skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is anyone using a VM for the work environment?
I've been contemplating using a portable virtual machine for the work environment, and wondered if i'm alone at it.

Right now it's Qemu with Arch Linux in it. The VM is headless, and is only accessible over SSH and VNC provided by the system inside of it. It can also be run by Virtualbox.

It can run on Linux and on Windows. Physically it's a 64Gb thumbdrive with several disk images and all the software needed to run it.

The benefit is that you can use it anywhere without having to alter someone else's machine, both physically by plugging the thumbdrive in and running the VM, and virtually, by running the VM on a server somewhere and accessing it remotely over VNC.

Other advantages are that you don't need to close or shut down anything for the night - just disconnect/save state and come back later to exactly the same place.

I got a feeling that i didn't came up with this first, so the question is - do anyone use something similar, and in which ways?
Whoa holy smokes yeah I missed the mark on that one. So Vulkan is a replacement for openGL, essentially a new api to gpu's in general? Is that closer to it? In the future I'll phrase the statement as a question if I'm not 100% clear on it. Sorry for the noise.
The Ten Craziest Failed Flying Cars
Why was this open space land for sale?
Here is the Libertarian Party Platform, adopted May 2016: https://www.lp.org/platform

Some things in there that might turn someone who is typically Republican or conservative off of the Libertarian Party (and therefore the Libertarian Party's candidate):

• No restriction on abortion.

• Gets rid of foreign foreign economic and military aid (which I'm assuming would include getting rid of aid to Israel, which is why I think it would be a problem for Republicans).

• Calls for close to an open borders policy (exceptions being for people who pose a creditable threat to security, health, or property).

• Full legalization of most drugs.

Some things in there that might turn off someone who is typically a Democrat or liberal off include:

• Government should not discriminate on the basis of sex, wealth, ethnicity, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference or sexual orientation, but private parties can. Those who disagree with a private party's choice to discriminate can respond with ostracism, boycotts, and other free-market solutions.

• No minimum wage.

• Implied elimination of public schools. (Education best provided by the free market, and government should not compete with private enterprise).
Unreal Engine 4 supports it.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Vulkan
'I worried people would forget about me': can teens live without social media?
Having access to the API does not mean that it is public, and that you have permission to do whatever you want with it.
Very nice. It would be cool if you could try out api calls from the examples (ala swagger style)
best not to rely on the media to provide us executive summaries of academic papers. just go read the paper itself (DOI is 10.1111/add.13477). it's a very useful read for getting up to speed on where we are in terms of understanding cancer and alcohol.
I sense injuries. The data could be called "pain".

If you can self-heal from the worst of injuries, you don't need to feel pain.
Benchmarking correctly is hard (and techniques for doing it better)
Probably OP mean pain does not interfere mental functions the way is does for living beings.
I would give you every upvote in the universe if only I had it...
First: don't think of the job as a "devops engineer". It's still a position
for system administrator. You'll be working with operating system and maybe
with hardware.

Second: as a sysadmin you'll be expected to manage servers and services.
Nobody will give a damn how you do that (except for fellow sysadmins), as long
as you don't break anything (too much, too often). This means that nobody will
give a damn what language and runtime you use to automate things.

As a sysadmin that writes tools, which means a system programmer, except
without the "programmer" title, you'll fly under radar in most organizations
and you'll be free to choose any tool that does the job. I learned Erlang this
way (I'm a sysadmin/system programmer myself).

And me today? I get offers for programmers quite often, and if I was to go
down this road, I probably could land somewhere; I don't know OOP design
patterns or latest JavaScript framework by heart (I never learned them
specifically), but I have many tools written and published and used to this
day, so my programming-fu is quite strong.

