skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing firmware development, I do find many of the C compilers generate sub-optimal bit field type manipulation code.
But that's pretty much what Aaronson is implying. That physics can be cold, calculating, unbiased while the social sciences are the opposite.

There is plenty of dogma in the physics world as well. For example, just look at the way people defend their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics as absolute truth.
This is a genuine question: in what ways is Python's async implementation lacking? Could it have been baked in a better way?

In what ways do languages that were supposedly designed for async programming different than Python?

Python is definitely lacking an elegant interface for async programming.
Salina Turda Salt Mine in Romania
that's definitely a tough decision. it's forcing you to choose between financial security and personal happiness, both of which are very important (in fact, the latter is often ignored for the sake of the former, but it shouldn't be). I think you need to weigh these two priorities as they apply to your current situation, and make a judgment.

I would err on the side of having mental peace and joy at the risk of taking a dent on my financial prospects, only if I am assured that my financial sacrifice is only big enough to take away my luxuries, and not my necessities.
Looks like isthewebhttp2yet.com, isn't HTTP/2 yet.

$> curl --head http://isthewebhttp2yet.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: GXE1k2FX9Wmpzdjer4hI7lmA7LK/Znlo6dN6/qUdOVSjb95g+VaDGL6EB6QODo+cv3QNkvTZcIc=
x-amz-request-id: 51C2129F4B496C03
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2016 16:35:29 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue, 05 Apr 2016 15:12:25 GMT
ETag: "543317ac1e885c2039b13925f35afdd3"
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 9793
Server: AmazonS3

Not to imply this is their fault - I wish S3 (and Cloudfront) would support HTTP/2 but that day is probably a long ways off. However, I've used Caddy[1] for hosting static files with HTTP2 and free TLS via Let's Encrypt and had a really great experience with it - might be something to look into.

[1]: https://caddyserver.com
Native video-out works a charm, using CableCreation Gold USB 3.1 Type C (USB-C) to HDMI Adapter (£12 on Amazon)
There was exactly this bug in Android for a long time - memset always cleared the memory to zero. I can't find a good link to this, but try maybe https://review.source.android.com/#patch,sidebyside,14699,1,..., not that Firefox will let me connect to check.

As for the rules for VC++, they are conservative - see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k1a8ss06.aspx. In general, you're right that it's much nicer to use than the shit gcc foists on you, but these conservative rules are symptomatic of its reluctance to integrate C and asm very well.

That's one problem gcc doesn't have - my complaint isn't that you can, just that it makes you do it the hard way. But that's totally unnecessary... a few years ago I used CodeWarrior for PowerPC. It was very pleasant, and did a good job of making it easy to have C and asm coexist. You allocated registers by declaring variables as `register', and the compiler would figure out how to put them somewhere sensible on entry to each asm block, and spill the ones that were modified, if that even proved necessary. You could leave one asm block having just modified a register variable, assert that it had done what you expected, then start another one, along the lines of:

register int fred=0;
asm addi fred,1
assert(fred==1);
asm addi fred,1

I wish VC++ would do something like that; you can sort-of do it, but it's impossible to request that a given value goes somewhere in particular (register, frame relative, etc.) and this can stymie you sometimes. But they decided to remove inline assembly language altogether for x64, so that's one way of solving the problem. Still nicer than what gcc does.
Get ready for your uber driver to start asking you for cash
Good to read!
How does the repeal of Glass-Steagall fit into that?
What news pages are you referring to? The only ones I'm aware of are in the Wikipedia space, which is not considered to be the actual content but meta.

Your site is interesting and definitely a different take to Wikipedia, but ironically it's often longer than the long form Wikipedia articles. But I do like it - and actually I might even use it :-)

It also doesn't cover broad topics that aren't news based. I don't know how you could use your site to cover Zoroastrianism, Jesus, Trigonometry, C++, the word "the", or psychoanalysis.

You are covering two different things that have overlap. I see a lot of validity in your project, but it doesn't cater to all topics - what it does do well is cover news well! Better than most sites I've seen actually.
> Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz

That sounds good. Unfortunately, in my experience, the real-world performance of the low-end chips in cheap laptops has been absolutely dire for about a decade. And those low-end chips are the ones most of us experience....
The romanticization of gangsters (Yakuza included) really bother me. Video games aren't the devil and aren't real, but they can have real effects in how we react to the world. When we play "gangster" video games and interview "real life gangsters", it seems really edgy and cool. But these people commit real life crimes, and are actual criminals. Not in a video game: in real life. And aside from law enforcement, one big disincentive to actually be a gangster is societal censure / disapproval.

