skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This really should be the top comment of the thread. I've been reading the paper slowly since yesterday.

Tl;dr - the best way to compute mid-points is:

round_to_nearest_even((a - a/2) + b/2)

Why?

It can't be (a+b)/2 because (a+b) can overflow.

It can't be (a/2 + b/2) because a/2 or b/2 can underflow. However, this works if you explicitly handle the case when a == b.

It can't be (a + (b/2 - a/2)) for similar but more complicated reasons.

However, if you switch things around, ((a - a/2) + b/2) works great without the special case. (Though all three options need to handle a second special case: when a == -b.)

Regarding the rounding method, you want it to be symmetric and moreover you want nearby numbers to not always be biased in the same direction (as might happen if you always round towards zero). Hence rounding to the nearest 'even' floating point number (i.e. nearest bit pattern with a zero in the LSB)

---

In the case of OP, I think the paper would argue that the mid-point was working just fine, and that the code surrounding it isn't considering all possibilities (symmetrically). But then the discussion of infinities in the paper suggests that no matter what you do, there are issues for surrounding code to consider. Which in turn suggests that floating point is absolutely busted as an abstraction.
> Most Python code doesn't have all of its parameters laden with type checks, whereas Java code tends to have type names attached to its parameters.

Why should I care about the name of the type, though?

> More importantly though, that Python type check doesn't actually get verified until runtime, and only on a case by case basis. The static type checks in Java will be done first at compile time, and then again during bind/load time.

My point is that Java's static checks don't buy you much, because types aren't very precise about what objects are supposed to be in the first place, as my quote from Oracle's own documentation above shows. I'm all for more static checking, but only when it actually buys you something. Java is effectively a dynamically typed language with an integrated linter.

> You still have to write code to verify that you never get a non-Baz "baz" for the Python function, and that's trickier than it looks.

Python programmers tend to care more about the methods a concrete object has, rather than the name of its class. Which is IMO pretty sensible - as well as doable with a static type system, see OCaml.

> You value your time, so because of cases where you'd like to return more than one type without a common parent type, you would throw out type checking entirely?...

No, I use sum types. The problem is that Java doesn't have them!

> So, Rust at least still has null as well (they say they don't, but in practice they have std::ptr::null

You can't do anything with raw pointers in safe code. Unsafe code is, well, unsafe.

> and they also have None...

`None` is the right way to handle optional values. It doesn't have type `T`, but rather `Option<T>`.

> now tell me that doesn't create more problems than it solves ;-)

I tell you.

> as there's this problem that reality is already filled with nulls.

No, reality doesn't have nulls. Where's null in the laws of physics?
Ruby Fellow Hired
Any mirrors, that is down.
It doesn't appear to work properly. I read a thread on Gorhill's Github page and the whole thing seemed really convoluted. I activated the function but when I tested it my UA wasn't spoofed. Also, the list from which to choose/randomly assign is pretty short, though I think Gorhill made it so by design.
Mmmhmmm. I agree.
I recently began making a function that can output the 2D lines of the walls of a house, with windows and different shapes (L, S, T), and inside walls that are generated with points and NESW directions. It was pretty fun and challenging, but now I have to move to 3D to make this base line become a level with windows and door.

The only thing I have to give this function, is the height/width ratio, some other ratio that define how large "corner holes" are in the LST configuration, the amount and relative position of windows and door, the starting point and NSEW direction for inside walls, and with all that, I could create a house of a story building with an inside. Of course it's not finished yet, and there isn't furniture of details, but you see that in theory, you can use procedural generation as a compression tool for human-designed structures, that no machine learning algorithm or autoencoder could really achieve.

If you associate this kind of algorithm into a well made openstreetmap database (think vector tiles which are used for GPS software), you could also recreate the whole world in 3D, with enough details to make a game that would not require that much disk memory. Recreating the roads, fences, parks, rivers, vegetation, elevation etc is difficult because it require a lot of tuning and geometry tricks, but it's very cheap in term of cpu cycle and disk.

The folks at outerra have begun making an actual software that lets you browse the entire planet in 3D. You can zoom in real time from space to 1cm. They don't have cities yet though, but they are planning for it. I want to make a game using such ambitious ideas, but it's not easy...
>What if TPB didn't have ads?

Then it's more complicated, and depends on other distinctions I alluded to above.
Quite frankly, why is this on Hacker News?

Maybe Jacob Appelbaum raped someone, maybe he didn't. That's not anyone's business except Appelbaum's, his accusers', and the legal system's. It certainly is not a public concern, and it's irrelevant to Tor.
I'm no Elm expert, but as far as I understand, the "native library" APIs, the kind that are used to actually wrap browser APIs and interface with javascript in a way that can be published and made reusable, is "private". I mean, you can look at the source and make your own, but you're playing in undocumented, unstable territory.

