Improvements to search results in Google are done by a relatively small amount of people from Google

How many open source projects log more engineering hours than Google's search team? It's the flagship product of one of the largest corporations in the world.
Sorry, why is this a big deal? We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago. Obviously better, compatibility improves and security issues are easier to push out and fix. To me the browser is as important as the OS, I spend the vast majority of my time in it.

Why should MSFT not do this? It's a free update. They're not charging for it. On many aspects, it's a lot better than Windows 7/8. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but Windows 7 is nearly 7 years old now. From what I can see it performs better on older hardware than W7.

We accept that Android fragmentation is terrible and Google should be doing more to fix it. Yet it seems the complete opposite reaction when MSFT tries to fix their desktop fragmentation.
Loading screen minigames were under a Namco patent until last year: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidHoppe/20150109/233806/2015_T...
There's a clear user preference question here. Do users prefer being asked upfront for all the permissions at once, or do they prefer being asked for permissions on the go.

Random dude in startup forum isn't smarter than your users, and can't anticipate how your users really would behave.
> ... that's rough. Do these people know something I don't? Or is this really what Twitter gets like once you get exposure?

It is what Twitter is like when you get some exposure unfortunately. Trolls, racists, etc. come out of the woodwork.
I listen to the hole house commity about this issue. The FBI says it has "talked to anyone who would talk to them". The security expert is on record stating that she beliefes the NSA had the capability to break the 5C but did not want to share it with the FBI. She recommended the FBI build such capabity itself instead of threaten the security of everybody.
There is far more to this story. Wait for it to come out before you jump to conclusions.
But, on the other hand, teenage children getting $20K cars will always fall into the problem category of ... teenage children getting $20K cars.

Even if a trend breaks out whereby cars with self-driving abilities are chosen by parents who are gifting their spoiled offspring with new automobiles, that trend is temporary; eventually the capability will become commonplace, like ABS and air bags. Teenagers will then be getting their licenses using such cars, whether or not their parents are spoiling them with new cars.

Eventually, even relatively poor teenagers will be learning to drive and taking their road tests on 25-year-old third-hand beaters which have still-working self-driving functions.
IQ TEST – Inductive reasoning
Hi guys,

I would love to know your opinion regarding this IQ test (see picture here: http://s28.postimg.org/wifhb4jp9/fofo.jpg).

My hypotheses are as follows:
1) Odd figures have even number of dots & even figures have odd number of dots. Therefore, we're left with a,b,c and e.
2)Odd figures have one vertical line (at least) and even figure have one horizontal line (at least). Therefore we're left with a,b and e.
3)Odd figures have a vertical axis of symmetry. Therefore we're left with e only; a is ruled out because its two rectangles are not of the same size.

Am I correct?

Thanks!
Thanks for releasing this!

Anyone know if there is a Docker container for this app? I've found Docker to be a great tool for trying server apps out without littering my system with extra installations.
I've never known anyone who acted reasonably have a spit mask put over their face. Only place I was arrested. I was off the charts drunk and treated 100% fairly. Long hair and all. Just because some John Oliver show etc, doesn't mean Texas is all the same. Nor can you take the behavior of one volunteer and extrapolate to the rest of Texas. I honestly expect higher discourse from this news aggregator site.
I discovered that if I only consumed caffeine when I had a Migraine headache, that it was the most effective medicine I could take provided I didn't already have a tolerance built up so I gave up caffeine in my 20s.

I have heard the same. Very potent.

I've also detoxed from Caffiene in the past to reset, and been amazed at how little I can get by with.
Fewer.
Ask HN: Costs of acquiring a company?
My company is considering acquiring another company.

One of the people tasked with deciding this seems to have no concept of integration costs. He thinks that we just grow our team by 2x and then we're 2x more productive. Even though their technology stack is on JVM languages, and ours is Python-based.

My experience is that this is totally underestimating the costs of integration, but are there studies to back this up?

(Let's set aside the coordination costs of a larger team -- we can refer to the Mythical Man-Month for that).
I just tried evil mode a few days ago and felt blown away by it. May I ask what problems you ran into? I believe you, and I'm trying to find out what to watch out for.
Anyone's story about 'why they just got arrested' is probably not one you can really take at face value.

People who did nothing will usually say they did nothing.

People who committed a crime or were very unruly or unsafely intoxicated will also usually say they did nothing.

Let's not start sharpening the pitchforks quite yet.

This could be a ridiculous and completely unjust situation!

