skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got a theory that string theory is more of a sociological phenomena than real science.

I've got to say, that comes across as awfully dismissive toward a whole lot of very thoughtful people. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by it. Certainly all of the string theorists I've known (it's my profession) have talked as if they believed their work was involved in a "genuine attempt" to model reality.

Maybe a physicist can make a living by just "doing math and writing papers" without any expectation of making meaningful progress toward understanding the world, but the people who really drive the field and get noticed are almost invariably folks who dream of changing the world, of being the next Hawking or Witten or even the next Einstein. If someone like that doesn't have the a pretty solid hope that what they're working on is likely to be truly relevant to reality, they work on something else.

I think that others have already more or less answered your electron question. I might answer it this way: one of the great triumphs of 20th century physics was the realization that the details of how physics works on very small scales (or equivalently, very high energies) get very predictably "blurred out" when phenomena are measured at longer scales (or lower energies). The formal process involved is called "renormalization", and the punchline here is that essentially any ultimate theory of nature (whether that's string theory or something else) will reduce to an ordinary quantum field theory (with "renormalizable" fields) once you get a few orders of magnitude below its intrinsic scale.

That means in particular that any "stringy" physics (or any "loopy" physics, or even any simpler "grand unification" physics) will inescapably be completely washed out and undetectable when electrons interact from a few cm apart. All you need to understand is "simple" quantum electrodynamics, in which the two electrons exert a repulsive force on each other by way of their interactions with the surrounding electromagnetic field: interactions that can be described as being mediated by exchange of virtual photons as force-carrying particles.

For that calculation, it's not at all important to know that (e.g.) each electron is an extremely tiny string in a specific vibration mode, nor that they (more or less) emit and absorb virtual photons by pinching off into new tiny strings or in a different specific vibration mode and then joining back up with them in a uniquely determined way. (This would be a good place for me to note that nobody knows exactly which scenario in string theory would correspond to our world, so nobody actually knows exactly what vibration mode corresponds to an electron. But we know a lot of ways in which things like that might work.) My point here is just that most of the questions you've asked are really quantum field theory questions: the string theory connection is almost entirely unimportant in that regime.
My point is that you're competing with those unwashed, underprivileged foreign workers whether they work here in the US or not. Our economy is, and should be, global in nature. If we build the wall that some posters in this thread apparently want, we'll find that instead of locking everybody else out, we've locked ourselves in.

There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer, unless we deny ourselves the benefits of the work done by the latter. To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
My thoughts were that instead of merely having a laptop without the screen, someone could use just a wireless keyboard with a phone.
I grew up in Canada and now in the US and after reading this, the first thing I thought of after reading this is - there are vastly fewer neighborhood bars in Canada. Strict drunk driving laws (obviously more important) and cold winters seemed to lead to the only viable bars being large clubs or in downtown cores where there's tourists.
Apology accepted, thanks for that.
> The original purpose of open sourcing Go was different for Google (make the language more robust/better)

I'm not so sure about that. I like the 'baseball cap' argument more. The quote is about React, but it may be relevant for Go as well

> Facebook doesn't care if you use the Web, it only cares that you use Facebook.

> So why release an open source Web framework at all? Because Facebook is battling Google for engineers. So you've got a big fight between two companies over which company is the coolest place to work, and both of them are companies that your grandparents love. How are you going to win this fight? One way is to have the hippest Web framework.

> Basically, both Google and Facebook are desperate to find a baseball cap that they can put on backwards. Angular is Google's baseball cap. React is Facebook's.

https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea
Bit of a clarification, the jcore design doesn't fit in the biggest FPGA with a purely open source tooling, which is made by Lattice, not Xilinx. 7k gates is tiny for an fpga these days -- the spartan 6, which they also mentioned is an older design has up to 19 times the gates and can fit a few cores and DSP modules, but needs a closed source toolchain.
How does this compare to Lua? It seems to be going after a very similar market.
I've never seen canned coffee in Poland, Czech Republic, Greece or England, but I can't speak for other countries.
Traffic engineer here. Generally speed limits are set by measuring vehicle speeds for about a week. The 85th percentile speed is set as the speed limit. The reasoning behind this is the assumption that most people will travel at a speed that is reasonable for the facility. Of course, politics often becomes a factor and the speed is changed to fit those pressures.
Other aspects that can be taken into account when setting speed limits is the character of the facility. For example, number of approaches (driveways, other roads, etc.), type of area (urban, rural), and classification of the facility (arterial, collector, local street).
These blog posts are all the same. Effectively this person has discovered she does not like or share the same values as the set of parents she is friends with in the US. Instead of trying to find new friends who take a similar parenting attitude, the rational choice, she has decided the entire country is on the wrong path. Maybe she just needs to find new friends.
Clojure tries to put as many user faults into "erroneous" as possible