The only "official" interop channel is the "port" system, which only lets you do a publisher/subscriber type thing with your application at runtime, and cannot be used in a library.

So you basically cannot make a "blessed" library that uses native browser APIs.
And reputable VPN vendors resist efforts by nation states to procure information about subscribers? I would expect to have to pay a handsome fee for that.

(I'm not saying you're wrong; again I've not really thought about having to thoroughly anonymize my own traffic.)
What does "roll over on Assange" mean? What is it that Appelbaum would know about Assange that would mean anything to any government anywhere?

There are quite a lot of people in the security research field (or whatever you want to call it) that really dislike Appelbaum, so I am not at all surprised that he gets messed with.
The Logistical Miracle of Cramming 80,000 People into Bonnaroo
Are cul-de-sacs not a thing in the states?
And they're really itching to work for basically charity for someone who will greatly undervalue them. Sure. I saw some unicorns by the lake the other day too.
You're paying for the right to be able to use that street - and for the street to be maintained in working condition, not any of its specific qualities.

I find it hilarious that NIMBYs would complain about noise, when they hire gas-operated lawnmowers to keep their lawns tidy for them.
Anyone notice 11 gallons of fuel for 10 minutes of flight? Calling this a gas guzzler would be kind!
Introducing Rill – the isomorphic, middleware based, web application framework
That's interesting, I wonder what happens if you take one of the current prototypes and hover off the ledge of a canyon... Will you drop suddenly and go splat, or will you keep altitude? Intuition says the former, but I'd like to know objectively.
Suppose the two children were the thieves and the traffic abatement program let them get away from the police.
Intuit must have gotten some good web people because I've seen massive improvements in Turbotax's online product over the past couple years as well.
Theories and Models for Game Depth
Gantt charts are tools for planning and scheduling. It got Hoover Dam done two years ahead of schedule. It'll probably be useful for your Rails app, too.
I spent weeks doing a full review of the literature which is outlined in detail here: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/. I largely agree with Stevenson and Wolfers and this article does too. One of their co-authors on this research endorsed our bottom line.

Money does make you a bit happier, but most readers of HN are among the top 5% of income earners in the world, so it's not the top priority for them, on the margin. You can get more mileage by focussing on other things. I also think affective measures of welfare are more reliable than evaluative ones. But it's a huge issue that I had to write many thousands of words to cover properly, so check out the full article and see what you think.
> What does "roll over on Assange" mean?

Testify against him. Have you never seen a cop show? :-)
As a corollary to what shados was saying, now that 0.17 is out the elm-lang organization will make a library to cover every single part of the web platform [0], at which point you will never need to.

[0] https://platform.html5.org/
Great data visualization for learning a little more American history. Seems one more piece of evidence that the mainstream American culture is set by the British and German, or the original English and German speakers, and luckily so. Think about the rigorous constitution, logical reasoning, rule of law, and the founding fathers, etc. (from someone without British or German root, otherwise the "political correctness" would kick in).
Speed bumps help a lot. These are barriers made especially for making sure people are not speeding down these usually quiet streets.

If people are speeding, surprise surprise cops are helpful. Towns need to work WITH waze not against it. I can imagine towns REALLY cranking up fines to use speeders on usually quiet streets (where kids may be playing) to ensure that the money flows into creating appropriate barriers.
By the way, if one were already using uMatrix and NoScript, what benefit would Policeman provide?
Yes. For an extreme example, see Houton, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03...
An analogy with Google PlayServices is inevitable.

> "Google's strategy is clear. Play Services has system-level powers, but it's updatable. It's part of the Google apps package, so it's not open source. OEMs are not allowed to modify it, making it completely under Google's control. Play Services basically acts as a shim between the normal apps and the installed Android OS. Right now Play Services handles the Google Maps API, Google Account syncing, remote wipe, push messages, the Play Games back end, and many other duties. If you ever question the power of Google Play Services, try disabling it. Nearly every Google App on your device will break."

https://lwn.net/Articles/681758/
The Story of Tetris
More specifically, differing law in different countries.
http://www.calmingrisk.com/ambresptimes.html
Their career-wide median is just barely north of what I was offered coming off a college internship, with no competing offers or negotiation.
Totally agree.

What do you think of Pandoc?

http://pandoc.org/
Since it's 2016, the answer is JSX. Define a core set of react components that are at feature parity with markdown. Extend it willy nilly.
This is great, but was already posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067566.
This is attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general in WW1 and WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
In your research, did you come across any longer time frame happiness studies with respect to income?

