skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. Other languages have a GIL or GIL-like.

The backstory of Python's GIL is a tradeoff made nearly a quarter-century ago. Python came from the Unix world, where forking processes was the common way of having multiple lines of execution, but in the 90s threading was starting to take off as an alternative (insert standard anecdote about Java adopting threading since it had to run on set-top TV boxes that couldn't handle multi-process concurrency).

So Python needed to gain support for threading, but also needed to not horribly break a lot of existing code -- particularly extensions written in C -- and not destroy performance. Which was an issue since Python's memory management and garbage collection internals were not thread-safe, and it would've been both a major slowdown and a major breaking change to just say "all right, we'll do this in the theoretically best possible way".

The trade-off solution was to introduce this global lock which needed to be acquired and released. The side effects of the lock are twofold:

1. Only a single thread can be executing at a time within a given Python interpreter process, and

2. The bookkeeping around the lock introduces overhead. This overhead is negligible in some cases but ruinous in others.

The tradeoff seemed reasonable at the time, though. For one thing, hardware capable of exposing the single-thread limit as a relevant limit wasn't exactly common in 1992. For another, the overhead of the GIL mainly bites you in CPU-bound workloads, and at the time people wanted threading to write I/O-bound applications like networking daemons.

Here in 2016, of course, everybody has a multi-core computer in their pocket and we see plenty of CPU-bound workloads that we'd like to parallelize. Which is why people complain about the GIL. But now it's even more of a breaking change to try to remove it, and still has performance implications.
It's a way of justifying keeping salaries as low as possible for engineers, but somehow managing to cough up more money in some locations. An equally good engineer in Chicago should be worth the same amount as an engineer in SF, but they're paid less... simply because the employer has more negotiating power in both cases. In both cases, the employer pays enough to give the engineer a reasonably good living for the local cost of living, because that's what's needed to incentivize them to work... a natural minimum incentive. If engineers demanded more, they'd get more.
Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting.

Lung cancers are particular in that they feature an incredible amount of somatic mutation. If I remember its at least 10x as much as the next high-mutation rate cancer. Probably more even. Smoking tobacco provides a melange of mutagens: complex aromatic DNA adducts that result from combustion, heavy oils, and radiation from potassium heavy fertilizer. These would be enough to cause problems alone, but to make things as bad as possible the active ingredient is a critical signaling molecule in the cell cycle, which after copious application is likely to induce the survival of cells unresponsive to it. These cells are less likely to play nice with others.
There's probably code in there, somewhere.
Cheapest smartphone start around 4000, while popular price point is 6-10000. No one sells it for 1000, one company promised it, but never launched.
Sorry if I was being ambiguous. All mice are less resistant to cancer than humans, even wild type mice. Mice in nature rarely live long enough to get cancer, but if you put them up in a mouse retirement home (lab), a large percentage of wild mice will get spontaneous cancers.

Yes mouse cancer in not a great model for human cancer and we probably should not be using mice - about the only good thing they have going for them as a model is they are small and cheap.

Personally I would like to see us using pets (dogs and cats) much more as their cancers are a much better match to human cancers in both how they develop and how they progress. That we are not taking better advantage of this resource to develop new treatments is a tragedy.
Ok we'll change the title back to what it was originally. Sorry for the distraction.

Edit: actually this is still pretty cool work and it isn't the creator's fault that I oversold it, so I've put "Show HN" back and edited my root comment above. Let's discuss the video now!
Matt Damon's Commencement Address at MIT
Jaunt – A friendly Clojure fork
From the article (search the URL on Google to get around paywall), it sounds like the biggest hurdle is ensuring a private company complies with international treaties concerning space and the moon. They described it as a regulatory Catch-22 because there was no template, no precedent for a private company sending something past orbit.
Yes, the compiler has fully implemented everything the language is intended to do since the 1.0 release a bit over a year ago. (Work focuses on the compiler and standard library itself; there isn't a separate spec doc that is updated to do things that aren't yet implemented or being implemented, so it's more like Python or GHC than R6RS or C++.) The compiler and the language are both stable; there's been no "runtime" in a strict sense since a few months 1.0, but there's a standard library which is usually statically linked in, and both the language and the standard library are covered by a very strong stability guarantee (more-or-less, code that works today and isn't deliberately doing something stupid will work indefinitely, as there are no plans for a Rust 2.0). Plenty of people are using it in production. So I'd go with "Yes."
I think there should be a point to address running out of memory. If you just keep adding images/animation/videos, eventually the site experience will be bad.
This will apply to a lot of technologies - of course X is slower than Y if you don't optimise your app to take advantage of the features and architecture of X.

