skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see, so does that mean it potentially would be required to explicitly support other code generators (GHC, OCaml, or something else), assuming the existing instrumentation is insufficient?
Happy to see the US government ban intel chips from China, we are forced to make something by ourselves, good start.
EXACTLY my response. Happy colemak user here!
Guns Censored by Emoji Police, Apple and Microsoft
It needs more additions.

After all the only way Haskell could be conceived is after a very long LSD (needed to grok monads) fueled BSDM (the type system) session.

Edit: Missed Haskell in the article. But I guess you could say the upper for different reasons about angular, enterprise software and spring. Or anything that transpires to JS, due to the build chain and difficulty debugging.
Note that with 1.10, the way we do rustc snapshots is changing: it will build with 1.9. And then 1.11 will build with 1.10, etc. so that will help a bit.
Depends on how you define "near term." It's being actively worked on, but is still gonna take a while.
If we create machines that learn as well as our brains do, it’s easy to imagine them inheriting human-like qualities—and flaws. But a “Terminator”-style scenario is, in my view, immensely improbable. It would require a discrete, malevolent entity to specifically hard-wire malicious intent into intelligent machines, and no organization, let alone a single group or a person, will achieve human-level AI alone.

Isn't this incredibly shortsighted? Ignoring all the questions regarding the morals and ethics an intelligent machine may feel and affect the way it behaves... It used to take nations to build computers, then large corporations, then off-the-shelf parts by a kid in his garage.

The first strong AI will most likely be a multi-billion dollar project, but its creation will arguably usher in an era in which strong AI is ubiquitous.
> Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Maya, Poser...

Doesn't Adobe continue to charge big $$$ for Creative Cloud? I don't understand how these statements mesh..
Europe’s Emergency Workers Turn to Drones to Save Lives
You are correct ... I misspelled it, right-clicked it and let spell checker replace it without looking at the result. Oops!
China's Top500 leader with their own 260-core CPU design [pdf]
I have no love of the American penal system or the drug war. That said:

A) You're right about the Draconian consequences of a jail sentence, and you also forgot to include the loss of her right to vote. However, I'd also like to point out that death will similarly disqualify his sister from student financial aid, government jobs, pretty much any job with an element of trust involved, housing, foreign travel. It might also disqualify her from voting, though there's always some reports each election cycle to the contrary.

B) My brother in law did go to prison for a useless drug offence that was a complete waste of everyone's time, thought it did make the police departments numbers look a bit better in their annual report. All of those bridges that you spoke of have been burned for him. As I understood your argument, you believe that his life is no longer worth living? Should I go ahead and euthanise him while I'm in town next Thanksgiving?

I hate the prison system. I hate the drug war. They are both broken on every level and future generations will judge us for how vilely we've handled this situation. However, I also have the perspective to know that there are people for whom there are worse fates than a life with a felony conviction on her record. They aren't common, and my brother in law wasn't one of them, but I accept the possibility that kilroy's sister might be one. It's certainly unlikely, but it's possible, and kilroy know the facts in the case better than I do.

Edit1: Fixed some language
I used to call them 'Prosthetic Goals' http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/200...
Hitting a Wall
[Josh from Algolia here] Places is designed to be very customizable in terms of the UX and the data you put in front of the user. For UX we have sensible defaults but you have full control over the look and feel. For data you can mix in results from you own database or other APIs (e.g. show the names of cities alongside search results for listings in those cities).
Any plans to create similar tutorial for Apache Heron?
Much of the variability problem could be eliminated by having real-time pricing of the power. Lower prices when the sun is shining, higher prices when cloudy. Then, build into usage devices a monitor for the price, and those that can shift usage (such as charging the car and running the electric water heater) can not suck power when prices are higher and draw power when it is lower.

I.e. solve the problem on the demand side rather than the supply side.
Going decentralized doesn't protect you from other people as much as you'd hope. Check out Bitcoin's scaling crisis and the DAO hack. Decentralization just takes the power away from a profit motivated corporation and gives it too a loose group of developers with their own agendas.

You don't get control unless you really do it yourself.
I have a question. 125.4 Pflop/s ... that would be about 23k nvidia GPUs (granted, 1080s). They claim they'll be able to do that with 10k by the end of the year, beginning of next year with server-class GPUs.

So that Chinese number seems awfully low to me. I would expect that the number Amazon has to be higher, for instance. Same for Microsoft and Google. Therefore I'd be amazed if the DoD, NSA and even the DoE wouldn't have more capacity available.
Ask HN: Is there hacker news android client with push notificaitons?
I would like to have a hackernews android client with push notifications for at least submissions I have made if there are any more comments made by others to that submissions so that I dont have to poll it frequently. Is there any such client available?
A very late reply.