So yes, I think it may be a good move to take this job. It certainly was
good for me ten years ago.
Control break report to PDF with xtopdf
It takes a certain amount of bad will to read an innocent question of an inexperienced user as a "complaint" worth downvoting...
Wow. I get that the permitting process is painful but rather than simply ignoring it one could try to make it either easier or more transparent.
You have a point. I think in a large app let's say 50+ screens and 100+ db tables, it will take quite a bit of time before we stablize it until then we are at the mercy of good logging and debugging tools.
> [...] the food-replacement guru—known for surviving for months on nothing but Soylent—apparently roasted a whole pig during the party [...]

I guess soylent is not that cool for parties and social gatherings...
I thought he was pretty douche until i got to the part where it says he bought the land... if he bought the land whats the beef?
> instead of estimating that task X will take exactly Y days, estimate a range of possibilities.

That's pretty much the definition of "estimate".
Make is a dependency graph with macroes for not having to repeat, copy-and-paste, and hard-code stuff.
This is what was previously the vkcpp project from Nvidia, which seems to have been transferred to the Khronos group.
It seems an argument against this bill is that the salary limit should be more like $125K or $150K. That is to say the criticism is: this bill masquerades as a meaningful reform but won't have much actual impact.
Greetings. Our corporate structure is undergoing a fundamental transition (from a software contractor to a holding company) and we're still deciding on presentation and community outreach.

...which is to say we have plenty of researchers but no social team. :)

Our primary goal is the formation of autonomous labor by helping put the institutional periphery into place: legal review, trade agreements, economic policy study, political and memetic steering, and financial innovation. Robots just won't automatically take all of the jobs. Humans are very good at cutting their own throats collectively and we very much account for this.

We have three private tech projects at this time that cover the UAV and theoretical mathematics space.
> I think this is a bit too keen to hew to the textbook definition of "virtual machine".

That's interesting to me because I haven't ever read any textbook on virtual machines. If you could recommend one, I'd be very interested (especially if it covers designing an ISA that's a good fit for your language, which seems like a dark art to me; I've seen plenty of examples but no design docs or notes whatsoever).

> In modern industry practice a "virtual machine" tends to imply "we wrote an interpreter, and to run your program you execute this interpreter and feed it your program".

My experience has been exactly the opposite: people have a preference for the word interpreter. When they've written an interpreter, they call it an interpreter. When they've written a virtual machine, it's still often called an interpreter. For example, you rarely hear talk of the Python VM, Lua VM, Scheme VM, Lisp VM, etc. the way you hear talk about the JVM. I normally hear "the Python interpreter" or "the Lua interpreter", etc. I sometimes even hear these sorts of VMs referred to as bitcode or bytecode interpreters.

> In the interest of being precise, I'd rather call LLVM an "abstract" machine, in the same vein as the C abstract machine defined by the C language specification

I'd normally be with you on that one, but I referred to it as a virtual machine here for two reasons: 1) I most often hear the terms "virtual machine" and "abstract machine" used interchangeably, and 2) the LLVM -- Low-Level Virtual Machine -- is called a virtual machine by its creators. All in all, the distinction between the two isn't a large one, and only rarely an important one, so I thought it best in this case to avoid causing any more confusion than I already felt I might :)

(As an aside, I think a big problem with the computation science field -- both in academia and in industry, though perhaps more pronounced in industry -- is the sheer lack of (and sometimes even disdain for!) precision in our jargon. Abstract vs. virtual machines is, of course, a topical example, but many others come to mind: parser, DSL, interface, object, message, native, relational, lightweight, functional, and many more. Of particular annoyance to me is the cloud of meanings surrounding the word "type" and its variations, along with a great deal of modifiers typically used alongside it ("strong", "weak", etc.). It's enough to drive the more formal/rigorous/pedantic of us batshit, myself included.)
Reminds me of Limitless movie. Probably gambling (no identity required to start) is good idea for the first step, and stock exchange is good idea for the second step.
Vulkan is a new API standard from the Kronos group meant to compliment opengl and opencl by offering lower level access and merging the graphics and compute APIs.