I would absolutely disagree with this. Clojure has long had a Garbage-In-Garbage-Out philosophy, which puts it clearly into "undefined" territory. The examples with clojure.set are pretty clearly GIGO in my opinion, but "erroneous" would mean a runtime check and an exception clearly stating which invariant was violated, not returning something totally unexpected.

You could argue that it's under "implementation-defined", where the number of implementations is one, but I don't see how you could consider the set operations accepting and returning non-set things as consistent.
Anyone claiming -- explicitly or otherwise -- that there's a clear-cut causal relationship here is disingenuous, completely new to the US gun control debate, or blinded by prior belief.

No, I think that the causation might be reversed -- dangerous urban communities might feel the need for gun control, while rural communities that may be supported by hunting do not.
Which is famously why the U.S. ended up with health insurance tied to one's employer-- a workaround to the limits of price controls (employers could offer this additional perk, but not additional money).

Yet another unintended consequence that continues to impress generations later. (I wonder why they didn't simply let wages rise.)
I agree - this is the only right answer. Like you, I'm sad to have to accept it, but it's the only way to a frustration-free (or lower-frustration) Clojure experience.
would love to know how Rill hydrates the data needed to render a page, if the page is dynamically generated.
This seems to be making some good points but I'm only reading it now

https://computerscomputing.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/lua-and-...

Huh, it actually seems like an older language, it's been around for a while and it's used in some major studio games.
I can't hold the following two thoughts in my head at the same time, lest the resulting paradox would consume the universe:

1) "OCD focus on social justice"

2) "What a quente" as applied to Marissa Mayer.
> who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station

I was going to ask whether there was then a civil service ethics rule that required him to recuse himself from investigating his own complaint. But the article already addressed that:

> Each complaint, which will have to be addressed by others within the commission [...]
By native, do you mean uses native elements, or simply loads things in a webview? I don't know how many people consider that truly native if that's the case.
Another vote of support for @sunwooz's answer!

One client is about 99 clients short of a minimal validation. But my concern is that there are several other property management SaaS programs out there. A quick google-fu shows that the going rate is around $10 / property / month. Based on that quick competitive analysis, you would need to confirm that you can deliver something that has compelling advantages over what already exists out there.

Another angle is that at the above rates, you'd probably need a 10 clients, each with a 100 properties to generate a good wage for one person after costs. To achieve that you'd need to not only build the app but also sell it. If you aren't a salesperson, then you'd probably need to get a partner who is good at sales, but then he too would probably want a good wage, so you're up to 20-30 client level and so it goes. And these quick calcs do not allow for payback on the development effort and marketing lag.
Germany has the Vereinswesen, which are small clubs around a common hobby (such as shooting, football, gymnastics, orchestra, basketball, etc.) that are usually part of a larger Verband, which may be state or country-wide like the DFB (German Football Federation), the DBB (German Basketball Federation), DSB (German Shooting and Archery Federation), or the BDMV (Association of German Music Societies).

That could be a model.
Anecdotes give ideas. It led me on a short hunt trying to find some hard data on this question, coming back empty handed. If no one starts thinking about it, no one will go and start actual research about it. So, no, it's not nothing. It's only worse than nothing if there already is enough research about a topic.
There are many definitions of the term 'healthier'. But the links are pretty amusing. And now we have a first fork https://github.com/jaunt-lang/jaunt
I work at a community radio station, and I definitely see this as filling the void in my life that a community church serves for others (and for us, music is quite literally a religion).

I wonder how many people can answer yes to the questions:

1. Do you believe there is something out there bigger than yourself?
2. Do you interface with others in your community, connected in some fashion to this Greater Power?