I'm not sure if this is for or against your comment, but I hope you find this interesting:

"A cave in Romania that was sealed for 5.5M years" http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-l... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11682816 (889 points, 38 days ago, 163 comments)
My expectation of any communication channel is that it allows true anonymity & strong encryption.
Java RPM builder
This might seem like a silly question, but what does one do with a HAM radio license? Just talk to other people?

I have trouble seeing where the creative, build-cool-shit part comes in, though I'd love to be wrong about this!
Of course it's (much) better than anything else... though my experience is that it's quite hard to scale your application that much... You always need some shared resource and it gets ugly.
And I also suspect Erlang has some implementation quirks (for example the algorithm of deciding which scheduler gets which process) that will prevent it from scaling that much.
Yeah, I do believe that some day we'll reach such scalability, probably just not today.
What's interesting is that IIUC it also is the leader in the Green500 list. This is quite the feat and exciting given there are no SPARC, x86, POWER or ARM designs involved in the machine. From what I gather it's a distant relative to DEC's Alpha design, and given the children like AMD64 that came out of Alpha, I cannot wait to learn more. Who wouldn't want capable competition to spur the likes of Intel to create better designs and not sit on their laurels, in addition to having access to a competitive alternative.
Eclipse Package Drone 0.13.0 released
For technical information, read the paper: http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...

Compared to Tianhe-2, the previous top system, 2.7x more flops, and 3.2x more flops per watt.
Related talk about Tis-interpreter and SQLite:
http://gdr-gpl.cnrs.fr/sites/default/files/documentsGPL/Jour...

Note also:

> We want verification to be about proving absence of bugs, not about finding bugs
True AI wild be born in the wild, not in a lab.
it would be perfectly OK if we would be living in peaceful world without any conflict, without nations which should hold the banner of democracy and freedom, where there are no terrorist attacks and so on.

last time i checked, we're getting further and further away from this scenario. in fact, we SHOULD expect evil AI in worst form possible and beyond, anything else is dangerously naive.
> Needles get shared because they're not legal to buy OTC

-_-

Seriously, fuck this bullshit. Syringes with needles and isopropyl alcohol not being sold without prescription. I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad.

I complain about anti-depressants and some other drugs not being available OTC, but this... just why...
Welcoming Reactive Extensions for .NET
looks cool for steno, where you one press of both hands to input a whole word. But they still have 2 keys per finger... https://youtu.be/JXQQzW99cAI
As soon as that becomes available outside the fast ring I will be spending a lot more time on Windows!
Archive of the PDF: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.netlib.org/utk...
How are you expected to know you need to restore from the backup if the damage is silent?

How can you have confidence in your backup if damaged data can be silently written to it?
It's not a fad for me. I didn't use a phone much in the US and I've never owned a smart phone. I only associate with people in my neighborhood and people online, so I really have no need.
Please excuse my ignorance in this area, I was just wondering - why does it matter so much who has the biggest and baddest supercomputer? Shouldn't that which we process on them matter more?

A while back I recall reading rumors that China didn't even know what to process on their Tianhe-2. That kind of makes a supercomputer look like a pile of hardware, no matter how well it's organized or engraved.
Indeed, a proportion tells us something about the probability of making a driving mistake. A boolean tells us little in comparison.
If they patched it to use a different syscall, maybe.
Hallelujah. This has been a pain point for anyone who tried to build rustc on non-tier1 platforms (musl as host, etc.).
I think so, when using an unsupported codegen backend you'd need to add guided fuzzing support.
Tom Wheeler defeats the broadband industry: Net neutrality wins in court
Let just call it mass surveillance
>they [Canonical] should demand OVH stops calling it Ubuntu //

Hmm, if they can franchise and make some money I don't have a problem with that as long as Canonical have some oversight, such as a Canonical specified QC process for OVH to go through before release.
The referenced Reflex/gccxml/CINT approach has now been replaced in ROOT6 with an LLVM based system called Cling.
One step back though - choosing to go to a gig where they don't want phones is _also_ a choice.

I wouldn't choose to go to an Alicia Keys gig where they advertised it as "you'll need to leave your thumb at the door", because I feel my thumb is part of my body. If you feel your "smartphone is part of your body" perhaps you need to make the same choice for a show advertised as "you'll need to lock your phone in a bag if you want to bring it in".

There are other shows at other venues with other demands on what audiences can and can't bring in to the auditorium. Choose whichever show and set of rules works for you.
This isn't about total computing power, but about computing power per one system.
Where can I buy a sample?
Thinking out loud.

Instead of imagining applications per processor, I imagine this device could map threads or message handlers to processors. It could work better with a functional language or at least some language that didn't explicitly manage parallelism in code but rather in the runtime. Offload the app writer to just coding algorithm and not thread synchronization.