It was gifted to Kronos from AMD where it had been called mantle.
You got it, it's just a joke :)
It isn't talked about much, but riding a bicycle is actually really dangerous. I say that as someone who loves riding and has done quite a bit of it through my years. It's the most dangerous mode of transportation between driving, biking, and walking. That's based on my rough estimations of micromorts/hour from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort; 0.26 micromorts/hr, 1.25 micromorts/hr, and 0.18 micromorts/hr respectively. That makes walking the safest by a good margin, and biking is almost 5 times more dangerous than driving. In fact, biking just 80 miles is roughly equivalent to one hang gliding or skydiving session.

I don't really want to dissuade people from riding bikes; it can be a lot of fun and healthy. But it's quite dangerous, and I gave up riding a few years ago because of that and because everyone on the road hates you; cars, cops, and peds alike. They all pretty much want you dead. (I've ridden mostly suburbs, both in bike friendly cities and not)
Changed it, thanks!
"There's a fundamental issue with this report. It doesn't provide insight into why these indicators for well-being are important."

Not really, it's getting tiring to read these sort of comments on HN. If you actually go and read on the page that outlines what SEDA is, you'll find their justifications for how they choose to measure well-being.

https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/public_sect...
I know, for example, that under a certain annoying development process coughPSPcough, I will produce code at a rate of 30 LOC/hour when measured from initial requirements gathering through handing code off to testers.

I know this because every line of code I've written (using that company's process) for years has been measured and timed. So now the estimation process becomes a matter of figuring out how many LOC (as a proxy for effort) a given feature/project will be and then dividing that number by 30.

It is scarily accurate, but like I said, it's been aggregated over thousands of lines of code for years.
And yet this came out as well:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/dark-matter-still-mia...

Truly fascinating why we can't seem to detect dark matter on earth.
Why does the author refer to this unknown robot as "he"? What use could a gender be to a nonhuman superintelligence?
Growing up and having a little exposure to people who tagged, I find it hilarious he thinks there "There is no evidence of illegal activity taking place on the property... I have private security conduct regular inspections." given the whole container is tagged inside and out and the windows are now all smashed in.

The guy has his head in the sand.
"Give a man a game engine and he delivers a game. Teach a man to make a game engine and he never delivers anything."

https://twitter.com/sandbaydev/status/403219167236857856
why isn't the answer "hang around outside Yankee Stadium hitting balls, running, and catching them, till you get discovered and signed"? or something athletic like that. Seems a lot better than the "super productive web designer" answer that was getting love over on stackexchange.

I considered boxing, but you probably have to pay too many dues (timewise) first. But you can be signed and stuck out on a baseball field pretty quick; signing bonuses, etc. Tennis? Basketball? Soccer (in one of the places that calls it football)? Golf?

Where can you get a signing bonus and start hauling in the big money right away?

Also worth mention, I have heard recently that there is a way to break PHP, hack Pornhub and earn $20k!

edit: just out of curiosity, why was this answer disliked by somebody? cuz I said Yankees? soccer? athletics rather than nerd dreams? Cu-uz, I still think this is the best answer I have seen.
Show HN: Interview questions to learn whether an org is “healthy”
I asked the HN community for advice on determining whether an interested company culture was/is "healthy", and the response was overwhelming. I am grateful to all of you.

The original comment thread is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12137049.

I condensed your suggestions into a simple PasteBin at http://pastebin.com/ueLdcVmQ. Thanks so much.
Would you be so sanguine about "if he bought it he can do what he wants with it" if he were upwind of you, and kept a pig farm or something? What if your child were allergic to bee stings, and he kept bees on land he owned near you?

Ownership isn't a free pass to do whatever you want, and the neighbors can suck it.
Redesign of Instagram app
I'm 2/3 of the way through a co-op CS degree, and have dipped my toes in both camps. Spent ~8 months interning as a Software Engineer (web dev) and am coming up to ~8 months in a more back-end/dev-ops role.

