skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are the first almost live form, you have plenty of
time, and can evolved in an environment that has plenty of
food. Something like the brown goo of Titan, with lots of
hydrocarbons and other small molecules that you can pick up
for free.

But there's no food on Titan anywhere! There's no oxidizers for hydrocarbons to react with; hence no accessible chemical energy.

That's likely generic for pre-biotic environments. Planets don't naturally form redox gradients; if there's a large redox potential, that's reactive chemistry, which will react away to equilibrium over geologic time. It takes work to maintain such a gradient; for example, Earth's oxidizing atmosphere is actively maintained by life. Oxygen is geologically removed from atmospheres, reacting with exposed rock surfaces (oxygen weathering). It takes active expenditure of work (solar energy) to keep it existing.

There is some chemical energy in abiotic planets, but only small amounts, at very low power levels compared to Earth's aerobic biosphere (which eats something like 10^14 watts!). There's photochemistry caused by solar UV light, and there's atmospheric lightning (which is a major player in the Earth's N2 cycle). Most important is geochemical energy; i.e. primordial chemical gradients that aren't yet at equilibrium, because the two reactants are physically separated by rock layers. On Europa for example, a very slow process brings rocks into contact with the ocean, where slow serpentinization reactions can occur: oxidation of Fe++ to Fe+++ by water, with the production of H2. This would be the food source of Europa life, if it's there.
> Java has a feature called checked exceptions that ensure that you handle all possible exceptions in your program, although admittedly this feature is annoying.

I think it's mostly annoying because checked exceptions were used badly in the early years of Java, so there are methods which throw loads of unrelated exceptions which have to be handled separately. Better design of exception hierarchies, and the availability of multi-catch, makes this quite a bit better.

Although it's recently got worse again because none of the shiny new stream stuff supports lambdas which throw checked exceptions. You have to either stick to unchecked exceptions and lose type safety, or probably better, rotate the exceptions sideways in type-space and use an Either:

https://github.com/poetix/ambivalence/blob/master/src/main/j...
"To keep prices low we continuously assess opportunities to lower our operating expenses...

Customers will continue to be able to use...American Express."

Thought this was funny given that Amex must have the highest interchange & fees. Their statement still makes sense because Walmart is saying Visa fees in Canada are too high compared to their rates in other markets.

Maybe Target will win some market share, but I doubt it. I think customers will switch cards or go cash. Walmart is too good at what they do.
Unfortunately Norwegian power companies realized they could export electricity to other countries in Europe, so electricity is not as cheap as you might expect.
One issue I've run across is spying on JRuby's native Java classes. Anyone have a solution?
Unreadable on mobile
> Every mathematical system has things which are true but can't be discovered from first principals.

This is not true, see Gödel's completeness theorem [1], which states "... that a deductive system of first-order predicate calculus is 'complete' in the sense that no additional inference rules are required to prove all the logically valid formulas." It basically means that every "true" statements are provable with a good enough deductive system.

What you possibly think about is Gödel's first incompleteness theorem [2] which is quite a different statement. It states that in "most" formal systems (that are complex enough to be able to describe natural numbers) there is always a statement A that both A and "not A" are not provable. It basically means that these statements can't be "logically valid", which means that there exist models of the formal system where A is true and models where "not A" is true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
HTTPS everywhere is a good thing, and if you don't understand why that's fine, I don't have the time to explain to you why you are wrong, but you are. Good luck deploying Internet connected services in the past.
How to learn? Take a look at http://survivejs.com/ and then http://teropa.info/blog/2015/09/10/full-stack-redux-tutorial...
If you are a world renowned investor with fu money and don't particularly care about marketing, you don't need email capture.

But for the rest of you, email capture is valuable precisely because you own the delivery channel.

The author Nate says all his traffic is from search and social. Two platforms he doesn't own. An algorithm change or someone marking his link on spam on Facebook could be disastrous.

Having that email channel is crucial to any online business. And if your metrics stink, then you need to revisit how you're capturing emails and how you talk to your subscribers.

I've had lists with 5% opens and lists with 20% opens. The difference was how the list was built and how I positioned myself.
This part was covered by Cheney already, isn't it?
Another fun fact I always think of when dithering comes up is how Tim Sweeney's software rendered or the original Unreal game used dithering instead of bilinear interpolation for texture mapping. This was very impressive at the time.

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Texturing_As_In_Unreal.shtm...
In fact, if you count commit messages, e-mails and keyboard layout flamewars, your average developer may easily turn out to type more natural language than code.
> and I am not willing

You live with your choice.

