skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
basically, on paper flow is better. However, lack of Windows support and poor tooling, plus the fact that it was second to market, slowed down its adoption. Now you have the issue where TypeScript has thousands of type definition for a lot of libraries, and Flow only has a few. Facebook keeps underestimating Windows (eg: there was a survey out for a while asking people if they should just stop working on Windows support for Jest and depend on Windows 10's linux userland support instead).

That, coupled with Flow being harder to get up and running, makes TypeScript much more popular for the average developers. I still prefer Flow though :(
What if you don't use Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark? I don't and I've used it for my workstation for 12 years.
It's a bit odd (pardon the pun) that the words Taylor series [0] appear neither in the blog post nor so far in the comments, since that's the origin of the terms odd and even in this context [1]: the power series of odd functions have non-zero coefficients only on the odd powers of the variable, and those of even functions only on the even powers.

And thus the Taylor-series representation of a function makes it immediately obvious that the function can be decomposed into odd and even sub-functions. But Taylor-series representations exist only for smooth functions, and generally converge only in parts of their domains, while the even-odd decomposition applies to all real-valued functions defined on all real inputs. It's this algebraic generality of the even-odd decomposition that's most remarkable.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series

1. The Wikipedia article on odd and even functions points out the decomposition described in the submitted post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_and_odd_functions
Thanks!

Yes, Barliman is ambitious. Both the synthesis capabilities and the interface will need to improve before Barliman might be useful for practicing programmers.

One question Barliman is trying to explore is whether relatively modest synthesis abilities might be useful for some tasks. If the last 10% of a function could be synthesized, for example, how useful would that be? Perhaps a better question is, "for which tasks, if any, would modest synthesis be useful"?

I don't know the answer to this question.

A tool like Barliman might be useful in an educational setting. However, this seems a bit like the calcular/Wolfram Alpha debate in teaching math. If Barliman becomes good enough to synthesize many simple Scheme definitions from examples, would that take away too many learning opportunities from students? I suppose it would teach students to think of example tests, and perhaps even properties, types, or contracts, for the functions they are defining. But it does seem that the better synthesis works, the less useful Barliman might be in a teaching setting.

One suggestion from Matt Matt is to use Barliman for code repair. For example, say I define a function `foo`, along with several tests that `foo` passes. Later I find that the definition of `foo` is incorrect, and come up with several more tests that fail using the current definition. Barliman could have an "auto repair" button that attempts to synthesize a correct definition of `foo` from both the tests and the "almost correct" existing definition. I have several ideas of how this might be done. For autorepair (and other synthesis tasks) it would be helpful to extend Barliman to run synthesis tasks remotely--for example, on an EC2 X1 instance with dozens of hardware threads.

For more advanced synthesis tasks, I think we'll need a more sophisticated search. I was very impressed with Alpha Go's performance over a giant search space that historically has been considered the domain of human experts, a task that reminds me greatly of synthesis. I'm working with Rob Zinkov and Evan Donahue on using stochastic search/Markov Chain Monte Carlo/etc. to try to allow miniKanren's search to explore more promising areas in the search space. One inspiring piece of related work is this 2013 ASPLOS paper by Schkufza, Sharma, and Aiken on Stochastic Superoptimization:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/asplos...

I don't see Barliman or other synthesis tools replacing programmers any time soon, but in 10 or 15 years I hope our tools will be assisting us with useful synthesis tasks.
Casual observation. I read a few of these and they seem made up by "ride share" drivers. Anyone who has used Uber, Lyft, etc, will plainly see that some of these stories could not have even happened.

"I picked her up and then at the destination they wouldn't let me go", etc. Um. GPS said you delivered them to the destination. Just leave.
Show HN: Compare Property Files
Meta: why does https://outage.report redirect to http://outage.report ?
You can go to Whole Foods and every product will have some meaningless "All Natural" or "Asbestos Free" certification. That's not fraudulent.
The internet will do it for you. http://www.the-email-archive.com/email-data-jgc-optimal-com-...
Most of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.

I'm not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China's population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can't really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events.

Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.
The video streams are delivered from their OpenConnect appliances. The video encoding, their actual website and all the client interaction is run in AWS, active/active in three regions (and multiple availability zones per region).

The AWS part is also very dynamic, at any given time most customers are (unknowingly/behind the scenes) participating in 8-10 beta features.

That said, this is all based on talks and presentations they have given at various conferences in the past. It could be different, especially some AWS parts.
To visualize this, take the graph of f and mirror it across the y axis.