As cool as it is to have a realistic video game, pieces like this are a good example of the insidious impact they can have on how you treat the world.

I am sad to see a genuinely bad person being lionized.
> But that's pretty much what Aaronson is implying. That physics can be cold, calculating, unbiased while the social sciences are the opposite.

Sure, and I agree that it's not necessarily true. I just wanted to point out that I was never claiming physics to be unbiased. :)
There are plenty of parkings / pavements like that in Europe.
In fact I was surprised why pavement in USA/Canada is solid concrete and not those small pavement bricks.
I found it easier than doing it in javascript because I could insert `import pdb;pdb.set_trace()` into the code and get an interactive debugger.

Supposedly you can do this in javascript by running node with a particular flag, then connecting to a port on localhost, and opening the chrome debugger. However, the multiple times I've tried throughout 2014-2016 has show that to be incredibly finnicky. It is especially frustrating when trying to insert a debugger into an automated test.
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 OpenBSD mailing list post about the state of
compilers, whose points still are still valid in 2016, and I think it has some
relevance to this submission.

Assuming the upstream developers fail to deliver, it's up to us to fix
or workaround compiler problems as we encounter them; sometimes it's as
easy as finding out which patch has been commited upstream, but not
backported to the version we use; and sometimes it's a genuine issue
which may or may not have been reported in the latest compiler version,
and we are on our own. When this happens, we can only rely upon our
developer skills and intimacy with the compiler.

A few of our developers have, over the years, become unafraid of gcc,
and able to investigate issues, backport fixes, and fix or work around
bugs: I'll only mention niklas@, espie@, etoh@ and otto@, and hope the
few others will forgive me for not listing their names. This has not
been an easy road, to say the least. Now, another few of our developers
are working on building a similar knowledge of llvm. I wish them a lot
of luck, and I will try to join them in the near future.

In the meantime I am not sure they feel confident enough to support
switching the most popular OpenBSD platforms from gcc to llvm.

In a few months or years from now, things will be different...

...but there is something I wish would happen first.

An LTS release of an open source compiler.
Because all compilers nowadays are full of subtle bugs, but so many of
them than you can't avoid them as soon as you compile any nontrivial
piece of code, and because we can't afford to going back to assembly, we
need a compiler we can trust.

GCC, as well as LLVM, have Fortune 500 companies backing them, paying
smart developers to work fulltime on these projects.

Yet none of them dares to provide a long time support version. Bugs in
version N are fixed in version N+1, but new bugs are introduced. And
noone cares about trying to settle things down and produce a compiler
one can trust (because version N+1 runs 3.14% faster in the loonystones
benchmark which doesn't match any real life use case). Who cares?
Tomorrow's compiler will generate code which will complete an infinite
loop in less than 5 seconds; stay tuned for more accomplishments!

The free software world needs an LTS compiler. The last de-facto LTS
compiler we have had was gcc 2.7.2.1, and it is too old to compile
modern C and C++ code.

Should a free software LTS compiler appear (be it a gcc fork, or an llvm
fork, or something else), then OpenBSD would consider using it, very
seriously. And we probably wouldn't be the only free software project
doing so.

-- http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=137530560232232

( Previous discussion of this post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322259 )

I like that this project is in-line with these same goals.
Awesome Python: A curated list
I don't think being at a startup is what I would consider "financial security". There's still 2 years until the stock vests, and even then it may be worth less than if OP had left and worked another job for 2 years. But I agree with your sentiment, it's better to be happier and have a more fulfilling job if you can afford it.
JS coach
Now thats interesting.
The ones we have (in the UK at least) are not usually permeable though.
Can QBE do coroutines (e.g 'yield')? Or maybe it's a front-end issue only?
If this is happening then internal audit procedures are non existent as any significant finance decisions should involve a minimum of two people to authorise transactions to minimise fraud in the first place.

This falls under business basics.
> Physics can collect so much data that the generally accepted standard for results is five sigma. There are biases in physics, but it's much harder to delude yourself into a five sigma result than a two sigma one--in the end the right answer becomes obvious.

That's in the case of clear-cut predictions from theory or empirical relations. But bias generally arises in a more subtle fashion than statistics on measurements, though. Even if you have a "5-sigma result", it still needs to be interpreted, and that's where biases can rear their heads. On possible manifestation (though not the only), is if one ascribes to a particular theory, one is generally biased into interpreting those results within the framework of that theory. And if one isn't careful, that can lead to diminishing the weight of evidence that conflicts with the theory (e.g., "it's 5-sigma, but those data aren't actually relevant to this issue").