> and I can't get

You try to look harder for other options.
Eliminate tornado threats by building giant walls (2014)
I had the same thought, but perhaps it is just a matter of being a huge retailer means being in a position to negotiate a sweetheart deal from AmEx vs the rest of us.
AMEX could negotiate their transaction fees down, right? Walmart is very well known for playing hardball with suppliers, so maybe they give credit card companies "take it or leave it" offers as well.
Snowden reveals GCHQ spy programme with link to Scottish police
https://sagecell.sagemath.org/

Basic interface with no requirement to log in, mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Probably best for 'calculator' mode tryouts.
A lot of uproar, but have you ever tried to teach a 60yo veteran working his paper trail to switch to python? The laid off personnel did not have the required skillset, and would be fired regardless of the source of replacement, H1B or local.
> I cannot stand the road that new languages are on, abandoning the type system, or making it optional, or not explicit.

That trend is so 10 years ago. Today the pendulum is swinging the other way again.
ML is having a comeback. Look at F#, Rust and Swift. They are mainstream and they are strongly typed (mostly)functional languages.
The last sentence made me feel like this is Walmart trying to force Visa's hand in this. This seems quite surprising to me in any case. Most (maybe all?) Walmarts I've been to have ATMs in the front, so it's not like people won't be able to get cash at the store. They'll probably just have to pay the $3 (or whatever) fee.
Decline of Facebook's Like Button
Walmart is trying to leverage its market power against Visa. You can leverage your market power against Walmart by shopping elsewhere if you so desire.

Walmart believes, probably correctly, that people like you shopping elsewhere will be the lesser effect compared to the difference in transaction fees to Visa.
>Maybe Target will win some market share

There's no Target in Canada.
Asyncio doesn't support http yet but that could be fixed with a library like aiohttp
The human brain in numbers: a linearly scaled-up primate brain
Definitely Nordic. I think I'm Nordic though I was born and live in Australia :-)

http://virtualwayfarer.com/nordic-conversations-are-differen...

(oops - finger spasm made me move this from a reply to top level and lose me 3 karma points!)
How US Transnational Fiber Cables Are Tapped [pdf]
It says:

...Visa and Walmart have been unable to agree on an acceptable fee for Visa transactions. As a result we will no longer accept Visa in our stores across Canada, starting with our stores in Thunder Bay, on July 18, 2016.....We sincerely regret any impact this will have on our customers who use Visa and remain optimistic that we will reach an agreement with Visa.

This is nothing more than a negotiating ploy to get Visa to cave to Walmart's demands before July 18. No major retailer can afford to stop taking Visa. They may take the hit and carry through with it for a while just to show Visa they're serious, but it won't last very long.
What's wrong with that? Epicycles are a good testable model. They were discarded when a better one was developed.
> Read always returns the number of bytes read, and if an error occurs after some bytes have been read (or at EOF) it returns that error as well.

Sum types can do this as well. In OCaml syntax:

type result =
| Success of int (* bytes read = buffer length *)
| Error of int * err_info (* bytes read, error info *)

class type reader =
object
(* attempt to fill the buffer *)
method read : buffer -> result
end

> It does feel a little dirty, but it's also efficient and pragmatic.

The pragmatic thing to do is to make illegal states irrepresentable, so that the programmer doesn't have to worry about them. There's literally no benefit to losing conceptual clarity.
This from the guy that helped push DRM for the Web.
Here's evidence that Uber cares about all those things in New Zealand:

http://auckland.ubermovement.com/uberx/

http://auckland.ubermovement.com/required-documents/

It looks as if your proposed regulation is not solving a real problem. Personal attacks don't change this.

I'm all in favor of regulation where it makes sense. If there's a problem that can demonstrably solved by regulation, I'm all in favor of it. But this hardly seems to be one of those situations.
> package manager is built into import system.
> Importing a package that's not in the user's
> environment yet will lead to something like
> pip install at script startup

Here's a nifty little recipe I came up with to do just this by exploiting the import hooks introduced in py3.4

http://lonetwin.github.io/blog/html/2016/05/16/auto_install_missing_python_modules.html
c-plus-plus-a works, thanks mate.
That one was from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploit...

I guess people use the term in different ways.
Just so folks understand: in Canada (actually, pretty much everywhere but America) every bank issues it's own non-credit-card affiliated debit card that can be used to pay for things at stores (or get money at the ATM). So this is annoying, but not a huge deal.

I'll get to the cash, get told "sorry, no visa", and take out my debit card to pay that way instead. Really not a big deal.