The even function is the average of the two traces f(x) and f(-x), and the odd function is the distance from the average to the actual values.
> Aren't we really talking about junk rated mortgage back securities being packaged and sold as AAA?

Yes. But I suspect you don't understand precisely what that means:

First: A large number of mortgages were made, grouped into pools, and sliced into "tranches", where losses were assigned to the most junior tranches first, and the most senior tranches last. Thus, a junior tranche might stop paying out if 5% of the loans in the pool were defaulted on, while a very senior tranche might only stop paying out if 80% of the loans in the pool went bad. (Or whatever; numbers for example only.)

Second: These tranches were submitted to ratings agencies, who constructed models where they said "well, the chance of 5% of the loans defaulting is X%, the chance of 20% is Y%, the chance of 60% default is Z%...", then based on this model they assigned ratings to the tranches, reflecting the models estimation of their likelyhood of paying out, which is the entire job of a ratings agency.

Third: Tranches rated AAA were sold as AAA securities, because they were. The model said that Random Senior Tranche was 99.5% likely not to default, which is enough for a AAA rating from whomever was giving the ratings, so that's what it got. We've later come to question some of the models used, and in particular, it's been suggested that the ratings agencies incorrectly assumed default risk was less correlated than it was, and systematically undervalued the chance of a "black swan" event. But that's hindsight.

> If so, how is that not straight up fraud?

How is it even sort of fraud? Or if it is fraud, who do you think committed it, and what should they have done differently to avoid it?
Olin. Van Pelt. Baker. Widener.
I like NewsBlur, has a good web client and a nice app for iOS (phone and pad).

Edit: maybe also for Android but I simply don't know.
Thanks for your reply. What little C++ experience I have is from several years ago - do you think (again, purely in the context of Qt) that any of the new C++11 features are worth using or should I stick to C++98?
Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible -- especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human decision-making.

You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.
Well, my feeling is that no programmer worth their salt has only one computer. I have 4 within easy reach at almost any time. :) I guess if you can't "cheat" on this test you don't deserve to get the job.
*antisymmetric

The matrix problem is of course a special case of the same problem, where the domain is the matrix indices, labelled with (0,0) as the middle of the matrix.
Black Guy Beats Up Three Cops with WWE Jim Ross Commentary
+5, meh.

Slashdot voting options!
Thank you for posting the links!

For anyone interested in how the relational interpreter powering Barliman works, here is a short talk I gave at PolyConf last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQL48qYDwp4

And here is a much more in-depth two-part talk I gave at Lambda Lounge Utah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHov3fKYqBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFE2E91VDAk
> edit: while I think about it, most large changes in FreeBSD are discussed in private. Public discussion on patch and technical discussion is frowned upon.

Ugh. That sounds pretty bad for an open source OS.
f(1)=e(1)+o(1)

f(-1)=e(1)-o(1)

It's impossible for e (or o) to have an asymptote where -e (or -o) does not.
I did not claim that you said it, not at all, and that's a definite misrepresentation of what I'm talking about.

The comment in which it was said is here: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12191938 >.

I am comparing whatever anecdotes (yours and others) that are supposedly backed up by lots of people you know, with this.

While the people you know might have had some bad experiences sometimes, I wouldn't believe they were anywhere near the claims going on in this thread.

If your connections reported occasional bad experiences with taxis, who would care? It couldn't possibly be relevant to a thread where the entire context of the thread is that people are saying that all Boston taxis are almost always awful and almost always have broken card readers, etc.

I'm not sure how to explain it. I'm trying to say that the connections whose informal opinions you cite as backup couldn't possibly have said something as extreme as what the other people of this thread are saying -- in which case whatever minor and totally expected occasional complaints your sources have had, they aren't relevant.
> It's about the intent.

And now you've got yourself some trouble, because the intent for publishing the free speech flag can reasonably be as criticism of laws purporting to make certain information illegal. Then you're publishing political speech which is a whole different ballgame.

But the better point is that people have become quick to dismiss the math, as if facts and logic and reality are irrelevant to the law. The law has to live inside the universe. It has to do something when the problems the math proves can happen actually do.

So for example, the xor situation is interesting. If you xor with random bytes, the result is indistinguishable from random and is capable of encoding literally any information of equal or smaller length -- at the same time -- by changing what you xor it back with. So A xor B is the Declaration of Independence while A xor C is DeCSS, C xor D is the Bill of Rights and C xor E is a trade secret document.