E.g. imagine each timer wait being a processor spinning; each I/o loop being a processor that blocked/looped on an I/o pin state. With so many processors to schedule, it wouldn't stall application progress to spin or block an individual strand (until you ran out or processors). To make this efficient, they'd want interrupts and semaphore state to be hardware-supported. Instead of polling a memory location, block on a shared register masked where each bit was a condition. So instead of a 'kernel call' it'd be an opcode or small loop. Latency of wakeup then becomes about 1 machine cycle.

I imagine with the right runtime support this could be a useful device for a large I/o server. It could reduce latency of processing each client message to just the execution time. No time burned in kernel calls, process switching, stack copying, interrupt/event latency.
We can always restart the apache server after 10 requests.
> This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam

If I'm not that one person I'd have a problem with that.

> why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?

Switching from dash cams to police helps a bit. I think most people would be okay with one (or a handful) of police officers randomly walking through their neighborhood. Most locales would say it's a good thing.

Now take that to the extreme and have an officer every 10 steps, looking around in every direction, and writing down everything that's happening. Still a good idea?
On Stackoverflow, I scan down the list of questions on the first page and all I see is a myriad of questions about tools I have no idea about and, therefore, cannot help with. Most of these questions have no, or one, answer; most of which aren't helpful.

So the problem with choice is the number of people who also know that tool who can help you.
Yes, Taiwan is too far. I personally know of an adtech startup that is going through contortions because they need to stay below latency limits on specific ad exchanges and those exchanges are located in Singapore. Taiwan is certainly way to far for them.

There are other instances where I think additional ~50ms latency diff to from India to Taiwan matters much less and I am dubious if it is material. But what matters if that the difference exists and people believe it does matter.
The World's best language App
>Competitive advertising by name is illegal in most countries. //

Can you give examples? Referring to a product's origin by using the Trademark is allowed in the UK and under the harmonisation treaties I thought such big issues had been evened out across EU states trademark regulations (so that community trademarks can work).
I think open source is going to be a good bet on iot. Right now I'm focusing on the esp8266 toolchain
Three pools (dwarfpool, ethpool/ethermine, and f2pool) control around 64 % of the hashrate currently.[1] I don’t know how many people are behind these organizations, but their vote, if coordinated, would be decisive in whether any kind of fork takes place.

[1] https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners
How so? Ubuntu uses the names of those programs in their packages, no?
Its essentially a matter of realistic benchmark acceptance. Right now machines are compared by how well they run this benchmark called LINPACK, which has been criticized for being non-representative of real science codes. As mentioned here [1], China's new system only achieved 0.3% of its peak flops on a slightly more realistic benchmark, HPCG.

[1] http://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunway...
The Terminator scenario is basically one, single centralized AI wired into everything (or at least wired into enough military power to stave off opposition as it force-wires itself into all the rest of the things). But practically speaking, a single centralized AI is highly unlikely to be a world-takeover machine of godlike intelligence in its first iteration. The iterative improvement that you refer to which could potentially make it dangerous also points to a likelihood of there being a diversity of agents with a variety of designs being run by a diverse set of organizations with a diverse set of goals, with many incentives to obtain protection from hostile AIs and computer systems run by 1337 h4x0rz (possibly foreign government hackers).

Diversity and independence of AI Agents mitigates against the Terminator-scenario danger; the situation would really be not so different than the modern-day situation with natural intelligences that have control over resources and weapons of war.
The 'creative, build-cool-shit part' is always available to those who are so inclined in this way:

Build a rig from scratch (using even discarded components for the most part) and then use it to talk to others across the town (VHF/UHF) or across the ocean (HF), completely off the grid!! How cool would that be? :-)
I'm betting on HBM + APUs replacing dedicated GPUs for a lot of people.
Your arithmetic is in the ballpark -- the article says this machine has 40k processors. But, firstly, these are double precision numbers, I believe that lowers nvidia performance substantially. Furthermore, scaling is not as trivial as putting them in the same room -- you need massive networking, cooling and power supply. Also, while the LAPACK benchmark can work pretty well on GPUs, the stuff that the computers actually is used for might not.
Meh, like I said, big fan of SQLite.
But any use of it in a "serious" application will undoubtably run into:
Error: database disk image is malformed

On a fairly regular basis.
Google gives:About 57,400 results

So I'm definitely not the only one.
IMHO the problem is not if it's fair or not, but if Canonical's demand is grounded on juridically or not.

OVH is a huge user of open source, and, as far as I been told by several sources, gives very little back (for instance, they have a no open source contribution policy internally).