However, it could also be that this person got very drunk while partying and did something stupid, and either remembers it incorrectly (see 'drunk') or is terrified of losing their job and wants to set the narrative.
> If some film is unavailable in some region, piracy in that region has no conceivable impact on sales.

This is definitely not true. Piracy in that region builds up a support infrastructure for piracy that can be used in other regions. It builds social support for piracy, and can spread, as a cultural practice, when people from the afflicted region converse with people from other regions. All of those things can impact sales outside the region.
I have been locked up over 20 times in my life.

Everytime I've been to jail, there are newbies in the holding cells that cry "I didn't do anything" and can't believe how horrible and mean all the CO's are.

And everytime, if and when I go to First Appearance with them, it turns out they very much did something quite illegal that got them arrested in the first place, and its almost always something then did not want to discuss while they were whining in the holding cell.

If your are new to jail, every fucking hour seems like an entire day and the powerlessness of the situation seems beyond comprehension.

BTW, it designed like that so, you know, you don't ever want to come back. That's the whole point.
Seems this is what Twitter is like when you get exposure in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9oZplyzDKc
There is definitely a gene for caffeine metabolism. I'm a slow metabolizer. I know people who can drink coffee right before bed and not notice.
Yeah, it's pretty awful. It's one of the only social platforms where your experience gets significantly worse the more popular you are. You can't even untag yourself or "ignore" replies to tweets you're tagged in. Even if you block someone, Twitter will still put replies to their tweets in your notifications and timeline if the tweets have your handle in them.
Good, Windows 7 is a security problem (or will be, soon).
Before we turn into an angry mob, can we try to wait until more facts come out about this? Remember what you have heard so far is only one guy's side of the story.

In a different tweet the author said that it was for public intoxication. Austin is a big college town and throwing young guys into the drunk tank for public intoxication is a pretty common thing in these type of towns. And I am willing to bet that most people who are thrown into the drunk tank think they "did nothing wrong".

A reasonable explanation is this guy got a little tipsy and the police thought he was drunker than he was, threw him into a drunk tank to sober up, put a spit mask over his head in case (or because) he was being belligerent or he might puke, then released him once he was clearly sober.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is fair treatment. But for anyone who has spent years living in a college town populated by tens of thousands of drunk 20 somethings, it is at least understandable why the citizenry would want police to respond this way. It is also far from a sign that the US is racists as a whole or an (extra) reason we should be afraid of Trump which the author seemed to suggest in other tweets.
A volunteer asking for something unreasonable, possibly because he has no understanding for the religious role of a hijab, that you can simply decline, maybe explain and surely get sorted by talking to someone else, or at worst just walk away in disgust, is very different than experiencing police abuse and force, being helpless and restrained, isolated from your friends and family for hours.

Not to dismiss that event, still pretty fucked up, but not the same order of magnitude.
I agree with all that. But what's the link? I mean, interest in self driving cars is much greater than interest in plastic flowers, but it wouldn't make any sense to compare the two in an article.
Critical thinking free-zone.
You could apply this to almost any amount of popularity look at what people say about Donald Trump.
It's hard to tell what's going on here. The article appears to conflate information from many different FBI publications.

I downloaded the first linked document;[1] skimming through it and searching it, it seems to lack the most inflamatory claims in the article. Mostly it seems an exaggerated threat (students at every school are at much greater risk of many other threats) and it has other flaws, but it's not so bad. I think the most common theme is to look for students advocating violence to acheive their goals and use their support network to help them.

EDIT: To give you a feel for at least part of the document:

* "The response should leverage the strengths of governments, community organizations, social service agencies, and other professionals to provide what is commonly referred to as an “Off-Ramp”. ... The school formulates an intervention plan in conjunction with the community and non-law enforcement entities on the federal or state level. Ideally, an intervention cadre should contain professionals from the local community representing multiple disciplines such as mental health, social workers, law enforcement, school resource officers, faith-based organizations, and/or crisis intervention teams."

* "If a student continues on a trajectory to violence, the one remaining option is a law enforcement disruption"

----

[1] Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools: https://info.publicintelligence.net/FBI-PreventingExtremismS...
Yeah, this is incredibly old news. We already know this. When are they going to investigate why or come up with a new hypothesis?

My hypothesis: Most women reject short men as mates and most men reject fat women as mates. A successful marriage tends to strongly correlate to socioeconomic success, longevity, etc.
https://twitter.com/crylenol/status/344561543150727168

Commercial for Twitter dot com:

*man yells nonsense out his window*

Narrator: Don't you wish there were a better way?
That is completely inapplicable to drivers who are already merged into the correct section of freeway and just want to zig-zag between lanes based on what they think is faster at any moment.