What that means in terms of RDS vs Aurora, I'm not sure. But would be great to hear what your outcomes are!
Convos.org – sort of Reddit meets 4chan
Here is a YouTube video of a breakdown of manually exploring the Ulam Spiral in the J programming language [1], and finally coding it up user tangentstorm. [2]

After all, J is an array-processing beast!

[1] jsoftware.com
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBC5vnwf6Zw
Click the web link, then click the first result. Going through google bypasses the paywall.
I think there is a future in VR / first-person representation of real world networks, applications and Internet.
Haven't read the article because of paywall but it's likely a requirement of the outer space treaty where the government is required to ensure conformity to the articles of the treaty by private entities.

Specifically, article VI requires - "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty"

Interestingly I don't know of any established processes for monitoring the activities of companies in outer space apart from getting approval from the FAA. It's not really ever been a problem up 'til now.
Here's a version without a paywall: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/first-commercial-mission-to...

(Alternatively, there's a "web" link on HN to bypass the WSJ paywall)
I looked at the vote data and didn't see anything fishy. My guess is that it shot up because people love smoking gun posts and Reddit is always a popular topic. Then it got heavily flagged and plummeted to the depths.
That will make company like MS/Google/FB/AMAZN, invincible. Startups are going to be starved. They will not have that much leverage to recruit desired talents.
The T4xx and the X2xx lines have been pretty much the go-to for corporate IT over the last decade. Solidly built, upgradable (except for perhaps the bleeding-edge models), and heaps of spare parts around if needed.
I'm not deeply familiar with the CPython API, but that should be completely straightforward as long as you don't trade native CPython structures between interpreters. If you start with something like Numpy's array interface, and implement an array in C that knows that it could be accessed by multiple Python interpreters and needs to become immutable before it's passed, it should work. But I wouldn't expect it to be easy to take a regular PyObject and move it between interpreters, so the cost of serialization and deserialization might be an issue.
> To be clear, this won't actually let you get to any blocked server, since there are IP layer blocks in place too, but at least DNS will be correct. :) (Actually, detecting such blocks could allow someone to build a middlebox which used VPN only when needed and otherwise used normal upstream. Hm...)

That's more or less what ChinaDNS/Shadowsocks does[1], though I think the DNS list is maintained by hand, not automatically generated (?).

[1]: https://github.com/shadowsocks/ChinaDNS
That is why there needs to be a social network where you can just hop on and meet people for dinner, yoga class, or whatever.

I don't mean Meetup.com ... you don't use Meetup to go to dinner.
I gave up on the local market pretty early, at least for Linux work. I work 100% remotely now from Kapolei (just west of Honolulu) for a company on the mainland.
Also, didnt the company Micromax I believe start to gain a big market there? I haven't followed much on it yet but I know them and a bunch of home grown brands have started taking over as well
WAVM: standalone WebAssembly VM prototype
Sorry, I don't think you understand.

I'm saying that people cannot send emails to your mother pretending to be you if you were to implement the changes I have suggested.

I didn't say you were phished, I said you were spoofed. Judging by your first comment, your email address being spoofed is how your mother was phished.
Exactly. It does not matter how clever your structure is if the IRS thinks it is fishy you are going to be in for a world of pain.
So what is actually being paid on these H1B as salary? Using something like h1bdata.info, you can look into any company's filings. For example, the most recent Uber h1b filing[0] has a rate of pay from 110-140k but only a prevailing wage of 68k. Any insight as to what these employees are getting for base salaries?

>"F. Rate of Pay

1. Wage Rate (Required)
From: $ 115,000.00 To: $ 140,000.00"

>"9. Prevailing wage
$ 67,683.00 "

[0]http://h1bdata.info/lca.php?id=4536234&em=UBER%20TECHNOLOGIE...
>Can people from other countries use your service (by traveling to one of your locations?)

Yes.

>At what (maximum) age would the max potential benefit be achieved from harvesting?

Functional data of cells harvested from donors of different ages shows much variability between individuals, but after about 40, a slow trend in decreased differentiation potential, proliferation, and other measures, appears. The decline depends upon the measure, but in general, suggests 20-40yo is the best window, and closer to 20 is likely better. The functional decline continues, but seems to get steeper around 60. Between 70-80, some studies report that the numbers of stem cells start to drop in addition to function. Here is a representative study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2398731/
Just curious, why UC system has such a budget crisis? What leads to this?
How is that bribery? Sounds like negotiation tactics.
This breaks HN's civility rule badly. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842661 and marked it off-topic.
Immutability is also something you can model in the type system (not currently in Typescript, but it is possible in other languages).