It's just Walmart annoying their customers to try to prove some point to Visa.
Yes, this article seems to reinforce the notion that PTSD is the exclusive domain of combat veterans, which is very far from reality.
> I think it's mostly annoying because checked exceptions were used badly in the early years of Java, so there are methods which throw loads of unrelated exceptions which have to be handled separately.

I see that as a secondary issue, I feel the primary issue of checked exceptions is that handling and manipulating them is a terrible experience and even today I don't believe you can be generic over checked exceptions (though I could be wrong).

> Although it's recently got worse again because none of the shiny new stream stuff supports lambdas which throw checked exceptions.

It's not new though, the type-level facilities lambdas use simply don't allow for that. That's been an issue since generics were added, and even since the original release of Java.

Checked exceptions can only go through stack frames which specifically knows about them. And that, I think, is why they're such an awful experience and a failed experiment.
It was interesting, I missed a few things but highly recommend it for the experience.
+1 thanks for the cached version.
What distinction are you drawing to the debit cards that banks in the US issue with the visa or MasterCard logo?
If nothing else, in many NYC neighborhoods it would be simply impossible to greet every person you see.

Still, there are plenty of residential neighborhoods where no one acknowledges each other on the street, and there is no sense of neighborliness. Paradoxically, given this article, I find that the more wealthy a neighborhood, the less likely you are to be greeted by a stranger. The poorer the neighborhood (I would imagine down to a lower bound – I seldom go to the truly poor neighborhoods simply because they are so far from the city center in New York) the more likely that greeting is, especially in a black neighborhood like Bed Stuy or (when I first moved here) Harlem.
This drives me crazy. My local light rail system has an automated announcement system that malfunctions frequently. I write a complaint every time. I've escalated all the way up the org chart and I still can't convince them that this system not working needs to be noted in their service disruption announcements. Same with busses, always too quiet, always send the company a complaint while I'm still on the bus. It's tiring to be that guy but unless someone is letting them know, nothing gets fixed.
Bullies gonna bully, though.
Not exactly, but I work somewhat like this. Basically if it's on the laptop, the lid is closed and if it's the desktop either the monitor is switched off or disabled with a command.

IN office, people did used to get curious I think but they mostly preferred not to ask me :)

Even more, some constant robot-like sound (of low volume) coming from the computer make them more curious as I usually do not prefer headphone.
Everywhere but America?

My British debit cards use either the Visa or Mastercard network.

My Danish one does too, though it also uses the local Dankort network if available.
CCleaner v5.18.5607 Professional Plus Serial Key 2016
I always give a dollar to the first person who asks for it in any given day, regardless of whether I think they deserve. If they're asking for money, they probably need it. I don't think telling people they need it for bus fare is a scam, it's just another strategy.
Only matters if you care about average latency.

Just like the website load times, you should be focused on the 99th percentile and the median. Single line reduces those metrics.

Really this boils down to whether the business is interested in saving a bit of money (fewer cashiers per purchase) or improving customer experience.
This part of subsidies (free charging) has been getting less expensive for the budget too, at least in nominal terms. The price of hydro-power exported to neighboring Denmark has dropped by almost 50% since 2010, as Denmark ramped up its wind mills, albeit also with subsidies.

https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/ccca061b/2/
Really? When I lived in Britain 6 years ago my debit card had no credit card affiliation, didn't see any that did.
Likely - but here's the thing; this could very likely be permanent if they see no noticeable drop in their revenue / profits; or not enough to offset the money saved by refusing to accept Visa.

More to the point - a lot of banks offer both Visa & Mastercard, so for most folks it'd be just a case of swapping cards if they don't already have one (if they feel inconvenienced by the lack of Visa payments).
You misunderstand, first: it is not the case that new observations about the world forced the changes. Instead, it is mostly observations about the internal properties of string theory which has forced modifications.

After it was proposed as a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity it was realized it wasn't self-consisten because it had ghosts, which was then fixed by adding 22 dimensions. But this is a problem because that's not how many dimensions the world has so they solved it by compactification that folds all the extra dimensions tiny so they don't bother us. But then it turns out that there is no particular reason to fold just so so that we get the world we live in. And now they are trying to find a way to make it so its natural that the folding happens just so that we get the world we live in.

Secondly, and most importantly, while it is true that some models get revised whenever there is more data, those are poor models. Good models agree with all the data and don't need modification. (The best models agree with most of the data, but sometimes don't so that the scientist gets a mystery to solve!) Realistically this stage takes a while to happen, and proponents of string theory argue that they right now have a models that is going to be great one day, but right now needs a bit of tinkering. What critics say is that string theory has been in the "tinkering" stage for around 50 years now and maybe we should try other ideas a bit more.