I feel lucky to have this community radio, I wonder what other examples people have out there.
> There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer

Nobody made any claim of the sort! In fact, I made the opposite: when they enter into a labor market with local considerations (cost of labor, community investments) they should be treated as an equal. Right now, they are not. And one of the primary ways they are not is by being employer-constrained. That's the main issue I take umbrage with! Bring as many over as we want, but let them exist in the labor pool.

> To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.

These are not artificial factors for any of the players involved. May we be better off without them? Probably so, in the long-run. But they do exist today. Maybe in a computer simulation they can be treated as such, but right now those "artificial factors" have exceptionally real consequences in the world we live in. While national boundaries may be an "artificial factor", cost of living is not, nor is added cost of labor due to social commitments at the national level. Nor are dozens of other things.
Where do they all come from?
Hah, probably none of them, or all of them, depending on your outlook.
I'm not saying that he's perfect. I know him pretty well, and he can be impulsive as well as liberal with profanity.

If you read the context, he certainly did not intend to use "cunt" (which I've heard him use for men) as a gender slur. It seems, if anything, that he used the bowdlerized word in an attempt to avoid unnecessary offense/triggering that might be attached to the word "cunt".

Of course, he never got to defend himself, because he was banned and Gack subsequently tried to rouse a lynch mob against MOC. (Emails were sent around the Valley. Gack wanted a PC lynch mob, but no one really bit.) Those pleas were met mostly with yawns, because most of us feel that Church is far more of a feminist than Gack is.
Excellent suggestion! But ... most people are in too much of hurry to take such a thorough approach to validating their idea.
# No.

x = sexpr.list(1, 2, 3, 4)

>>> print x

(1, (2, (3, (4, ()))))

>>> print sexpr.cdr(x)

(2, (3, (4, ())))

# which is what you want.

>>> def cdr2(x): return x if x == () else x[1:]

...

>>> print cdr2(x)

((2, (3, (4, ()))),)

# which is wrong.
Those incentives didn't just happen. The Norwegians imposed them on themselves.
That's the textbook answer. The reality is that most jurisdictions have some fixed limits depending on the class of road. Parks and such, 30kph. Normal streets 50. Highways 80, with 90/100 where there are no ramps/intersections/driveways/people. If we believed in the 85th percentile then we would have lots of different apparently random limits.

Instead we have limits based on polices very much separate from road conditions or actual traffic patterns. School zones are 30kph not because that's the 85th percentile but because that's the law. US highways were once capped at 55mph to save on gas during the fuel crisis (see 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act). That certainly had nothing to do with traffic patterns. If 85% was a thing, I wouldn't cross a bridge every day signed for 50kph but where not a single vehicle is below 80 and the cops say nothing until you're over 100.
Interesting bit to me is the communication problems, not so much the technical ones, we live with tradeoffs.

The thing is communicating takes time and busy people are entitled to prioritise "doing" over "talking".

As a community, Clojure is defined by the promises made and the processes established. I think "Brand Clojure" is defined by some truly wonderful attributes but it could be improved.

Perhaps this could this be fixed with process? For example

* Document architectural decisions [1] [2]

* Close tickets WONTFIX with a link to the relevant architectural decisions

Make that a process/promise so that it becomes a consistently applied approach and it would give the community confidence they are being treated well, heard and respected. "Brand Clojure" becomes more lovable.

But these processes also take time and we don't want to burden Clojure core devs. (More realistically, I doubt they'd allow us to impose on their precious time.)

So, can this happen without adding overhead for the core developers? I don't know. It's an interesting question though. Can we learn from others online communities on this topic? Are those who do this well based on dev leads who are naturally inclined to communicate? Are any using community funded positions to deliver on communication" outcomes?

Sounds like a community advocate/support role:

* Triaging tickets ensures inbound communication is effective and helpful. That helps by saving core dev effort. That helps avoid confusion on both sides.

* Generate architectural decision docs which can be linked from tickets

* Ensure WONTFIX doesn't feel like a dead end. Link to ADs, blog topical workarounds.

* Keep architectural decision docs fresh as consequences become more apparent over time.

Few ideas in there. Just a thought exercise.

--

[1] See Documenting Architecture Decisions http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-archit...