But I'd like to see the juridical arguments forbidding any hosting provider to propose a given trademarked distribution on their system.
Show HN: GitKit.js – Pure JavaScript Implementation of Git
This makes it sound easier than it really is. It's not just recompilation, it's patching everything to remove the trademark. Then you have tens (hundreds?) of custom packages to build and most of all to test and maintain.
A Brief and Depressing History of American Gun Laws
Facts aren't copywriteable, and in the US a collection of facts is also not copyrwriteable.

A test case is structured around an assertion of facts. To that extent, it is not copywriteable.

But other parts of a test case, which have creative thought, are copywriteable. This can include the test name and any comments.

If you manage to get ahold of the test suite, strip out all of the assertions, and create a new test system which does the same tests, then you might get a lawyer to agree that it's not copyright infringement.

Even then, a test case might use something which is under copyright. For example, it may contain a poem, and check if the length of the poem is as expected.

That said, if there were no copyright (let's say it's the 1960s, before copyright was extended to software), it could still be covered as a trade secret, and protected under confidentiality agreements. That is, copyright affects what you can do once you get the software, but you might not be able to get it in the first place.

Therefore, while I understand and even empathize with your argument, I don't think you should based the argument in copywriteability.

Instead, I think you should look to Stallman's argument for why documentation for a free software project should itself be free. If you modify the code, you should be able to modify the documentation instead of starting from scratch. https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Free-Softw...

By analogy, if you modify the code, you should be modify the test suite instead of starting from scratch.

One obvious solution is to start your own GNU-licensed SQLite test suite, to, ahem, fight against the software hoarders. ;)
Identifying Pets with Machine Learning
We would want the AI we build to ultimately share our values, so that it can work as an extension of our will. It does not look promising to write down a long list of everything we care about. It looks more promising to leverage the AI’s own intelligence to learn about our values and what our preferences are.

This looks like a nice intro to a dystopian sci-fi movie.
>> own a pair of normally $150 running shoes that I picked up for $60 that I absolutely adore and try to treat well. I put about 5 miles into them every day, so they probably will last 2 years at the absolute very most.

don't running shoes last about 300-500 miles? If you're running 5 miles a day you're probably going to want to replace them in 4 months
It really sounds like a slapped on excuse for the next incarnation of the data collection biz. How would they generate revenue if not by selling the collected data to 3rd parties? Because imo that is the most straightforward option. Missing this bit entirely in the article is disingenuous and concerning.
I'm not too sure about opaque code rating drivers either, though people might be ok with it.
You sure it's just how they call it? IANAL but I believe they would also have to remove "ubuntu" from any user noticeable string.
Also important is the memory bandwidth. You can do all the TFLOPs you want, but if you can't access the data fast enough, then there's a bottleneck.
Sometimes I think speculating about AI is similar to speculating about the Fermi Paradox, i.e. predictions about the unknown backed up with absolute certainty.
The OnePlus 3 Review – AnandTech
But if you have an application that can be distributed transparently to thousands of GPUs, the difference between one and several systems is not very relevant.
"One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap."

Unless, of course, they pay this nice fee to have their fleet cars whitelisted in the app, call it "bad driver protection money"!
Well, if I run a SaaS business on VPSs but it's only profitable if those cost $1 a pop, would OVH lower its prices just for me?
3DR is known to use free software for the autopilot and the ground station:

https://3dr.com/solo-drone/

https://pixhawk.org/choice

https://github.com/ArduPilot/MissionPlanner
I'm an ex game engine developer and I bristle anytime anyone thinks any existing functional language is better for multicore. Specifically garbage collection alone will make any language an order of magnitude slower generally per a single core. Also the C/C++ game development community at least has great approaches to multicore which makes C/C++ linearly scale with scores to boot, see for example: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022186/Parallelizing-the-Naugh....

I love functional languages, more for thinking in them, prototyping ideas, especially compilers/visualizers, and etc. But for any language that adds garbage collection, immutable data structures (way more operations per write and crazy memory thrashing/alignment issues), unless used sparsely or in a mixed paradigm (ugh, except maybe scala/clojure) are going to pay a magnitude of performance loss.

Mind you there are tricks around using more system languages (C/C++/Rust/D etc) for a lot of the heavy lifting with the application core being functional that gets you closer to the best of both worlds.
We should expect evil AI. But it's not patently obvious that we should expect it to make the world worse off than evil natural intelligences. The horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were accomplished using humans, and global thermonuclear annihilation was on the table while computers were still programmed with core rope memory strung together by little old ladies with knitting skills.

Perhaps there is something specific about the availability of artificial intelligences, and their relation to the world around them, that is different and intrinsically more threatening than a world containing only human intelligences - but surely we mustn't leap to that conclusion without identifying what this difference is.