Finally, I don't think Sabine likes being refereed to as a "he" and rather have that pronoun used to describe the father of her children rather than herself.
Mathematical model matches, since a mathimatical arbiter eliminating Head Of Line blocking also incurrs the additional latency penalty due to the extended path and additional switching elements. However the latency penalty is incomparable to the improvement in latency variance.

I can't believe they've ommited a situation where this one lonely customer answers "Yes, I DO want to hear more about the offer" and starts signing up for the store membership, a bonus program, a store credit card, a cat insurance, and a dunce hat.
The linked crawler uses aiohttp.
That's one perspective, however, collectively, as a society we see value in funding such research. I think that's a better approach.

> But they only are because progress has been made indirectly in other fields to make it worth it now

Yeah, like the fundamental 'moonshot' research done in the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s, which now serves as foundation for all electronics.
Scale.

End of discussion. What works for 100 customers/drivers does not work for 100,000
How sexism held back adoption of electronic computers at JPL
As a customer I only, only care about my perception of speed, not actual speed.

Which in turn can be gamed. See the infamous story from Houston, where there were large numbers of airport complaints saying it took too long for arriving baggage to reach the bag claim. The solution was:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...

(they rearranged things to increase the distance between arrival gates and bag claim; it still took the same amount of time to deliver bags to bag claim, but now passengers spent more time getting to the bag claim and less time waiting at bag claim, so they perceived it as faster and complained less)
So we have instance based learning which basically is about approximating this, and support vector machines which abstract the idea into representing the space of decisions represented by all the data points via a kernel which is a mapping function. The problem I see which deep learning seems to be "winning on" is that the space of instances that you have does not either abstract a meaningful theory of the distribution of these points (therefor predicting outside of this space) or describe things exterior to that space - but that exist, or might exist. A scientific theory is considered valid if it predicts things that have not been seen yet (and you can then test that, hence the post today about "string theory : enough"), I think IBL and SVMs can't represent the unseen, I used to work using something called inductive logic programming (I used a tool called Progol that Steven Muggleton made, it was good!) and I thought that that did produce such insights, sometimes, but it turned out that often these were actually me due to fiddling. Some play projects I did recently made me think that conv. nets were doing the same sort of things, but it was /is harder for me to catch and show this (and as I say, I ended up thinking that I'd often fooled myself with ILP, even though it was very useful).

The old skool difficulty I have with deep nets is that I used to think in terms of structural risk minimization vs empirical risk minimisation when dealing with overfitting. The idea was that if you had the right size of information store in your learned system and it was experimentally producing results that showed it was an effective predictor you could say that it was generalizing properly. Deep nets seem to me to have all the information storing capability of the domains they address and I worry....

But I am shocked, shocked, by how well they seem to work.
No, this from the guy who helped found the web. In my book, that gives him the right to say whatever he wants. DRM or not.
> It's a fundamental mistake to assume that these are "real" strings being talked about.
Hadn't heard of FCC before, just checked it out. I really like the idea of parntnering with nonprofits to solicit practical capstone exercises. Seems like a good way to croas the production deployment barrier.
I think you vastly overestimate the need for Walmart in a person's life if you think they will actually switch their credit card to Mastercard with their bank just so they can shop there.
It's already possible for everybody to host his own mail server. But we choose to let Google host all our conversations. So the problem is more social.
> This is nothing more than a negotiating ploy

What do you mean? This is like saying "The only reason you use a towel is to get dry", implying "you are a cheater". Yes, towels are to get you dry, and yes, it is "This is nothing more than a negotiating ploy". I don't get why one would use the word "ploy" here as if something cunning that few people notice or understand is happening.
Could you give examples of tools which make your easier vs. those that make it hard / are impossible to use? This seems like a good additional argument for open / interoperable systems vs. closed, tightly controlled systems.
They really would need to be enormous: 300 m tall, 50 m wide, and kilometers long. Patrolled by a ragged band of scoundrels all in black who chose the wall over the gibbet, no doubt.
The Muse (YC W12) is hiring front end UI/UX engineers – Reach 50M users
Great! Could you elaborate what LogiLab are doing? There is creating .debs, and there is creating a .dsc source package for inclusion into the official Debian archives. If you guys want to do the latter, you should talk more to the other people mentioned here:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/sage...

The main barrier at the moment, is that sage patches many dependencies. It is better to upstream those patches, not only because it's good engineering practise, but also because it's unlikely that Debian policy (in practise: the admin, infrastructure, and security teams) would allow us to include (e.g.) a duplicate maxima-with-sage-patches in Debian, just to satisfy Sage.

OTOH if you "just want to" create .debs, the task is much easier. But then there's no chance of it entering Debian officially.