As an example, one area I'm actively researching is the emission from molecules in galaxies. We see that some galaxies show enhancements in emission from a specific molecule (HCN). Everyone agrees that the enhancements exist but there's wide disagreement on what causes it. And much of the discussion around it parallels people's opinions/biases about which is more important for a galaxy: how many new stars it is forming versus how active the supermassive black hole is at the galaxy's center. The preferred interpretations for the extra HCN emission seems to correlate very well with people's prior notions* (which is not surprising). Of course, more data will eventually provide a concrete solution to this question, though what new data are collected is often chosen within an existing framework.

* - I'm sure it's true for me, even though I try to mitigate it as much as possible. But we often have trouble recognizing our own biases.
More efficiently.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the most destructive bombing runs in WWII.

The March 9th 1945 bombings of Tokyo were far more destructive.
There's a chapter in an early book where the IT consultant protagonist is leafing through a technical report from some government bureaucracy full with buzz-speak about how they require "flexible system architectures" and "object oriented databases" or something or the other. The consultant finds it amusing and says something along the lines of "as long as they're paying me". Reminded me a little of Brett Easton Ellis, there's a similar kind of cynicism and detachment, with regards to white collar work.
Or the millions of mice that find their way into the blades of combines in wheat and corn fields...
For those in this thread that speculate about hitting this or this before reacting: nuclear weapons take a certain time to reach a target and retaliation would happen before _any_ nuclear explosion occurs.
It's pretty clear that the grandparent meant that for better or worse, ingroup-outgroup bias is a very real thing in human psychology abd sociology, and there wouldn't be many wars without demonization of the outgroup. I saw no indication that they actually thought that this is a good distinction to make. Is-ought problem.
Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-l..., which points to this.
I think the position you are presenting is wrong. You are essentially saying that it is irresponsible for a country to not have nuclear weapons because that invites other countries to wipe it out, after all there is no difference between not having nuclear weapons and convincingly asserting that you will not use them for retaliation strikes.
When I come to put you up against the wall for holding dangerous to the nation ideas like that, will you still think of me as one of your own?
Plenty of modern innovation and experiments are funded by billionaires today. Most relevant to HN, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Elon Musk are all ready examples.
Wittgenstein’s Beetle in Software Engineering
It's certainly possible, but still much harder to evade than a sales tax or an income tax.
Thank you for reminding me of that paper's title. Jacobian mentioned it to me at PyCaribbean, but I've since been hunting for it.

It is available for free at https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/...
It's your job to prove that there's a gap attributed to gender, specifically. Good luck showing us even one such study.

When PayScale did their study, they controlled for some of the obvious factors, and the gap pretty much disappeared. They obviously didn't control for everything.

http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap

You can also find a niche in which men or women make more, that's inevitable, just due to the randomness of the salaries. I'm yet to see any evidence for the systemic discrimination.
We're federal government employees (and are allowed to use Slack).
I live in a rural area in tornado alley. We also live on a major fault line, so there are a few potential "big ones" that could affect my area.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that, trying to figure out what to do in order to be prepared for a realistic disaster. What I ended up deciding was that I can afford to help my neighbors (and whoever else may show up). I have an extensive first-aid setup, stuff to purify water, tons of trash bags, and some easy-to-prepare food. If we have a major disaster in my area, I plan to distribute as much of that as I can. For a fairly small investment I have enough stuff to keep everyone on my street healthy and fed for about a month even if their pantries are empty. No Mad Max necessary.

As an interesting side note, as part of that process I did some calculating on relative costs and discovered that you can buy enough storable basic calories (white flour, stabilized cooking oil, and sugar - no health food here) to feed about 100 people for a month for less than it costs to get a single mid-grade rifle with no ammunition (about $1000). To me, that's the best answer to the idea that being prepared means getting armed to the teeth and fighting off the ravening hordes.

I may be wrong, but I agree with the thesis of this article that people tend to band together and try to help each other in a disaster, so I built a plan around that assumption.
A disclaimer: I am not currently a fictionalist, but I find it remarkably interesting to consider.

Fictionalists are not making claims about mathematical truth; they are making claims about philosophical truth. When Colyvan (who I believe is not a fictionalist) describes fictionalism as an error theory of mathematical discourse, he does not mean that mathematicians incorrectly assign the label of mathematical truth to statements that are mathematically false, but rather that it is an error to conflate mathematical truth ("true in the story of mathematics") with philosophical truth. In other words, you and the fictionalists are in agreement on your first point.