In the software role I had no idea how apps were actually deployed, and had never touched anything like AWS. At hackathons, for example, I was always clueless when it came to deploying my app and could only ever demo locally. Now, I am very comfortable deploying the code I write in a variety of production environments. Experience with the bottom end of the stack has made me a more productive developer since I have more experience with, say, database migrations, and can debug environment-related issues on my development machine much quicker on my own.

So in my opinion, dev-ops skills are useful and highly transferable, so you should do what interests you. In the worst case you lose interest and flip-flop to another part of the stack and come away as a more well-rounded engineer.
How I built a Slack bot to help me find an apartment in San Francisco
> there are existing regulations that make it difficult for a decentralized system to work (e.g. know your customer laws and centralized counterparty systems).

Those regulations don't apply to peer-to-peer electronic cash transactions, just like they don't apply to physical cash transactions.
Hmm

10 km
= 2 * 5
= 2 * 3 miles
= 6 miles which is pretty close

The way you seem to have done it:
10 km
= 1 mile * 3 miles
And your units have changed so this can never be right.
Agreed. Savvy consumers prefer quality, but many just prefer entertainment. And entertainment drives clicks/views, bringing more revenue.

Is capitalism supposed to provide some sort of self-correction?
C has just as much fine-grained memory support as Rust. Rust does however have better memory safety with its borrow checker, but I'm not sure if you could implement something like this without unsafe.
I don't think I'm getting through to you. In the interest of self preservation the author should stay as far away from company lawyers and HR as possible. In fact if you are facing a moral or ethical dilemma then no company resource will be of any use. Company resources will actively hinder you. I will repeat, it is naive to think otherwise.
Is China Stealing Jobs? It May Be Losing Them, Instead
I believe he's talked about how Soylent, for a lot of people, is meant to replace meals that you'd rather not spend time cooking and cleaning for. i.e., not social gatherings and BBQs.
If you're in San Francisco, at The Interval, they have a chalkboard drawing robot similar to Chalkbot: http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/13/interval-chalk-board-rob...
Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpQzIaH90f8

These projects are really cool.
Because the rotting process would create methane which would seep out easily, its wasteful and ethically questionable (people are still starving, so not even using corn as fuel is pretty horrible). Storing Carbon cheaply and safely is to me an unsolved problem. Especially if you want to do it without wasting tons of minerals (before someone talks about vacuumed dried algae or stuff like that).
Seems like YC continues to miss Jessica Livingston's social radar. Racking up lots of antics.

http://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Why didn't Tesla build its largest-in-the-industry battery factory here?

Why did Toyota move out?

"Business relocation expert Joe Vranich has been counting.

“I tracked for 2011, that 254 companies of all sizes and shapes and kinds left the state for primarily other states,” said Vranich, the president of Spectrum Location Services in Irvine.

He told KCRA 3 that companies leave California for three primary reasons: “High taxes, excessive regulations and the threat of really ridiculous lawsuits.”

Chevron is moving 800 jobs from their Bay Area headquarters to Texas, and Waste Connections shifted more than 100 jobs to Texas from Folsom.

"Two dozen companies commit to leaving California --
Prop 30 triggers business backlash"

http://www.kcra.com/news/Two-dozen-companies-commit-to-leavi...

Detroit took 50 years to crash.

Not sure if most people are aware, but Silicon Valley led California with jobs growth, led California out of the recession.

If the rest of Silicon Valley moves to Austin et al, California's highest-in-the-nation personal income tax will need to go much higher.

As a small business owner, the taxes and regs just scream "don't hire anyone!"

Arizona, Texas (no state income tax), Nevada (no state income tax) -- weather not too bad, real close to California.
Look, it's the original commenter who used muddled (and misleading) language in the first place, not me. Whether their "analysis" or his "language" was more critique-worth is beside the point.
People always say Hayward Fault is more troubling for California because so much is built directly ON the fault.
>> "What if the bank is the enabler, making it possible to gain access to someone's account only by publicly available social information?"

