skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now look, I like Lisp. Common Lisp was the first language I fell in love with. I remember it fondly, even though at this point I prefer Scheme.

But you have to admit that there's something a little...off...about having an iteration sub-language with a 43 page (in PDF) manual. And I mean sub-language literally; one of the advertised features of ITERATE is that it has a more Lispy syntax, so your editor has a hope of indenting it correctly.
John Perry Barlow has a hell of a lot to answer for.
3.4 gave us pip installed by default https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html

Before that it would give you an empty venv, not even setuptools

Yes, you can use the Python 2 virtualenv on Py 3 but I remember that there were some problems
The pendulum will swing both ways eventually. If we want a society that doesn't punish one group in disproportion to another, we're just going to have to accept that eventually the previously dominant group now needs help in certain areas.
Your entire position depends on the unstated assumption that it's wrong for someone else to convince you to buy their product. And that sounds pretty absurd. As for targeted advertising, seeing ads that are relevant to your interests instead of seeing unrelated ads does not seem wrong at all. As long as you're being advertised to, isn't it good to have those ads actually be things you might care about? The part that's wrong is the fact that targeted advertising depends on violating your privacy in order to figure out who to target. So it's the tracking and privacy violation part that you want to avoid. But if you're talking about some site that you voluntarily gave behavioral information to (e.g. Facebook), then seeing ads based on that information isn't violating your privacy.
But advertising is already regulated, just like any other market. There is no ethics involved.

Perhaps one day we (society) come to the conclusion that advertising, as a whole, is doing more harm than good and we decide to ban it entirely. Or we decide set a limit on how much advertising is allowed.

Right now adblockers are not against the law (afaik) so I don't see any problem using them. After all, they're a product of the somewhat free market that facebook is part of and they accepted the market price (which is that some people choose to block ads).
Doesn't seem that way to me.

For actual real world apps with a lot of IO, your PyPy benefit is kinda small.

For actual number crunching, I guess. Which is the whole scientific side of Python.

Python is weird that it is 50% webapp hipsters ala Ruby, and 50% scientists in lab coats sitting in the lab crunching.
It represents the resource and infrastructure investment needed to produce the note. The resources being ink and paper, and the infrastructure being the machinery, labor, electricity, gas and trucks needed.

You're not really arguing that currency derives its value from the material cost of producing it, are you? Because then everything is a currency. Modern currencies are special precisely because they have much more value than their material cost.
Bayesian Optimization for Collaborative Filtering with MLlib
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197
Note to self: set up cronjob to ping speedtest.net and fast.com every 10 minutes, just in case.
Doing so has also saved me a considerable amount of battery. I delete the app before any travel to ensure battery drain isn't as much of an issue.
I lived in Japan for nearly 3 years. I speak, or at least used to speak with fair fluency and I can confirm that this is somewhat accurate. I would add that many Japanese high schools are highly selective and very demanding of students. Graduates of these high schools often perform well in academic subjects and often overachieve in U.S. universities, but only the best students get into those high schools and many students are forced to choose from much less competitive schools.

In short, education through high school is often very demanding, but Japanese colleges are quite easy for liberal arts students. Much less so for STEM subjects.
The thing I find interesting is that I bet the authors are reading this.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12225301
VW Diesel Emissions Settlement
I'm one of the co-founders of SigOpt (YC W15) and am happy to answer any questions about this post (or anything about SigOpt).

More info on the methods behind SigOpt can be found at https://sigopt.com/research.
I am also surprised at all the hate against ads. Yes, there are some bad ones (disrupting, malware etc.), but how does that justify you blocking all ads (and thereby robbing websites of their only legitimate source of income)?

As Immanuel Kant said (loosely translated): Act in such a way that you actions could serve as the foundation for a general legislation.

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

I.e. "if there are some bad ads, nobody should have to look at any ads" would be a bad law.
Android BETA – A beautiful place to read and share the news you care about
Thanks, and sorry, this is totally off-topic... I am reading this as saying that there is some kind of data (or multiple kinds of data) which are worth viewing in multiple dimensions in giant holodeck-like rooms. I'm assuming remote conferencing is one of those, but I am interested in hearing more about the other kinds of data. Do you have some links to something a little more concrete than what's on the site you linked?
His answer to "Is there any lesson you’ve had to learn multiple times?" echoes one of the most important lessons I've ever learned.
> and aren't particularly sympathetic to the "b...but I'm technically correct!" stance.

That stance is called the rule of law and being technically correct matters. That's the whole point of that court thing.

http://time.com/money/4421955/bitcoin-miami-judge-money-laun...
Back to school bill: pencil case, pens, rubber … and a £785 iPad
A paradox is "a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth". If you encounter a paradox, it tells you more about how your framework of thinking is flawed than it does about reality.

"Infinity plus one" is a paradox to a child who believes that infinity is a finite number. When they realize what infinity actually means, the paradox will be resolved.
You can have any "control" you want by setting up your own "speedtest" mirror. It's hard to stop all of them.
I've also worked on quite a few methods of using Tor and Hidden Services, where my whole network is in .onion .

I can send data to .onion addresses natively via DNS ( https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/LinuxDNSre... ). I can also receive data from Onions as well.

Right now, I have Node-Red communicating data from my IoT infrastructure, publishing data to my MQTT broker elsewhere (my server onion). I have my 3d printers in another place, and part of the MQTT data is pictures and GCode readouts from them.

