skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What you really need to explain is why Python is inefficient.

Python is extremely dynamic and this makes things hard for someone who wants to build a JIT.

The powerful bits of python metaprogramming makes it really impossible for a JIT to say with some certainty across all running threads that what it is doing is right.

Inlining a simple call like a.x() is rather hard when everything underneath can move around - I am not saying that it always does, but implementing a python variant which is nearly the same isn't very useful.

Compare this to PHP, which has fixed method calls (unless you use runkit, which you shouldn't) - a->x() will always be the same method as long as there was an a->x which was valid.

The method will never change once it is has been validated.

However unlike Java, both languages end up not knowing exactly what type "a" will be when the method is being called.

Java also doesn't quite know, but only when the invoke is via an interface. But the engine at least knows exactly how many impls of that interface has been loaded so far (and the bi-morphic case is commonly 1 real impl and 1 mock impl).

But both in case of PHP and Python, the whole idea of "which object do I have look up ::x() for?" is an unknown. In PHP's case, you have to look it up once per class encountered and in Python's case, you have to verify someone hasn't replaced it at runtime.

There are very nice functional ways around this problem at the bottom end of numeric loops for Python, which makes it great for numeric processing interleaved with generic control flow.

numpy + numba is a great way of limiting all this and getting performance out of a simple loop. And I'd rather use numpy + a python script doing regexes rather than a C program + LAPACK.

But that performance doesn't translate over when you have class/object oriented structures or in general, just multi-threaded web/rpc style code.
The article does say:

"Overall, these findings show that even in times of great economic inequality, inequality in health outcomes is not inevitable but is strongly mediated by policy."

Acknowledging income inequality as a problem, even if it isn't have a negative effect on whether you die earlier or not.
6th submission by same user. This is getting a bit spammy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gkr
We probably would invent new languages, or at least new dialects, to signal group membership. If somebody has made the effort to learn the language then they're probably serious about being part of the group. As a practical example, consider the revival of the Hebrew language, which happened mostly as an expression of Jewish identity. Strengthening group identity is the main motivation for preserving rare languages.
Your previous post leads in with:

> Ever wonder why the cost of healthcare is so ridiculously expensive in this country?

The major point that I make is that physician salary is under 10% of US healthcare expenditure, so that's not why healthcare is so ridiculously expensive here, and driving it to 0 would likely make little overall impact. You haven't made the case that a constrained supply of physicians is the reason why there is a large amount of healthcare regulation in the US. Much of that regulation is to the consternation of physicians as much as it is to those who want to innovate in healthcare.

Finally, part of the reason that 16 of the top 30 jobs are different subspecialties of physician is that those jobs have existed for quite some time and are cleanly delineated into subspecialty. If you were to break out different roles in investment banks and hedge funds similarly, you'd probably not see physicians in the top 30 list.
Just letting you know, the monospace formatting appears as a single line and is unreadable on mobile.
First the article says: "drill holes in their molars, treat the tooth pulp that contains adult dental stem cells with low-dose laser treatments, applied temporary caps"

Then it says: "Dave and his team have added an innovative, noninvasive and remarkably simple but powerful tool"

Yeah, okay, if you read Wiktionary it defines "noninvasive" as "not requiring an incision". So by that strict definition it's true. Drilling holes is totally different than "an incision". Right?

I realize that this has "a host of applications", some of which truly are noninvasive. It's just that this particular application was anything but noninvasive, IMO.
> It seems hard because the roles are so few and high in demand that such a low number of people actually get to fill those spots, making it look very elite.

How many people will endure this kind of training[1] and face the dangers this profession has? It's very demanding. I don't think more than 10% of the population can keep up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK8U8RZyzsM
Warning, my layman's understanding:

The United States maintains global hegemony, props up the value of its currency, and reduces the cost of imports for its citizens, in some significant part due to the "petrodollar". That's the agreements the US formed with oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia to only sell oil denominated in US dollars.

Forcing all oil trade be done in USD requires nearly every nation carry large USD reserves, increasing demand for and the strength of the US dollar, increasing the currency's stability, and increasing other nations' reliance on relations with the US.

A weaker Saudi Arabia, and a weaker oil market, is also a weaker US dollar, and weaker US power internationally. This pits environmental concerns against economic and political ones at a very high level. While the subsidies may be small enough that they're eventually dropped, this is my understanding of why the US maintains such close ties to S.A. even when our goals are not otherwise aligned.
This was resolved in GCC 4.8 here:
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=52080

"Here is a candidate patch (it ICEs one Ada testcase, see PR52134). It enforces
the C++11 memory model (as far as bitfields are concerned) upon everyone and
builds on the machinery that was implemented for it (changing the implementation
for when we compute "an underlying object" and permanently store it, to make
it possible to use this information for optimization purposes)."