Now suppose there are some websites allowing anyone to publish xor-encoded data (or arbitrary data). Somebody uploads A to one such website and C to another. Anybody who asks about A, you can show them B and it encodes the Declaration of Independence. Anybody who asks about C, you can show them D and it encodes the Bill of Rights. So now A and C are being published by separate sites, each is indistinguishable from random, but xor them together and you get DeCSS.

DeCSS is being published, but who is publishing it? Who can be forced to remove their half, when doing so would also delete arbitrarily many instances of lawful speech that require the same random bytes (and could be the only copy)? What is the status of B and D, given that you can xor them with public documents to get back A and C? What if you can prove that A is preexisting and C is derived from DeCSS and A? What if there is no way to prove which existed first?

If somebody does this, there has to be an answer better than hand-wavy dismissal of inconvenient math.
This is a nice tutorial, but it seems a bit kludgey (and I'm guessing part of that is due to Fusion 360's "not quite a fully finished CAD system," though they are making pretty good progress with it, and I find it's a fairly nice program, especially for the price, (free to hobbyists) and it includes CAM abilities.)

I would think OpenSCAD would be pretty decent at this, but honestly, I've never tried making parabola's or similar with it.

A quick google found this openscad script for parabolas: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:84564
Belated update, but thanks for the tip.

In the end I did indeed add syntax-highlighting via the use of the LPEG library.
They do a splitter in datacenters to the NSA so I presume that is similar many fiber optic wires. From what I understand is that the submarine has to stay there to collect the data. So I presume they split it and have a cable they connect to it that routes it right to the sub. However I think Hawaii is a big NSA station because a lot of those international lines right through near there. I wonder if they could split the stream and run a whole cable back to Hawaii with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slid...

https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/55_201110-ISS-IAD-T1-...
I don't see that attitude in what you are reading.

Any OS which the user has to install themselves has to assume a certain amount of knowledge in the user. It's completely fair to say "And there's an even easier way if you prefer" as well.
I assume you're talking about: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/18/jamie_dimons_perp_walk_why_i....

It's one of the most ridiculous theories I've ever heard. Sarb-Ox 906 in conjunction with Section 13 of the Securities Exchange Act requires bank CEOs to certify that the bank:

"maintain[s] a system of internal accounting controls sufficient to provide reasonable assurances that—
(i) transactions are executed in accordance with management’s general or specific authorization;
(ii) transactions are recorded as necessary (I) to permit preparation of financial statements in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles or any other criteria applicable to such statements, and (II) to maintain accountability for assets;
(iii) access to assets is permitted only in accordance with management’s general or specific authorization; and
(iv) the recorded accountability for assets is compared with the existing assets at reasonable intervals and appropriate action is taken with respect to any differences"

"Reasonable assurances" does not mean "free of problems." Imagine a law that required Program Managers at tech companies to certify that they had controls that gave "reasonable assurances" that the software performed as designed. That would just mean they had a Q&A procedure--not that the procedure was perfect or that the software was perfect. It would not violate the law for Satya Nadella to sign such a certification, even though everyone knows Windows (like all software) is full of bugs that need to be fixed.
Most metal 3d printers simply don't have the surface finish to make this feasible, never mind cost (it'd be ridiculous).
>There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago.

I was at the NY world's fair, I think it was 1960 (56 yrs ago). I remember walking through an exhibit that showed fusion. They had a chitload of capacitors in a bank that dumped all the power into a big electric spark. It looked impressive and sounded great. They implied fusion was almost ready.
Is there a cli tool to browse that, or do you have to go to the web?
Not only it supports both PV and HVM (with PVHVM in works) but also it can run as a dom0.
Inoreader has plenty of advanced features. It's better than what Google Reader was like.
Isn't it possible for apps for ignore the OS's proxy settings and make a direct TCP connection? In that case the proxy man-in-the-middle trick won't work.
How many networks still run SONET at this point? Most global carriers would run OTN over DWDM at 25GHz or 50GHz spacing, with up to 200Gbps per channel. There is of course OTN encryption though
This seems to have no connection with Snowden other than saying "Snowden says". And the information presented is too shallow to be interesting for the HN audience.
I tend to use Comic Rocket for those rarely-updating sites too; anything with a next link works. For instance, I read http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ that way, and several other things that update even less often (a few times a year).