I don't quite understand your second point, or its justification. For example, would you consider the statement "All even primes greater than 2 are divisible by 1001" to be true, false, or meaningless? I think most people will agree that even primes greater than 2 do not exist. Fictionalists would assert that this statement is false; with my background in formal logic, I tend to believe that this statement is vacuously true. I would be interested in seeing an argument for the claim that this statement is meaningless.
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/game/unit/mutalisk

No fire-breathing : "Weapon: Glave Wurm"
true it's more about sacrificing the possible payout if/when the company exits, which obviously can set you up nicely down the road to do the things you want and have a happy life.
I guess I formulated not precisely enough. I have not tried to accuse anybody of misusing. From books that I read I got a strong impression that the term "functional programming" as a term is about treating functions as the first-class entities (or even the only entities). The persistent data structures is orthogonal to this. But I guess I just have to accept that in the field it is a common speak to use "functional algorithms" to mean "algorithms for persistent data structures".

Personally I see this as unfortunate as the persistence as a term IMO is much more precise. It also remains that one also needs GC and properly accounts its cost which this paper discuss a lot.
most of the plants and things were thing of building on don't have atmospheres, so most of the heat loss is radiative? I don't think an airless gap would do much to reduce it.
Looks pretty interesting to do async on python. I once did something similar in node (async by default) with a few lines of code. I think I scraped 12 or 20 million real URLs in 8 hours on a $5 cloud VM. It was limited by network bandwidth.
That works for physical goods, but not for a diner in London.
This is the second time I've seen this statement (the president won't launch nuclear missiles without being attacked first). Given that this is demonstrably false in the case of the US, I'm wondering what you're basing this on.

(The US has never been bombed by any other nation but it has bombed a couple dozens. In the case of nukes, it is the only nation that has used them against another country.)
I think that Python 3.5 now has a very elegant interface for async programming. I prefer Tornado to the standard library's asyncio, but the new keywords are nice for both packages (disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of Tornado).

The downsides have nothing to do with the design of the language. The problem is that introducing a new concurrency model late in a language's life splits the ecosystem. Most existing packages are synchronous, so if you want to build asynchronous systems you must avoid packages like requests, django, or sqlalchemy and find (or develop) asynchronous equivalents for the functionality you need.

Javascript has an advantage here not because the design of the language is especially well-suited for asynchronous programming, but because it never went through a synchronous/multi-threading phase. Every javascript package is designed for asynchronous use.
There are plenty of independent bands singing in local languages. Few
of them make it global. More imporant, humans are herd animals and
often (not always) emulate others, especially others that have had
success. If you've grown up in an environment saturated with
English-language pop-music, like a lot of the world has, then the idea
to sing in your native language might seem absurd or a fool's errand.

You need to think historically. The dominance of English language
pop music emerged at a time when music was distributed as vinyl
records. They were very expensive to produce and
distribute. Basically, to recoup the cost of producing and
distributing vinyl, you had to sell an extremely large number
(millions) of identical products, so you can industrialse the process. You target the most lucrative market (US), carter mercilessly to that market's demands, and homogenise (by way marketing in all forms) as much as possible the consumers, so you can sell as many copies of as few products as possible. You amplify this process by reusing production, distribution, marketing and reselling the product in less lucrative markets.

While the economics of producing and distributing has changed, the change was too recent to have
affected the dominance of English in this field, a dominance that was a reaction to the market forces described.

Social evolution typically trails technical evolution.
Maybe that needs clarifying then. A source that comes up with information that can't be verified isn't terribly reliable, and thus not really verifiable.

Every single anti-vaccination site does this. Here's an example:

http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/02/18/the-deadly-impo...

"The Deadly Impossibility of Herd Immunity". There are claims in there such as "as the literature shows" with no reference to the literature itself. It makes a lot of claims and refers to some sort of group that it doesn't even identify to characterise claims by vaccination specialists, and gets a lot of facts wrong about herd immunity.

Thus, as a source it is unreliable in that it doesn't clearly state its own sources, so I'd have to call it unverifiable.
And when the lens flares show up at the beginning of SF you can really see how hard the image stabilization is working to keep the image steady.
From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Even...:

JavaScript has a concurrency model based on an "event loop". This model is quite different than the model in other languages like C or Java.

...

A very interesting property of the event loop model is that JavaScript, unlike a lot of other languages, never blocks. Handling I/O is typically performed via events and callbacks, so when the application is waiting for an IndexedDB query to return or an XHR request to return, it can still process other things like user input.
Considering that we've been doing this for decades[1], it's a bit odd to see this hailed as something new. Though it's nice to see low impact development[2] get some press.

1: http://www.millermicro.com/porpave.html

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-impact_development_(U.S._a...