If I'm not mistaken they could have ensured 64-bit alignment when a bitfield immediately follows a lock, although that likely wouldn't have been fun.
Why not?

Aren't these types of alliances fluid and opportunistic?
They've changed contractor tax in the UK, this year you'll be paying 10% more than you were (less £500, you're only allowed £5k dividend tax free now).
Likely their standard practice so the addition of a second field is immaterial. Does look funky though.
Echoes of 'I, Pencil' in there:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

Some more background about the brain shrinkage referred to in the article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brain...
Pakistani Movie “Actor in Law” Official Theatrical Trailer
> CPython's job is to run programs rather than to educate.

CPythons 'job' is to be the reference implementation of Python.
I think this was a big premise of Path, but it didn't pan out to well (I guess technically it's "hasn't panned out" since it is still around). I agree it's likely a stronger product, but not a strong or even equal business.
If computer scientists made similar emotional arguments: Save EBCDIC because diversity.

No. Full stop. It's the adherents' of these cultures (speakers' of these languages) duty to compile and/or translate their cultural insights and knowledge. If they fail to do that - good bye, it probably wasn't that important, otherwise the culture or language would have been dominant.
Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?

I mean, you have the perfect example in front of you: why are there so many programming languages? Could it be that some language constructs are more difficult in one language vs the other? Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?
Doubtful the police officer is thinking that far ahead. There's no need for an explanation. When your profession is both prestigious[1] and seen as being for the greater good, you tend to get treated well by the police. Especially if it's on your driver's license (military id works too).

Try telling someone you're a doctor at a bar to see this in action.

1 - http://media.theharrispoll.com/documents/Prestigious+Occupat...
This is also why tensor flow is such a resource hog compared to torch. My mac book pro has intel iris graphics so no cuda, but I was able to get usable results with torch, still struggling to get tensor flow to produce anything useful. Compared to lua python is very hungry, but also Apple is going to need to have a decent GPU option in its new macbook pros to keep people who work on ai projects from bailing for hackingtoshes.
Thanks, you're correct that I had two services with rights under Settings-->Accessibility. LastPass and Twilight. I have turned them both off, but do not see how to manually re-enable the pre-boot password prompt.
It's a centre-left policy think tank article advocating government health care initiatives. Just saying cause I don't think you read the article, yourself.
The exact issue is that it cannot. The reason is variables can change on the runtime, and often dependant on input.
Say I can have :
if blah:
os.path.join = lambda ...

and then the pre-looked-up version of method are now wrong.
I agree with your assessment.

I'll suggest another comparison - the Kinsey scale for sexual orientation. Most adults place themselves on one extreme of the scale or the other, while 20% put themselves somewhere in the middle.

Also, my sense is that "spectra" carries with it a 1-D interpretation, which doesn't really fit with multi-dimensional interpretation of gender. The question "Where do you fit on the blood type spectra" doesn't really make sense.
I think the article is missing the point of what AI will do by eliminating jobs like transportation and fast food preparation . I think once we get to that point we will have to implement basic income .
Intel announces full set of new Atom and Xeon server processors to fend off ARM
There's no need. If you upvote the story you can find it again under 'upvoted stories' in your HN profile.

That said, pinboard.in is a decent service, and it's useful to have all your bookmarks in a central location.
The subsidies are not really that big.

For the USA, total subsidies of ~$20 billion (which are mostly things like tax deductions and exemptions, not direct payments) vs. energy market size of over $1 trillion.

You could eliminate them to "feel good" but that's mostly what it would be.
What content are your 5 friends posting that you believe FB's newsfeed is leaving out? I've mostly limited my FB to my HS and college friends, and a few work friends. It's a nice nostalgic oasis from the things I see on Twitter, because on Twitter I follow just about anyone who is in the same field as me, whether or not I personally know them.
What is a programming language? A six-layer model
I use an IKEA wall shelf to lift my monitors off my desk. The thing has just enough clearance to have the Mini under it and an inch and a half clear above it for airflow, and was a pain to place at the right height at the time (concrete walls).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#Decline
The Scala course running (for free, if one ignores the IMHO useless certificate offerings) on Coursera and authored by the guy who also invented Scala in the first place seems to be a great pointer to send people new to FP to. Sure, teaching the parts that are useful (for that system) in Javascript is one more option, but maybe use several methods, and a "real" FP language and an actual FP course with exercises and course forum and all that stuff is probably one of the better options.
Oh, I got it, Settings-->Security-->Device Security-->Screen Lock. Opening that item generates a message asking you if you wish to enable password at boot.
That's because deepening relationships is not FB's goal. Maximizing profits on the other hand is, and that explains all the changes over the years it exists - social games (Zinga etc), "like farms", lack of piracy controls over stolen YT videos, etc.
El dorados are never drawn in the map.
> That doesn't addressing my point, and my point doesn't depend on there being a monopoly, just much-higher-then-typical returns.