[2] Is the 'garbage in/garbage out' architectural decision documented?
> Our customers expect that they will get a 20 percent increase in performance at the same price that they paid last year

Well, looks like they have really lowered the bar, I seem to remember it being twice as much power, for half the price, every 18 months.
you can do such a thing with matlab. many, many of the function calls and algorithms in matlab can be directly viewed.

and honestly, it seems like diving into sage may not be as trivial as you make it sound. is it not a massive glue of many different languages and implementations?
How to tell when a robot has written you a letter
I think you're a little out of touch with hosting prices these days.

https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml... For 12 months will cost you about $800

A somewhat comparable EC2 instance (that still has way lower specs) m3.2xlarge will have an up-front cost of $1772, and an hourly cost of $0.146. So you'd be looking at a total yearly bill of $3051, which would pay for 3 of those dedis.

I honestly don't know how anyone could describe that as competitive.

> "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive.

If you're one of the few people that actually need the rapid scaling that EC2 can provide, sure. But that's an extremely specific and rare use case.
Sometimes, the most amazing thing about HN is the absolute quackery displayed in the form of downvotes.
The more I read about this, the more weird I think I must be. I've always preferred being alone. My time in San Francisco was utter hell. I couldn't get a moment away from people and noise. Now I live in complete isolation. My nearest neighbor is two miles down a dirt road. I only go into town to stock up on foods, which I vacuum seal and stuff in the deep freeze (enough to last me 3 months at a time). I've never been happier than I am now.
I wouldn't be surprised if they already had it. It would (unfortunately) be surprising if they chose to redistribute it, though.
Science Says Alien Once Existed
One very small part of the arctic circle. That title is appropriate once electric cars are popular in the northern regions of canada and russia, who are by far the largest occupiers of the arctic.

Some data: It looks like the leaf's range is basically halved in cold weather. That, and the greater distances between everything in the true north, says to me that they are a long way from adoption.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1087587_what-does-it-tak...

Fyi, running the heater on a gas-powered car does nothing to the range. That heat comes from engine coolant. You are doing the engine a favor, something to remember if your engine is overheating.
Why is rearranging your life around your children is bad for you?
I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
Due to lack of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility and not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility
I think they will change to monetize everything very soon. Right now is the transisition period where by you still able to seek for financial aid and get approved.
I've been using nginx for reverse proxying mostly, but what's the purpose of using something like gunicorn or uwsgi over using just bare Flask? I'm not very familiar with best practices in the area. Is the goal to filter requests for performance or something else?
Better do it five or six times, and then switch among all those captured fonts in the document, to have some variation in the letter forms. Otherwise your document will be the typographical equivalent of a drum track from 80's synth pop. Ooh, hit me with that bit-for-bit identical snare drum sample again: snap, snap, ...
Show HN: Virtualenv-mv – Move (rename) Python virtualenvs
Looking forward to the day when they reach SH4 level so the Debian SH4 port can be run on it:

https://wiki.debian.org/SH4
What makes you think that you can find an equal or better engineer? When you're hiring you don't just get to order an engineer who precisely fits your specifications; you have to choose from real people who are all imperfect in one way or another.
To promote Entrepreneurs/Local Jobs

1. Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits

2. Regulate market capitalization of corporations
Fucking kill yourself.
"What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly."

Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.
> Having a broken work/life balance is "great"?

Broken according to which cultural paradigms? Just because we have different ideas in the west does not make them better.
You're ignoring the fact that I don't believe clojure.set to be buggy.
This brings back some memories of traffic flow fundamentals.

I do remember an assignment that was modeling multiple different traffic flow models. The thing that stood out to me is how after a long time span with an network that was stuck with the same vehicles, like this model, traffic flow issues tended to become exaggerated.

As a traffic engineer, I use a product called Vissim to do exactly this kind of thing for real world scenarios. Very fun stuff.
Thanks for the book recommendations. Obviously, I haven't read them yet, but I think my next point will still be valid.

In situations of natural fixed supply, think real estate in times square, water after Katrina, rare collectors items - the price is still extremely important for rationing. And the price does lead to the highest value activities performed.

For example, in times square, you see mass market wide popularity businesses - you don't see niche computer parts stores (which you might if rent was capped at $500 per store per month). Nothing to do with NIMBY.

In this case, if rent control was established, people that would be willing to commute from further away might end up living closer, while those who want to pay more to commute less may be forced to live further away. Exactly the sub-optimal economic situation.
Measurement is great. I'm all for it.

But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account.

It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods.

Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers.

It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.