skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>crowdsourced homecomputers in a 9 cent kwh region

My suggestion was not that an entity use crowdsourced home computers, rather that it would be more efficient for a company to setup their own hardware and rent CPU cycles that way. The big difference is that Suchflex is limited to using hardware that consumers regularly purchase, whereas a company could use significantly more energy efficient setups and negotiate a better electricity rate. This is essentially what AWS already offers. Additionally, if you already have to transmit everything remotely, there's no need to stay in the US. Iceland offers rates around 4.3 cents. I chose the 980 TI for my example because it's about as close to perfect as you can find for this scenario while sticking with consumer grade hardware, average setups would be much worse.

My general point is that I don't think Suchflex's model is viable unless, as pliny mentioned, you have access to free electricity through some less-than-legal means (or you live in Iceland).
I appreciate that. I do wish there were more transparency. Some changes made by moderators are just too mysterious.
Simple JavaScript timeago function
And you do this why? You're making the assumption that capturing all of a star's energy is somehow a good thing. Something worth devoting goodness knows what effort to. And whoops another comet destroyed a ludicrously big section of it.
If 5 different people are all saying the same thing, that makes it a lot easier.
Model Qandeel Voice Recording and FIR on Front of the World
I hope you're right. The costs of 7nm are so high that even the "big guys" are being very careful about what they do. It's become so expensive they just can't afford a miss in the market. I worry the high costs will stifle innovation and that we'll see something that's more like a tweak here and there for a while.
"British" isn't a race... just saying.
I feel like I'm not understanding what your saying. Zooming is easy. I have bad eyes and zoom in on websites all the time. Simple sites like LWN work great, but every "magically interactive overly-designed" site breaks immediately. Large icons start overlapping/fighting with each other and the text. Wide-margins end up squishing the site to one or two word columns
I'd retort: do people still think that working 80 hour weeks makes you more productive than working 50 hour weeks? [1] [2] [3]

In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:

- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration);
- personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise);
- blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying);
- the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).

Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-...
[2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc...
[3] http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
I know that Jonathan Corbet is having cancer but he still keep working on and supporting this site. Not mentioning this is the best place for kernel developers, hackers to keep up with latest kernel news. God bless Jon.
I really don't see 70+ year old people working staff jobs for 50 hours a week with brutal commutes and skimpy PTO benefits, as is now the average for people holding a single role for less than 5 years.

I can see labor ages skewing upward, though, if a bigger share of the workforce adopts coworking, telecommuting and part-time/contract labor trends. This would make things easier for a share of the workforce that wants to take life a little easier than the average 30-year-old.

Recall that a union laborer with a pension plan can retire with a lifetime fixed income at age 55... and historically this sort of arrangement applied to a large share of the U.S. workforce (including many non-college-grads) not too long ago. And the people who lived/worked under that arrangement were either able to purchase cheap real estate that has since appreciated tremendously in value, or they were able to send children to college and post-college educations that secured high-paying professional incomes... or both... and this slice of society is weighing heavily on the rest of the workforce via high land prices, rent-seeking behavior, and anti-socialist politics. I think remedying this situation would help society far more than a mild economic boost due to retirement-age workers clinging to their jobs
>Because the compression used by just about every website works by eliminating repetitions of text strings, correct guesses result in no appreciable increase in data size while incorrect guesses cause the response to grow larger.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised that popular encryption schemes don't pepper the data with some random noise the client would know how to filter out.
React Joyride
It appears that you need to click a link to be redirected to the archived version, but it may still be a privacy issue if they check if an archived version of the page exist before showing the link:

> The notification reads: "This page appears to be missing. View a saved version courtesy of the Wayback Machine". You may click on the link to open the Internet Archive website to read an archived snapshot of the page on the site.
The data is stored redundantly (3x) in California, and there are several datacenter locations around the world, but I'm not sure any of them are a full backup of the entire collection.

There is an unofficial project by volunteers to make a geographically-distributed backup of the Archive. http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.B... The basic tech is functioning now, you can run it http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.B... but we're looking for developers to make it more user-friendly. If you'd like to help out, stop by #internetarchive.bak on efnet. http://chat.efnet.org
> If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan
> when I was 18, I would have missed every
> great thing that ever happened to me.

I'm not a fan of five-year plans, or any x-year plans, but this sounds very passive - in the sense of 'happened to me'.

Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.