I'm specifically thinking of myself (and probably a number of other people here) who tend to throw "extra" income past a certain point into retirement. Would be curious as to how that affects happiness after reaching the age of retirement. (Apologies if in article, still finishing)
The purchases seem to be made using things like browser-stored passwords/login cookies, or if nothing else the password reset and access to an email client with stored login info.

I don't think shared passwords are being reused once inside the session, mostly because why would you need to hijack someone's box to do so? Just log into Amazon from wherever.

They might be used to get into the remote session in some cases, but a lot of people who otherwise seem educated on the issue seem pretty convinced that can't be what happened to them.
"By creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed." - so un-binary and fascinating.
Meron Gribetz on UX/HCI 1965-2016 Keynote at AWE 2016
Sydney makes extensive use of no left/right turn between 6-10am/3-7pm signs. It makes sure that traffic stays on the main roads instead of side streets that would quickly fill up during peak hour otherwise but isn't an inconvenience outside of those times
More than just Holidays and food, knowing people's religion also helps you to make better impressions with people.
There's a new outflow of illegals from the US to Mexico since 2007. But net inflow of legal migrants from Mexico has been strong and much larger than illegal flows every one of those years.

And net inflow of illegals from Central America that cross Mexico is very high and has been rising as illegal inflows from Mexico fall.
This is an old chestnut of a philosophical problem that many youngsters of my generation first experienced in the form of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.

There's no solving it. And yet we all know that differences in quality are real. This is not an argument I want to engage in.

My question was, did the GP learn anything from being told 'not good enough, do it again'? They imply not, but I bet they did.

I've learned lots of things that way. Grant proposals, job applications, asking someone out on a date: lots of things you try out and don't get feedback beyond 'nope'.
What this sounds like to me: the university admitted a lot of people without vetting them. A lot of them failed out.

Why is this a story?
My rule of thumb is the Lua core is about 100kb, and the Lua standard library is about 100kb. Tcl is about 2MB. (All built as dynamic libraries.)

Lua’s source is pretty malleable. There are things you can rip out from Lua if you don’t need them to make it smaller. I once read a claim that a micro-controller use got it under 20kb.
> I think that it's survival hinges upon delivering the model 3 on time and at high quality

... and in sufficient quantities. They have proven the technology, the approach and the readiness of the market.
The last thing they need to prove is their capacity to scale.

If they achieve their target (i.e. Model 3 generally available in 2018), they will have built a serious lead over the competition - meaning several years (at least 2) on that sweet sweet market unchallenged.

Of course, Tesla has failed to deliver in time, at expected price or in expected quantities before. Time will tell.
Moving Academic Researchers into a Corporate Data Science World [video]
Indeed, and for me, before that, Future Crew's Second Reality.
Food isn't supposed to grow without soil, minerials, fungus, and sunlight. It's going to be empty of nutrition and flavor. A shell of an idea of what constitutes lettuce or a carrot, tomato or potatoe.

These data center clean rooms for factory food is just riddled with issues, abstracted layers of nonsense tech that wirks worse then the natural systems already working and present in nature.
In the legal opinion of more than a few courts it is. You don't have to be at all sympathetic to the RIAA to imagine why it might be a struggle for a legal team to persuasively argue that a site called the Pirate Bay which used to[1] boast that it had never taken a link to a torrent off the site and never would actually was encouraging the piracy that most of its visitors used it for.

[1]probably still does; I can't access it through regular web browsing due to a legal ruling...
I’ll stick my neck out there and praise Lua. While I will admit the stack is tedious to work with, all C binding bridges I’ve worked with are tedious. (With exceptions of languages that use compilers and architecture/platform specific tricks to pull off transparent bridging. LuaJIT and and LuaFFI would be one example. Swift would be another.)

Lua’s design is at least very clean and avoids allowing developers from accidentally creating nasty lifecycle design issues. It is very clear with Lua about ownership and visibility, which propagates cleanly through all aspects of Lua, such as working seamlessly with Lua’s garbage collection system. The design+code is also 100% portable to any processor/platform that has a C compiler (i.e. not requiring platform/arch specific #ifdefs, which is really useful when bringing up on a lesser-used platforms/chips.) And the design has very clear performance implications. In contrast, there was a recent talk at Google I/O about Android Dalvik vs. ARTs with respect to JNI bindings and performance. The results were non-obvious to say the least.

There is a research white paper that compared the C binding design tradeoffs of several different languages.
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/jucs-c-apis.pdf
> Quoth Spolsky: "All nontrivial abstractions are leaky."