It does address your point. As I stated, there aren't higher-than-typical returns, because Medicare acts like a monopsony. Monopsonies result in lower-than-typical returns.

Medicare is involved in a number of different ways, but the two main ones here are to set the number of available residency slots, and separately to control providers' revenues through a monopsony power.

Aviation is highly regulated, but neither airlines nor passengers are monopsonies, so the analogy doesn't work.
> People are stupid, and generally don't know what is best for them, and the more of them you get together, the more likely they'll develop mass insanity.

People all have a similar amount of intelligence. Given that the effect you acknowledge is partially due to large groups, I wonder if it's more a problem of party politics, or an us-versus-them mentality, or collective decision-making...
Post some! NZ laws are some of the least restrictive in the world, especially when it comes to business.
I understand the frustration but your analogy broke down for me when you added the "idiot." I interpreted this to mean that the developer chose not to put additional effort into documentation. While I understand this can be frustrating, Impress.js is still a pretty cool project and I'd rather it exist without documentation than not exist at all.
> all values are (at least semantically) strings, so numeric operations are slow.

All values are _still_ semantically strings (it's a core tenet of Tcl: "Everything is a string (EIAS)"), and in 1994, they were practically strings, too (that was the implementation). In 1999 w/ Tcl 8.0, Tcl became byte-compiled and adopted "Tcl_Obj" to represent values[0]. The Tcl_Obj (nothing to do w/ object-oriented programming), is what's called a "dual ported" object. It contains a string-representation of it's value (to preserve EIAS), and a "native" value of it's last computed use. For example, if you:

% set a 9.0
% expr { $a * 0.01 }

The native value of the Tcl_Obj $a refers to will be a float. Repeated calls to $a in a float-context will continue to use this already-computed native value. No need for further string interpolation.

[0] http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.tml

[edit: formatting]
Try Alaska?
AI and basic income in the same comment. I almost forgot I was on HN for a second there.
I do not believe for a single second that your insurance company "pays" their full share as demonstrated when they tell you you have to pay 20% of the cost. I have no evidence but I am strongly convinced that there is some sort of account reconciliation between an insurance company and an in network provider where they settle accounts in a ... more palatable manner.

There is just no way Humana would pay over $7k for two hours of waiting for triage in the emergency room and eventually a rabies vaccine shot.

You've hit the problem right in the head here.

> Medicine should not be a negotation. There should be one price for everyone and you shouldn't have to know anyone or pull strange tricks to get the real price. If we don't even know what something costs, how can we begin to drive the cost down?

From what I've read: Part of the problem is hospitals themselves don't know the exact cost.

I think another part should be the introduction of death panels. There should be a point being which we will "put down" a suffering patient. We do this with dogs and cats all the time. If someone is suffering and very unlikely to make a good recovery, we should put them out of their misery. Or at least we shouldn't pour so much effort into keeping them alive.
A population which to a large degree is often found clustered in separate communities (as the case for many minorities in other countries) and generally segregated, even if not by intention. Coming across a Muslim can be an oddity in many localities. There are a lot of communal tensions still being harbored by people today. I have repeatedly heard the phrase "सब पाकिस्तान से हैं" (they are all from Pakistan) being used derogatively to describe Indian Muslims, amongst other similar things (that one sticks out to me because I've heard it way too often)

It is possible that the reasons are not what the author thought they were. But it is pretty likely that they were, and I'm suggesting we give the author the benefit of the doubt in that he had valid reasons and prior similar experiences to feel that way.

It is very easy to discount an experience when your bubble makes you think it is impossible. For many years I didn't think casteism was a thing anymore in cities, since I never saw it happening. Over time I realized that it is still very much there, just that those not negatively affected by it tend to not notice it.
Either that, or they can take a slice of your own patellar tendon and just graft that on where your ACL used to be.
My dream is to migrate to the US eventually. Not so much for the incredibly better pay but just because it seems there's much more interesting stuff to work on there. I'm German and currently doing my Master of Computer Science in Germany.

Do you have any advice on which path would maximize my chance of getting a visa? Or possibly your personal success story?