Clearly we live in different worlds.
The concept of technical debt is easy to convey to management, the hard part is conveying the scale of the debt because it's an abstract value. You don't have x units of debt. And because there's no actual value to measure it's easy to keep adding it on, it's easily viewed as the same debt.

To give you an analogy imagine you have a credit card. As you spend you increase your debt but you never get to know want your balance is. All you know is how much you pay per month. In fact even that number would be blurry and fluctuate. That's what management sees from their perspective. As a result it's easy to keep adding debt because it had no real value, you don't see that you're $1000, $10k, $100k, etc in debt, just that you have to pay something each month. Yes each month you have less to spend but it's a lot less than you spent that month. Last month you had to pay $100 but this month it's $101 and you don't have to pay that $50 one Ike hit. The extra $1mth is easier. You kinda forget that in a year it's now an extra $2-$3/mth. And again you never see your balance, so you don't know how much you have in debt. Your spouse keeps saying your way in debt but you have no idea of the scale. It's very easy to increase your debt this way.

Unfortunately I don't have an answer as to how you can value the technical debt so that the business people can appreciate the scale. I don't think as developers we can even measure it ourselves accurately, it's more of a feeling, a scale if you will.
I use "parallel foreach", sometimes worker queues, implicit single writer... like in C++.
It sounds like you think only Rust-style ownership can avoid data-races. Sure, if you want the type system to do it. For me discipline is enough and I've seen it work in teams too. Not seeing such a problem really.
What likely happened with the Bitfinex “hack”
Who mostly just has spectacular traffic jams... which I think we can all agree are spectacular. Widest highways on the planet and you use them as a parking lot... you're a weird bunch :P
I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me
It seems like this point of view is unassailable because for every example that, in regular understanding, would be selfless behaviour, the definition of self-interest is stretched to encompass it.

- Anonymous philanthropy => feelings of self worth

- Low reward public service (Mother Theresa) => fame and influence

- Parents sacrificing personal good for kids => some kind of evolutionary advantage

- Falling on a grenade => Avoiding survivors guilt

I don't mean to present strawman arguments for these scenarios - if they are silly I apologize. In any case, it seems to me that denial of altruism always ends up stretching the definition of selfish and shrinking the definition of selfless, so that any scenario can fit.
The author is a game person and primarily interested in game compression (compression at compiletime, decompression at runtime), so if he's lazy and smart, then his corpus consists of assets from the games he's worked on. That would be both conveniently available and realistic.

Of course he can't say in public that he's kept copies of any of those assets. They belong to his previous employers.
At my job if a code change is expected to take more than a day, you have to write a spec for the changes and have someone else review it.

This helps cut down on re-work from misunderstandings, as well as provides a historical record of why something changed.
Note that even people who fully know correct usage do type the wrong thing now and then. It's particularly easy to do when you're basically transcribing a sentence that you're verbalizing silently to type the wrong homonym. I very rarely to never mix up things like loose and lose but I will mistype things like its and it's from time to time even though I fully know the correct one.
SLIP, being just a simple encapsulation for IP packets, might even work on this shared serial bus. Provided that some sort of collision detection would be implemented, so not to waste too much time transmitting corrupted packets.
I bet LWN could run entirely off some large subscriptions from companies like Google, which employees hundreds of Linux kernel developers. LWN is legitimate business information for many people and their employers. The model could be similar to the legendary newsletters of yore, like "Shannon Knows DEC".

Maybe they don't want to refocus away from the public, but it could work.
This assumes self driving without human intervention. If your in the car you can keep an eye out for danger and still be far more relaxed. Open road on a sunny day, no cars, sit and chill. Creeping along at 5mph in a traffic jam, relax it's all good. Driving in a more complex situation ok, manual time.

People suck at paying attention to boring situations. So, the easiest part of the trip is likely the best thing to automate.

Remember, the actual accident rate is very low. Further cars and humans are likely to make different mistakes so if you supervise and the car does sub second reactions and 24/7 360 degree vision the combined rate is likely to be great.
Honestly, I would get bored working at a place where everything is "easy". I actually enjoy the challenge of working on awful code-bases, and trying to improve upon it, while still preserving the functionality and not breaking anything.

That said, if I had to work with awful code and I wasn't allowed to touch it or make it better, I would definitely leave in a heartbeat.
Not every elliptic curve is the same: trough on ECC security (2010)
Ask HN: Need advice on starting out
Hi HN. I am a programmer in my early twenties and am unable to find a job.