If you're not one of these drivers, it benefits your trip time if you prevent their actions by not creating easy opportunities for them to slip in.

If you are one of these drivers, it benefits your trip time if you successfully carry out the zig-zagging. To that end, it behooves you not to announce your intended moves. If you do, you reduce your opportunities, because you're relying on those who enable this behavior by letting zig-zagging drivers in. In other words, not-blinking is a rational game strategy.
If enough people file complaints with the FTC and/or state Attorney Generals, they might get involved as well.

I wonder how privacy settings are being handled, and whether harm is being done to those who are automatically upgraded.
One of the AWS people at Re:Invent mentioned that Amazon is storing 8EB across all storage services (S3, Glacier etc.)

So 500PB is ~6% of that... Although I'm sure Amazon would have liked to keep Dropbox as a customer it's probably a pretty small percentage of their revenue. Also, if you assume that AWS is growing at ~50% year over year then 6% of S3 is only about one or two months worth of growth.

I think it was this talk but I'm not sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HDQsW_r1DM
Oddly, it used to require manual intervention to resume after any stop longer than five seconds. Then they bumped it up to 30 seconds on highways. Then they (mostly) removed it.
The population growth rate peaked in 1962 at 2.2 % per year and is now back to 1.1 % per year. There is no way for a population to grow exponentially for a long time, the growth will hit some resource constraint sooner or later and then the growth stops. Therefore also the human population can not and will not grow exponentially forever. But the important point is that you don't want to get stopped by hitting a resource constraint, that is always going to be an unpleasant experience. And the slowdown of the growth of the human population is not due to hitting a resource constraint as it happens in animal populations, it is because of a conscious decision to have less children and having the means to do that. And that's a good thing.
Except this is railing against a bastardized version of a rule. Leaving out the "small efficiencies" allows the rule to be applied in contexts where it clearly was not intended.
I think this is just a matter of learning styles. This speaks to one kind of learner, maybe not others. I personally learn by doing - no lecture, no matter how slow or fast is going to "teach" me - it may lay groundwork, but I learn in the (virtual) trenches.
Exactly this. You can buy them combined at http://www.powdercity.com/products/l-theanine-caffeine-capsu...
It's night and day compared to caffeine only.
Yo-yo.js – replacing react with 2 lines of code
As somebody who tries to learn from fundamentals, can you suggest a book (or two) and a course (online to accompany) it with, to get started in this area? I have been working as a programmer for a while(10 years).
Yeah I don't see why one would want to write extensions in anything but lisp. Lisp is way more powerful and straightforward! :)
> Compensation is not something covered by Free Software.

That's kind of my point. Free software, per the FSF and the GPL requires that the users are free to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute software. There is no provision there to allow for the authors to extract value from their own investment through distribution of the outputs.

If you can't extract value from the distribution of that software, then you are left with building value through the delivery of services, support, monetizing the data you can collect from users, or access to your user (so far the the most prominent open source business models).

I have no objection to open source software, and quite enjoy using and contributing on open source stuff (software , documentation, gaming content, etc), but make no mistake, the free software movement demands that the work of others be free for consumption without compensation.
I thought this is what we wanted it? The ability to point at someone claim they're a harasser/suspicious and get them bagged and tagged? Have I missed the memo were that's not the modus operandi of recent efforts for combating harassment?
I would look at this from a different point of view -- give people recourse against this kind of nonsense. Reduce the barrier for people to rightly protect themselves and help them wherever necessary.
Soldering without heat
> ...built from the ground up to be as lightweight and efficient as possible.

This is my favorite part. So many sites start out this way, then become slow, unresponsive and bulky. Here's to hoping it stays slim and quick.
The Texas public intoxication law is apparently very broad (you could be arrested without having had a single drink) and is apparently used to discriminate regularly: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/texas-racist-law...
> What if a counterexample with very large (x,y,z,n) had been found somewhere in the late 1980s because enough megaflops to find it was finally allocated

I'm curious why floating point operations would be the appropriate tool for finding solutions to a Diophantine equation. Did you have something in mind when writing this? Where can I learn more about it?
Using a spit mask because you're afraid someone is going to vomit sounds like involuntary manslaughter levels of stupidity.
Good to know. I read the original series about 20 years ago and was recently thinking of catching up on the rest of it.
Not necessarily true. Depending on the field, publications in arxiv can be important and cited.
For instance in http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types-issues at 26:26 the topic of mapping modular to functional vs. functional to modular is presented. It wasn't some arbitrary decision, but based on the lessons learned earlier.