Well, no, that's wrong. Abstractions can be made tight, but that requires discipline and hard work.
Toward a Practical Perceptual Video Quality Metric
Man indicted for disabling red light cameras faces 7 years in prison
I found it interesting to read. Appelbaum is relatively well-known in tech circles, and I use HN to keep me updated on "what goes on in tech circles" -- whether that's gossip or new technological developments.
I did some tutoring in graduate school. Unfortunately some were clearly admitted for a variety of, doubtless well-intentioned, reasons who did not have the most basic underpinnings of math and related skills. Graduate school, even with remedial training, is not the place to get students up to speed on 8th grade arithmetic.

Perhaps, in some cases, general diligence was also an issue but a lot of it was just a total disconnect with respect to (especially quantitative) skills. When someone comes up to you and requests (I still remember this many years later) "I need you to teach me about graphs" (the simple X-Y version), it's hard to know where to even start.
I think this is a chicken and egg problem here. Coming from the US, it's my opinion that the pet owners should be responsible for their own pet's waste, not the government.
I does look like Elixir/Phoenix is growing fast enough that it will not be considered esoteric in fairly near future.
Considering they're not in the US they are DMCA-compliant no? Compliant as far as compliance is required for non US states..
For what purported crime? Are we just positing that there might be some arbitrary crime Appelbaum could accuse Assange of? Doesn't the same logic then apply to, like, anyone else in the world? Are people trying to do the same thing to Trump?

I ask because Assange seems to be just about as implicated in the Manning leak as it is possible to be without being Chelsea Manning, and it's still unclear (read: unlikely) that any of that involvement leaves him culpable for any crime in the US.
Hm...

(1) I think you have at least partially misconstrued my comment. It is not my intention even a little to dismiss the plight of the poor. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances. I certainly do not think asking them to dig themselves out on their own is the last word in a conversation about how to solve poverty.

(2) My bullet points about diet/clothing/saving/debt/etc were not intended to mean the poor have a way out and need no help. I was simply pointing out that there are ways that a more educated/energetic/encultured person can behave that will yield better outcomes. The parent comment's thesis seemed to be that nobody with those financial means could do any better, and that seems wrong to me.

(2.1) I have been convinced by some other comments plus some googling that I have overestimated the means of many of the poor. A one-child household that can only scrape together $5k per year in the USA is in dire circumstances indeed. Google suggests such households are rather more common than I thought.

(2.2) I included that thrift store bit in an attempt to cover all the parent comment's points. In actuality, I think that the fraction of jobs where the candidate's wardrobe budget is a serious factor in determining eligibility is so small that this is not worthy of in-depth discussion.

(2.3) While I can imagine situations in which your spend-all-the-money-because-ill-end-up-in-a-hole-anyway logic seems genuinely valid, I'm not sure how common they are, and I'm skeptical that anyone actually performs that particular calculus in their brains. It seems like regular thoughtless spending is probably more the norm, even when that calculus is offered as a rationalization after the fact.

(3) Who really takes signals about socioeconomic class into account when making hiring decisions? Is this different from rejecting less-educated candidates due to their inferior communication skills? Does anyone mind a secretary/cashier/barista/construction-worker/floor-manager who seems like they are poor (or even from some alien subculture with wildly different social sensibilities) as long as they are efficient and productive and communicate effectively? If so, that sounds like a pretty small-minded hiring manager to me.

(4) Thanks for your comment. I still think I mostly agree with the article's thesis, but I'm coming around to the idea that I'm not fully appreciating number of people who find themselves in economic situations where savings of any kind are nearly impossible.

(5) I realize that my point of contention with the parent post is somewhat irrelevant because, regardless of which of us is correct, the proper way to combat poverty probably does not change. We both believe (I think) that a large fraction of the population is not going to be stuck in poverty unless/until the rest of us provide them with an unconditional income substantial enough to let them turn their lives around.
You have to take such studies with a grain of salt.

The most important one that put hacker news on the map was "Working for yourself" is missing from the list. Paul graham in the early days of hacker news wrote great things about miracles happening when people worked for themselves in small teams.

That kind of philosopher leadership has been missing in tech community as a whole. Look at comments and topics discussed on hacker news. These aspiring engineers are talking about how some one else should pay them basic income so they could innovate and many other lame excuses. very sad.
Nope, when he says the word "false" it's specifically in reference to criminal sexual misconduct. Read carefully, because that was written carefully.
Return of SpongeBob SquarePants
Just because that wasn't enough, lft has also written a demo which created a custom CPU/GPU on an FPGA to run a demo:

http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/
There’s no friendlier school district for refugees than Anchorage, Alaska