That said, immutability by itself won't save you from passing the wrong shape of immutable object into a function, just as validating the shape of the argument passed and the argument expected against each other won't help if there are other assumptions being made by the code (such as that the object cannot be mutated). As one of the parent comments pointed out, types are proofs. Not everything can be proved to a compiler, but (assuming a bug-free compiler) everything which can be proved to a compiler does not need any additional tests. Things which cannot be proved to a compiler will need tests, of course.
I suspect one reason could be that mice have much faster metabolisms than humans. Also, typically the speed of metabolism is typically inversely correlated with size, although there definitely are some outliers too.
India has a misguided government that is crippled by bureaucracy and incompetent. The country would be in much better shape if it was still controlled by the British.
Interesting the link tlrobinson linked [0] (current NSObject docs) says:

> NSObject is the root class of most Objective-C class hierarchies.

vs

> NSObject is the root class of all ordinary Objective C inheritance hierarchies

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
It's not about your beliefs or what people infer about them. In fact it's not about you at all- it's about the other potential contributors and users that Yarvin is alienating, despite all the claims in this thread that his views don't impact the project.
Hey so if anyone is a Django expert and wants a little part time work helping direct a semi-green coder building a webapp for a fulfillment business, shoot me an email at alex@monthlyboxer.com

Bonus points if you're in HI so I can expense a trip to visit you :)
Miami U.S. Attorney's office, FBI accused of spying on defense
And OSI and many more.
Mice have far few cells than humans so they should be much less likely to get cancer (all things being equal). Peto’s paradox is all about this effect [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox
Except you're making the assumption the article highlights: you're operating under the belief that there is a concrete thing that "you are" that you should know.

As a person I'm constantly changing (or so I hope). Who I am now is not who I was ten years ago and probably won't be who I am ten years from now.

I prefer to try and simply understand myself; understand why I think, feel, or believe what I do, understand why I make the choices I make, etc. That then (hopefully) gives me the insight to change and improve.

As an aside, I've always found the human penchant for pigeonholing everything fascinating, especially when people do it to themselves. Many folks have a very concrete idea of who they are and aren't, and what they can and can't do... I see that as a real shame, as I often see people limit their own potential by harboring preconceived notions about themselves.
Have you heard of the Bengal famine?
> "There are plenty of rich people on all parts of the political spectrum always trying to unseat the current government."

This is wildly reductive. Your post in general seems to suggest that "rich people" (ill-advised usage, IMO) have equal sway in every corner of politics that could possibly matter to large swaths of voting US citizens. To sit there and defend "private citizen's influence" while shouting down the idea of public funding is _truly_ naive. Even a fool's review of The American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) effect on elections and public policy show that there is disproportionate private influence that needs tending to.

I'd suggest you give http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/if-corpo... a read.
In the US, the lifetime risk of developing cancer is 42% in men and 38% in women

Woah, this isn't far from saying living in the US isn't far from a coin toss for a death sentence.
I think it was David Brin who wrote a short story and a foreward explaining that aliens have taken the place of faeries in our culture.
Which ide are you using? WebStorm, for example, gets easily confused about common JS idioms, which makes its tipped hinting useless in many situations. This makes refactoring a pain since you can't perfectly trust its warnings.
If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It
Second time I get to mention David Brin in this submission!

You might enjoy his Uplift series; it deals with scenarios not unlike what you mention.
I've not made any arguments that we are pre-disposed, as a race, to these traits. I made no mention of the heritability of these traits. Describing my comment as racism is a complete nonsequitor.

My comment was on the state of the predominant Irish culture at the time of the diaspora.

By 1800 Ireland had been victim to hundreds of years of British misrule, shortly followed a major famine.

Our culture was devastated, our institutions were devastated, our life expectancy was in the mid 30's. We had little experience in self-governance, little experience of Democracy, Catholics were banned from most universities, couldn't fully own land until 1778.

It was even illegal for Catholics to teach elementary school, so childhood education was in an unimaginably desperate state.

Worst of all, Irish immigrants (unlike the H1Bs of today) mostly came from the lowest rungs of society in this already destitute nation and culture.

When my Irish great great grandmother came here she was 16, sent to America by her stepfather (along with her younger brother) because he no longer wanted to care for another man's children. She was fortunate enough to have come from a family of domestics for a wealthy estate, so she spoke well, and could cook and clean. She was comparatively lucky. Even so, it took multiple generations before my family pulled out of poverty, in NYC, and became a normal middle-class family.

Trying to assimilate a population like that into a nation with limited government and social institutions, as the US was in the 19th century, is a recipe for disaster. And it was, for a long time, a disaster.
You are just making stuff up! Please show me a citation that supports the claim that US students get their education on the backs of foreigners.

That UC is public university of the state of California, that differential of which you speak is funded by tax payers in California that is why it is cheaper for Californians to attend. Get it right. Here is an abridged history.

http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-...

And by the same token the the University is more expensive for out of state students.