So far, I will be doing an internship at one of the Big 4 and will be trying to get a job at the Big 4 in Europe or some other company in London (provided I can still migrate there post-Brexit) after my graduation. But I'd be glad to get other (possibly better) suggestions.

EDIT: Added Paragraphs.
Right, I'll just choose the non-crook option next time! A foolproof plan.
Uhm... do you now how bones get repaired? Only the easiest fractures are allowed to heal themselves. Everything worse than that looks like this: https://teachengineeringprod.blob.core.windows.net/content/c...
I think the point is that they see this as a poor decision on the UK's part, enough so that they wish to emigrate.
>You don't have to treat everything as a string.

Oh, I agree with you on that. My point was that Tcl makes it especially easy to "cheat" and avoid building an AST. You may do this when you only care about writing an interpreter in few LOC, like the original version of Picol, quickly.

A Tcl interpreter in VHDL sounds interesting. Do you have a public
repository for it?
A Haskell mention would've completed the HN trifecta.
Orthostatic hypotension: fainting when you stand up
Classic HN: Trying to capture the depth of topics like Basic Income and AI by sprinkling them over two sentences.

Kidding :)
The BEHEMOTH cycle is just something else. A Mac in the front of a bicycle with head-mounted controls and a keyboard in the handlebars is just the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. Roberts' projects are seriously cool. Just think of all the dozens of different technologies that this guy understands intimately, from the highest to lowest levels.
Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder Than You Think
Seems you skimmed the article.

The first part you quoted was explaining the prior art done by the lead author -- giving rodents (not humans) damaged tooth.

The innovative procedure on humans will use lasers to trigger restoration of the damaged teeth.
I personally agree, I don't think we should give a rat ass what a regime like SA thinks. Part of the point of the GX/UN/WTO/<insert bureaucratic partnership organization here> is to slowly co-opt authoritarian regimes into a pro-market/business mindset with the belief that democratic reforms will slowly follow. For a quick shallow example (this is technically off-topic): China, for awhile looked like it was on a path to give it's citizens real agency in their political future, some attributed this to their embracing of a limited form of capitalism, but now that the economy is contracting, their freedoms are being reproached... The same logic was used in the lifting of sanctions against Iran, which hasn't stopped them from hanging gays from building cranes yet, but the hope is long-term it'll force the hardliners out of power.
My point is that if you have a meter-wide hole in your parachute (sh and other interpreters you can call to execute any code you want), also having small rips in the fabric probably doesn't really matter - if you have to rely on it, you're screwed anyway.
| I think what bothers me the most about all of this is how criticism of the national policy of the state of Israel is reworked by certain opponents as anti-Semitic attacks... Why is this?

Let's say extremes from both sides of any issue in general tend to over-exaggerate...

You seriously think that the worst part is unfair propaganda by Zionists that exists to such an extent that it overwhelms any countervailing anti-Semitic reworking of anti-Semitism into slanting of news against Israel? Given the huge size of Arab and Moslem populations around the world compared to Jewish populations, the survey results that show their complete acceptance of anti-Semitism, and given the long long and recent history of anti-Semitism all across Europe... given that, to what do you attribute this "worst part"? Are you alleging that the Jews control the media?

Also, while we are on the subject, what races are "some of you best friends"?

I'm not attempting to attack you personally or accuse you, just trying to shake your intellectual lapels a bit to reconsider your stance, for what I've noticed is that your question comes up in every single discussion of this issue, to the extent that it sounds like a mantra to me. Propaganda itself.

Peace.
Re: "And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?"
We just borrow the relevant words :)
This is closely related to the economic concept of the "Invisible Hand"[0] and also explains why planned economies never seem to work, no matter how well-intentioned they are (see the current state of Venezuela - although in their case, as in almost every case of central planned economies, greed and corruption were the prevailing forces of the ruling agency)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
French is actually doing very well.
First, using a lot of English words doesn't mean we can't speak real French anymore (we use a lot of English words in my group of friends when we speak, but our written conversations are much purer). Secondly France is not the only place where French is spoken (common misconception in France), and among these other locations a lot of African countries speak a very good French, if not better than ours.
> The first two steps took about 6 months and the final step about a year.

That's quite lengthy (by the book): the LCA usually has a two-week turnaround. A nice perk is that it's also 'free' for the employer (there is no filing fee), although many have immigration lawyers on retainer to handle supporting paperwork and shepherd you through the process.

Excluding the interview process at the employer, LCA -> visa interview -> issued E3 for me was about ~3 weeks.
But that's just not the case in reality is it? In reality it's the main production implementation and its inefficiency costs the world wasted resources every day.

If readability and being the reference implementation is more important than performance, why is Python implemented in C rather than a higher level language?