Every time I try an RSS reader, I find myself drowning in things I don't actually care to read in their entirety. And I prefer to read almost everything on the original site, rather than in a newsreader.
Asking for email, and sometimes name, is fine. Forcing me to register is absurd. There are lots of “indy” software developers that don’t play these games.
> Referential transparency implies that we can everywhere replace an expression with any reduction of it

I'm aware, but that's too strong a requirement. I wanted my definition to capture the bare minimum necessary to make it pleasant to write functional programs. The basic idea is “functional programming is designing your programs in terms of mathematical functions whenever possible (not always!)”, not “functional programming is requiring an embedded IO DSL to do anything effectful”. (But don't take this as a dismissal of Haskell. While I do have complaints against it, effect segregation isn't one of them.)

> but because the return value of this function can change even when its arguments don't, this is not true in Javascript.

That's okay. A procedure that returns the system date will never be referentially transparent, yet such a procedure is a necessity in any programming language.

My beef is actually with the fact JavaScript doesn't have compound values: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12191119 . Since compound entities (whether values or mutable objects) are a necessity in practical programming, the harsh reality is that JavaScript programmers have to use mutable objects whether they want it or not.
That's crony capitalism, which is what you also have in Putin's Russia. The government decides which private enterprises will succeed, and in return the owners give the governmental officials their political support and immense bribes. It is not nearly as efficient and adaptive as the considerably less corrupt version of capitalism in Israel or the US.
My intent is not to diminish the genocide of the Americas but....

I don't think you realize how many people Stalin, Mao, Hitler have killed. We all know Hitler had to resort to incineration to get rid of the bodies. Stalin filled mines with the remains of Ukrainians and others. They couldn't dig holes big enough to bury the dead. I have no idea what Mao did with the 50-80 million bodies he had on his hands.

Between just these 3 guys your looking at well over 100 million people and that is not including war dead. Just people being exterminated for various reasons.

So to say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas is not accurate.
The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.

Yes, and they have been saying that for 50 years . . .
What about robo-signers? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure... )

EDIT: Also the scenario described could still be fraud. The rating agencies could have been defrauded and if people sold those while not really believing they were of the rated quality IMO it's still fraud. If someone did this for their personal benefit while the company they were running took a loss then they would also be defrauding share holders.

So it's a lot more complicated than simply saying the instruments were AAA rated by the rating agency and they were simply sold like any other AAA rated instrument. It could have all been innocent but it certainly smells and warrants investigating.
"I'm trying to say that the connections whose informal opinions you cite as backup couldn't possibly have said something as extreme as what the other people of this thread are saying."

The mental gymnastics required to follow your train of thought are just astounding. You're argument here seems to be that the opinions of my friends and family can't possibly match with what other people, not even myself have said in a completely different part of this thread. I mean, I guess I agree? What a truly bizarre statement.

"I'm not sure how to explain it."

On this point, we are in complete agreement.
Digg Reader. It's simple but functional.
No, that's the role of the ratings agency who rates the assets.
Actually if the CO2 absorbent is efficient it is not much harder to capture CO2 from the atmosphere than from flue gas. The key really is the CO2 flux rate which wind provides.

The real advantage of atmosphere capture is you can do the capture where the cost is lowest, not where the CO2 is emitted.
> Given that it took me 3 month to have Jack Vogel (then maintainer of the driver) acknowledge there was an uninitialized variable bug in the e1000(4) driver, leading to countless user frustration, despite detailed technical analysis and patch. Let me openly challenge this assertion... The issue ended up being fixed (or actually, buried in a huge patch) without attribution [ed. of course!].

Without seeing the actual conversations, I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt on this.

3 months isn't too bad of a turn around time, and I'm sure the guys maintaining FreeBSD are busy, so maybe not able to reply to everybody about every little thing.

Did you bring up the attribution on the mailing list or anything? Was it just a mistake? Was it a trivial change that could have been made as part of something else?

> I've worked for 5 years in a [small] company using FreeBSD as the main development platform, heavily hacking the TCP and network stack. We leached plenty, and didn't contribute a single line back !

Is that really something to brag about? But whatever, you get to use it that way if you want to. Still doesn't change the fact that a lot of companies do contribute back.
I used to use Digg and switched over recently to Inoreader, way better in almost every way.
If you have the ports tree [0] installed, you can browse through /usr/ports. There's a subdirectory in there for each port, named "category/port". You can search the ports tree using (replace foo with your search term):

$ make -C /usr/ports search key=foo

You can install the ports tree by running:

# portsnap fetch extract

[0]: http://www.freshports.org