Since then, DOT has been proven to be sound, dotc can bootstrap itself, and large subsets of "Scala 2" can already be compiled with dotc.

Dotc also sports a very interesting design with its mini-phases + phase-fusion approach, denotations, less desugaring, and a more immutable AST. The speed improvements have been very promising even though no performance tuning has happened so far.

TASTY is on track as a standard IR to express code as an entity that can be produced by different compilers and compiled to different targets like (JVM, JS, ...).

SBT recently gained a compiler interface to drive compilation with dotc, and dotc gained support for producing Scala.js IR.

What happened to 1ML since the paper was published?
I'm glad to see such positive news about PHP. It received way too much beating from the community in the last couple of years while constantly improving.
Interesting to see some benchmarks on how PHP7 compares to Python and Ruby in terms of performance.
> We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

I have not accepted auto updates that I can't turn off for anything, ever.
The threshold for ruining people's lives in general needs to be higher than hearsay. But we're often quick to disregard that when it fits our own world view or hits closer to home.
Grocery-Delivery Startup Instacart(YC) Cuts Pay for Couriers
https://cve.fbi.gov/whatis/?state=propagandaSection1

https://cve.fbi.gov/where/?state=report

I believe that is where they got some of the pieces. At least, its the closest I can find to some of the more inflammatory claims. However, all of those have clearly violent messaging.
I was actually thinking that may be the case, but (anecdata warning!) after switching to a car with lane assist + adaptive cruise control (so similar to the described one I think), I can concentrate on the road ahead much more now. I didn't realise how tiring the "normal driving" is until now. The ability to stop glancing at the dashboard to check speed and not working that hard to turn (even comparing to assisted steering) is amazing.

You may think those things are in muscle memory, but actually they do tire you out. Even after a 1h drive, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.
Sure, there's a chance some of it was overwritten already, though hopefully Windows 7 and Windows 10 are a similar size on disk, which would mean that it'd mostly be OS files that were overwritten (as Windows should be installed on the early sectors of the hard disk in both cases).
Yes, I think it's because of the beard.

I have myself similar problems but for different reasons.
What's up with depressing topics on HN?
I think this is what the internet is like. When someone tells a story that people don't believe, people don't nod their head and try to avoid the conversation like they do in real life. They make fun of you and mock your attempt to tell a self serving story.

Sometimes people on the internet are right, sometimes they are wrong. They are not saying anything here that they wouldn't have said if they heard this story in real life, the only difference is that they are saying it out loud where everyone can hear it, instead of in a private way to their close associates.
> The Japanese have a small word -- ma -- for "that which is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial".

間 means "a gap", but I don't see the relation to programming.
Try 絆 and 繋がる ("bonds" and "connect") out if you'd like some words popular in cheesy pop songs!
That's so bad it didn't even cross my mind.
It's disingenuous to say that this is included in a "bachelor's degree in STEM" -- it's part of a specific course of study.

Part of the reason this issue pisses me off so much is that I have a degree from one of the top CS programs in the world. I was definitely more of a theory than a systems person. And yet it still feels like a pile of unnecessary ego-stroking gibberish.

I feel comfortable saying most people who make software are less-experienced in this area than I am. When I run into this, I can at least say: "This is bullshit", and not feel the imposter syndrome of "It's just me -- I'm not smart enough for this" that I imagine most people feel.

Beyond that, functional programming is, by and large, easier than imperative programming. I love writing Scala -- It's honest about side effects, honest about concurrency, and has one of the better type checkers around. And I'm sick of seeing people try to "fence off the riffraff" by raising the barrier of entry to the Scala community.
This is probably like having your car towed: technically there’s something that says they are allowed to do it but you sure as hell don’t expect it to happen, you don’t want it to happen, it will cost you time and money and at the wrong time it could really screw you. Thanks, Microsoft!
Huh? Scala has nothing remotely resembling Javascript's weird prototype thing.
Why would one pick Zube of Jira? (I am about to implement Jira - are you mature enough to compete against Jira, thus shall I eval Zube V Jira? or diff use case?)
Actually, it's a good analogy because Mandarin's difficulty is also overblown. It's hard, yes, but I have no trouble being understood by the Chinese, and any Westerner living in China who makes the effort inevitably comes to that point as well.
Ultima Online's resource system: a world with properties (2006)