Why on earth should the US be concerned that residents of other countries have their "full financial need met"?
I'm not sure even bribing would help in this case. The government is pretty serious about the manufacturing push.

I'm quite happy that Apple is not allowed to dump refurbished crap here. They sell enough phones already. They can continue that or they can start manufacturing here and open their store.
The Amiga 1000 had the sidecar and the 2000 had the bridgeboard. Each had multiple ISA slots. The first time I saw Windows, it was Version 2.0 on an A2000.

To me, that seems like more hardware compatibility than a Mac or II.
If that first feature is true, it will bring me back to TypeScript. Honestly, my major deterrence of TypeScript was managing both 3rd party libraries and typing files.
Which makes it particularly painful if you're innocent
So bind f2 to tide-rename-symbol in the mode map.

And throw the bind into your .emacs
There are plenty of hand-built CPU projects built by enthusiasts, made out of wire-wrapped integrated circuits[0]. There was even a Zuse homage I saw that was built entirely out of magnetic relays[1]. It's...insane, tbh.

0: http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
1: http://nablaman.com/relay/
After a lot of back-and-forth with people who decry the idea of corporate personhood, and those who support it, I've decided to post one of the few articles I've read that manages to maintain some semblance of balance. This article has produced a good number of _quality_ debates in the circles I've shared it. I hope others will find it similarly enlightening and useful.
The original version of NS for PC (3.1) required 16MB RAM and recommended 24 (32 in 3.2). The software itself cost $800. In 1993-94 there was a massive RAM shortage caused by a factory fire in Taiwan. RAM spiked to over $50/meg. The additional RAM to run NS alone would have been worth on the order of $1000 even in 1995 by which time prices had gone down.

All told, a NS system would cost around 3x the cost of a Windows system.
The closest to that is in the site guidelines: "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Eh, people also looked at a bunch of terrible inventions and correctly said, "who would ever want that?". Sometimes an invention is mistimed (eg, if the remote control were invented when we had 4 channels and not 40 or 400) or lacking just the right amount of polish (does anyone remember browsing the web on a pre-iPhone smart phone?), but sometimes an invention is just solving a problem almost no one has in a way essentially no one wants.
Refactoring. Say you want to make a 1:1 relation into a 1:* relation. You change your core data type from e.g. `type person{address:string}` to `type person{addresses:string[]}`, follow/fix all the red squiggly lines until it compiles, and generally you're done.

OTOH with unit tests, you've got to find/fix not only your app code but the test code as well. You may forget some things because you overlook a function and its tests. And of course your test coverage is likely not 100% so things may slip through.

So in addition to "refactoring", I'd add "guarantees": literally one line of code gives you 100% coverage.

PLUS autocomplete. JS editors have gotten better, but TS blows them out of the water. Importa new library, and stuff almost codes itself.

Mutability is somewhat orthogonal to the discussion. You can write things immutably or immutably in typed or untyped languages. I prefer mostly immutable too. But, going with it, I'd been a Clojure fan for a couple years, where immutability and dynamic types are both forefront. After rewriting an app in F#, and then performing a major refactor, this is what I had to say about it. https://disqus.com/home/discussion/owenrh/the_beauty_of_cloj... tldr: refactoring is much easier with types backing you up.

n.b. There's no reason you have to choose. You can have all three. Immutability, tests, and types. I do. Though if I had to choose, I'd pick types first. I'm a disciplined enough coder that immutability guarantees aren't that necessary, and if I've got types and discipline, then tests usually are unnecessary.
Pole of Inaccessibility
We have always been at war with Amazon [audio]
Financial+Intelligence:+Ways+To+Save+Money
FYI: India went from 27% of world income to 3% under colonial rule
I know of 2 ex-coworkers who live{d} on Oahu while working full time for a tech shop. It was possible only because they were able to get full time remote positions at employers based out of California.
Not if you don't smoke. Smoking accounts for ~30% of cancer deaths in the US. A substantial number of the rest are due to skin cancer (lots of white people descended from Northern Europeans living in sunny climates).
You're aware that not every H1B is a developer right? Your proposal would change the whole basis of the program in a way that doesn't seem particularly thought out.

What about people who are botanists, or harpsichord teachers?
I think what you'll see first is the manufacturers embed the transport layer directly into the hardware and use cheap cellular connections to talk directly to the factory. The entire service will be either opaque to the customer, available for a "subscription", or part of a warranty.

The last-mine problem of standardizing the link from device to internet is going to be a hard one for a long time to come, IMO.
Are you saying startups could not compete without "cheap" H1B labor?!

The H1B is explicitly not supposed to bring in cheaper labor.
otoh, artificially allowing startups to get cheap engineers means that these or some other engineers are deprived of an opportunity to make a lot more money at Google/Facebook. Engineers are thus being exploited by unethical employers flooding the system