Using that logic, why would the scammer even need to call the victim?

>> "after the fraudsters were able to do multiple things that emulated the behavior of the bank - sending activation codes to her that were genuine, because they were able to get that from the bank."

According to the victim, who's story does not add up and appears to have been coached by the expert hired by the paper.

Feel free to look into it, but I'm not about to go auditing bank security measures without written permission.
Interview with Author of “Hillbilly Elegy”
Hopefully San Andreas will wait another 10 years, because by that time there will be no Nuclear Reactors operating in California. We are down to only ONE, and it will shut down within the next 6 years. PG&E is getting out of Nukes.
If he wanted to be a total asshole, he'd remove his crappy little container and build an eye-sore of mansion, lights, guard dogs, etc, all the trappings of wealth and resource consumption that make people "happy" with development over a temporary metal box.
Much ado about nothing. He put a shipping container on a flat piece of land that he owns. It's now graffitied so it bothers the neighbors. Why are we supposed to care?
> It seems that people proposing them don't have any idea about when/why you'd use them over a more centralized system

I think that this diagram is a good starting point...

https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA...
If you're a member of a trade union (and if not, why not?) then the union will probably have legal services that you can access.
Perhaps the previous owner had difficulty getting a permit for a small building or a party?
The described superhuman robot has so many capabilities that the question does not seem intriguing. There are so many powers and possibilities.

Maybe some capabilities should be removed from this robot?
Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure he was at the table in some form or fashion
This should be tagged with "Show HN".
IT companies would probably pay 100k on paper and ask 40k back from their employees. Laws like this don't stop companies who abuse the system.
I literally laughed out loud. Thats a good one!
I switched to using primarily Celsius a year or two ago. It's been tremendously useful for me, moreso than switching to metres (which I've been doing as well, though not as aggressively). Like most tech companies we have to frequently interact internationally, and everyone uses metric outside of the U.S. Knowing Celsius has made even basic conversations easier. I mean, "How's the weather where you are?" is such a common conversation starter, and it's one I can actually meaningfully have with people outside the U.S. now. No more "oh, pretty hot", instead I can just say "It's over 35 here!"

And as an engineer I obviously need to deal with metric for most everything (except those damned PCBs; thou, really!?), so it's very useful to have an intuitive understanding of what temperature my chip is at, or how thick 3mm is without grabbing a ruler.

Switching to Celsius is also a lot easier than switching to metres. You can get through a day using only Celsius, but you'll have a lot of trouble traveling around in a car using metres.
Metal, on the Apple platforms, is similar.
MH370 pilot conducted similar route on home computer
The Innovation Behind the Technology
They apply when you try to convert from a fiat currency to a digital currency and vice-versa. And trading derivatives contracts on a blockchain would almost certainly violate US laws.

edit: there are also regulations that apply to physical cash transactions if they are over a certain amount.
We'll have a huge number of childless old people in a couple of decades. I am hoping for huge number of young immigrants who will be recruited to provide emotional companionship.
There's definitely a school of thought on HN which would say so. Upvotes are a fine proxy for appreciation. Other online communities have taken steps to remove verbose "+1" mechanisms too - for example, GitHub, as per demand, added the ability to respond "+1" to comments without having to write an entirely new comment. That indicates that consumers of GitHub (and most HN users are probably in that demographic) value brevity.

Personally, I suspect a post saying only "Awesome post" would have garnered 0 or only a couple downvotes. However, the hangover comment was - in my opinion - a bit self-indulgent, irrelevant, and not in any of the broad categories of things people come on HN to find.

My $.02 only.
Having per-table random seeds and properly designed hash function prevents remotely forced collisions. This is the typical defense against hashtable DOS.

It has to be done properly, of course -- for example, a poorly designed hash function could have characteristic collisions for many different seeds.
Play Jeopardy and then gamble/manipulate the stock markets.