When I was is school I got involved in a federal case that got media attention, now I don't have a degree and google spewing all those media articles about me still online. At least I don't have a felony on my record since that was resolved in the settlement.

My skill include: C++(built my own chromium distribution)/Golang/Python,Django/HTML/JS/CSS5

I would really appreciate some advice from this community. Thanks in advance.
Defense takes more resources than prosecution. The prosecution has the relative luxury of the police force doing its investigatory work - hard evidence, witness identification, etc. The defense gets discovery of a lot of that, but also has to do its own investigatory legwork regarding the facts, alibis, exculpatory evidence that wasn't turned over (or not investigated at all), friendly witnesses, etc. To make a 1:1 ratio work, you need to include the police resources used in the prosecution and allocate investigative resources to the public defenders office accordingly.

PDs tend to be good lawyers, but you're boned if you need one. Again, it's not the legal skills, it's that they lack the resources to actually dig into your case, and the sorts of people who usually need a PD are also of a socioeconomic status that doesn't have the education or resources to do the legwork.
That may have been true once, but imho these days LWN is as likely to have uninformed or trollish comments as anywhere else...you don't need to pay to comment
This seems okay to me if cable subscriptions are already taxed. If not the cynic in me is thinking: "man, Comcast has some great lobbyists".
Is lisp functional programming ?
AppMobi, Appcelerator, or PhoneGap for Hybrid Mobile App Development?
We are no longer talking about similar types of tools. While there is continuous and ongoing debate about Titanium over Phonegap, adding AppMobi as another promising cross platform technology actually opens a difference between the 3 which can now clearly be distinguished.
That says something about you. But in general a lot of people act self-less in favor of a person they love.
Visualize what you want from life. Move towards your vision.
MIT OCW Maths for CS does the proof for this here[0]

Think the key takeaway really is to frame your question precisely and draw the right conclusions. That you always perceive your friends to be more popular than you, or that surveys of number of sexual partners seem to always suggest men have more partners than women are still interesting - only the actual conclusion may be more nuanced than the superficial takeaway.

In the case of sexual promiscuity, my questions are: what social trends are causing the skew in survey results and/or what flaws are pervasive in modern survey taking methodology. We're able to logically prove the fallacy of this particular question, but how many other inferences are we drawing from survey data which are incorrect?

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9wxtqoa1jY
Apple begins to sell power
I was quite into John Oliver for a few episodes, and then I started to realize how heavily he twists things to make them into a good show. It's still entertaining now, but I don't consider it a source of "news" at all now.
Adamatzky seems to be churning out cookie cutter articles on slime molds and highways

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG...
It's so infuriating when I come across a domain squatter that nuked the entire history of a domain in the Wayback Machine. I sort of get why they have to do that but it also defeats most of the point of the Wayback Machine.
When you introduce two people to each other, your own network page-rank increases as both of them get one extra connection.
I'll add to that: I've bought some knock off iPhone cables and a MacBook Pro power supply ($84 times two for a dog chewing through it twice) and they all look similar to the real product except there's a defect

In the iPhone cable it only worked one way -- flipping it over it did not work at all. For the MacBook power supply the MagSafe connector had two slightly indented pins where one had a black circle around it.

I think these were legit Apple parts that failed QA. Who knows.

And I've given up buying them as I don't need the risk. The dog could have essily been electrocuted when chewing through a cheap wire. Also iPhone cables have gotten cheaper.
Another hypothesis could be that in the culture surrounding other languages (as Russian or German) grammar and spelling mistakes are much more frowned upon than in the English-speaking countries.
According to the linked article the survey was limited to heterosexual individuals.
Looks like a solid approach without much downside, except for some added complexity. Without the high profile use case I can see how time and attention might be better spent elsewhere, but this seems like a good idea at present.
That one rang a little too close to home. The reason I chose math was it was the hard subject that I could reliably overcome. Meaning, while I still had a hard time with concepts, I could eventually get there. I liked the challenge even if it hurt my GPA at times. Meanwhile I overheard many engineers group working on homework (copying one another) to ensure their GPAs were never in question.
All the more reason to be investing more than a pittance in the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies. So very close to realization, yet widely ignored.

Actually, it seems crazy to me that the economic argument gets more play than the humanitarian argument. People, including the old, seem happy to consign the aged to suffering and death, but that aging and age-related disease impacts the economy gets a larger fraction of them up in arms.
Wait a minute my friend, people had it hard before WWII and people seem to be overly positive about the two decades following WWII. People's life expectancy has risen, so a pension plan would have to feed a person for a decade now, has to feed them for two or more. Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you are in a work force for 30 years its your responsibility to build a nest egg. Social Security was supposed to be a safety net, not a retirement plan.

Both the Left and Right, has to stop glorifying the 50s and 60s, yes they gave us 70s and stagflation and Regan.

PG has a wonderful column about refragmentation.
http://paulgraham.com/re.html

subsequent HN comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826836
It's voluntary. He could have chosen not to join the State Bar. Actually, I'm a little surprised the governor keeps an active law license. I went inactive in my two states of licensure when I went back to tech.
Please start hiring remote. :)
Agreed. It's another instance of making a tech to finance analogy that just doesn't hold up. It's really nice when you can just put a number on something. And it really sucks when you can't, but that doesn't prevent people from trying.

Why does the sales guy get to go play golf after closing a big deal? And yet the developer still has to show up and sit in his seat after he performs some equivalent wizardry? Because the sales guy's effort has a number attached to it, that's why.
I don't think you need to be so unforgiving?

If you want extra precision, a -> f(a, a) is Id.

Knowing that helped me understand one property of the chart, never said that was the most stunning of properties, and the best articulated one :-)
I think the bigger reason they don't have competition is due to the crazy requirements to become an ISP / cable service for any city in america.

You need to meet with EACH city and sign a "franchise agreement", which specifically spells out what kind of service you will provide and who you will provide it to.

This includes you providing a certain amount of bandwidth for local access / public access channels. It probably also includes promising to service 100% of the city and also whatever pet project the council has (wire up low income housing, provide 1GBPS service to the mayor's uncle back up in the woods on the edge of town, etc. etc.).

Don't forget the public gets to comment, critique this entire process. Jane the cat lover can show up and demand a 24/7 cat pictures channel, if enough of Jane's friends support that, its going to the franchise agreement.

It sounds like a good process in theory, but it just ends up getting super bogged down.

Comcast are the masters of negotiating these things, they have teams and teams of lawyers who do nothing but get these setup.
Our current Private Beta users earning $10+ per week communicated that they have not noticed any significant changes in their electric bills.
Pocket for Slack
Copying my comment from the OP

> Analysts and project managers might account for technical debt when discussing slipped deadlines.

No they won't, you cannot quantify technical debt, it's a metaphor.

I completely agree with the rest of the post. But "technical debt" is not a cause, nor a valid metaphor to share with management. Other bad metaphors are "building" and "architecture". We are not building anything, we are only writing algorithms that computers will follow. When we write down those algorithms, we are also encoding the inner workings of the company. The true knowledge of how a company works is not only in its documentation or in the heads of their employees, it's also in its automated processes.

The automated processes are the reason why a company can be competitive nowadays. People need to be able to understand those processes, those algorithms, from the code, documentation is never enough, and is never up to date. The code is the primary source of information. If it's not legible, if it becomes arcane knowledge, a black magic that only a consultant can "fix", then the company grinds to a halt, it withers and is crushed by competitors.
Be careless about the code quality is not about the suffering of the developers, it means that you are burying vital knowledge of your company, and eventually no employee, no consultant, will be able to dig it out.

If we are trying to figure out how to deal with managers who don't care about the company, but only about absurd deadlines that their managers gave them, then we need to start pushing back, start saying NO. Politics are unavoidable, and often necessary, not all decisions can be made because technical reasons, but we need to start imposing the reality of the code, you cannot rush it, our you are killing yourself.
As to the points in the article: Correlation does not equal causation. Now to two major points it conveniently left out.

- First, the overall labor participation rate is at 40 year lows, so there is no labor shortage. In fact, the rate for those 55+ has gone up and is at 50 year highs.

- The biggest danger from an aging population is how to fund our entitlements Medicare & SS.

The reason for a weak recovery and stagnant wages are pretty obvious and completely avoided by this study and article - which I think was purposeful.
Well, I never feel that ZSNES on DOS (on a 486) was unresponsive compared against my NES clone, when I was playing Super Mario 3 on NES and on ZSNES.
Should it be "its" instead of "it's" in the title?

At least that's the way they taught me English in high school (in Italy).