It sounds complicated, but Hidden Services allows me to treat a network of disjointed machines (all behind NATs) to be thought of as being on one huge ethernet hub. And I can code against an [hash].onion and know that my data will reach that machine, no matter the IP.
>We should not expect more privacy from law enforcement than we would from any other stranger.

I don't understand THAT statement. I'm pretty sure that the degree of privacy I expect from strangers is far greater than the one currently expected from the FBI or from any law enforcement agencies. I don't expect strangers to tail me or to run profile checks on me, much less call to try to get into my phone to check whether or not I'm really up to something funny.
Another Standing Desk? Yup with Launch Discount
This is a very good strategy for getting dangerous security flaws. BIND's security has improved dramatically since they went all-out on assertions; at least 1/3 of the "crash" bugs would have been remote code execution without the protective crashing.
Re-reading your comment, it strikes me as extremely anti-capitalistic.

> Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid.

That is literally the goal of every merchant everywhere. They need to sell stuff for more than they paid, otherwise they don't make money. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. They aren't forcing you to buy things, their buyers think that what they're selling is worth the amount they're selling it for (or they wouldn't buy it). This is the fundamental basis on which all commerce everywhere operates.

As for the Las Vegas angle, that's complete bullshit. Gambling operates very differently from commerce, and there's really no basis to make this comparison at all. Seeing an ad that's relevant to your interests has pretty much nothing in common with gambling beyond the fact that both of them involve money at some point.
I'd love to hear more about how this is done. Care to share links, websites, etc? Or to write me, dwanjiru at Google's email service about it?
Yes. It's configurable.
I wonder if anyone has ever run this system on Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky[1] or even something like Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, both of which contain a large number of made up words/slang/re-use.

I remember that when I first read A Clockwork Orange, it took me a while but I finally started to understand the meanings of those words/phrases (though I may not have every encountered them before.) It did feel like my brain was re-wiring itself to a new language. It'd be interesting to see how some type of language AI would treat these works.

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

edited to add there's a wiki article on the language of A Clockwork Orange, Nadsat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat
Thank you! Updated
You're describing a reluctant, cautious and rational adversary.

There never was any effective political opposition to "Star Wars" in the US.
Why Startups Should Consider Outsourcing
> So you're saying that the laws under which Americans are governed shouldn't be up to Americans but should be, at least for some things, up to people who live in other countries?

No, I'm not making any normative statement about what laws should be. I'm pointing out a fairly direct reading of the plain language actually adopted in the 8th Amendment. Which, in any case, was drafted and ratified by Americans, and so, whatever interpretation of it is correct, is not an example of the law under which Americans are governed being up to anyone but Americans.
I think, you may have the application with a different cloud provider or even in a different geographic location, so that you can keep keys away from the data. In this case you sort of distribute trust.
Indeed. Ever seen how much technology goes into a modern car wheel and tire?
This is a bit of an unfair test, as it is not in Netflix's best interest to provision enough CDN capacity for any user to hit 1Gbps, especially at peak times. Netflix wants to buy/provision just enough capacity so that users don't complain. Depending on the distribution of the users in the area, this could 5Mbps per user, or 15Mbps per user for a large amount of 4K streamers.

Netflix pushes their CDN nodes to the limit, 60-70Gbps per box for video. Speedtests don't make them money, so why provision capacity for it?
As a user more than an engineer, most of the apps I use have 'one feature,' but the one feature that's important to me is different than the one feature that's important to other people. My 'one feature' may also be a unique combination of smaller features that, when brought together, solve one very important problem for me, and some different combination of smaller features in the same tool will solve a different problem for someone else.
You could request a bench trial if you think the public at large would be biased. Unfortunately in the US this requires consent of the prosecutor. The Ghomeshi trial in Canada is an example of using a bench trial in this circumstance.
200 years ago there were "plenty" of bombings and mass shootings orchestrated by groups of 1 or 2 people that resulted in hundreds of lives lost? Can you provide a few examples of this?
Ha! I got a good laugh out of this comment.

For those wanting the "inside baseball" reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Post author here, happy to answer any questions as well.
Legalese does have variable declarations, they just look a little different and are used more sparingly. For example, look at section 17 of Facebook's terms of service: https://www.facebook.com/terms

The interesting part about legalese is that you get to argue with the compiler.
Any further comments on the need for nation-state sized budgets, based on your work?
> This seems apocryphal.

I have no reason to believe the person I worked with would make it up. There would just be no point in it.

> Its trivial to disable USB for a mass storage (or all devices)

Except there are hundreds of different kinds of devices, and you tasked with quickly "doing something to fix the problem". Do you have time to go and dig through different types of BIOS menus or open the cases to all of the machines. Or is it easier to get epoxy plungers and send an army of people from desk to desk. Normal epoxy is a pretty decent electrical insulator (some board or components used to even be dipped in epoxy to protect from environmental damage or tempering).

> I suspect you've never managed a non-trivial network before,

No, but I was selling a solution with one in it. And $40k was making a decent size cut in the profit margin.
So in that case Netflix just decides to have their streaming clients occasionally access fast.com before regular streaming to get any traffic shaping eased?

I agree, that in this case, where a separate domain was used, ISPs can use that to detect a speed test is likely. That said, I would like to note that every solution an ISP has to implement is much more expensive to any mitigation put forth by Netflix, as long as they want to hide what they are doing. If they aren't hiding it, well that's one of the reasons netflix is doing this, to inform customers what they are actually getting from their ISP, and let them make choice whether they like the current product they are using from their ISP (if they have a credible choice).
I used to really look up to Catmull, given all the research he did into early computer graphics, but that wage fixing scandal [1] is just downright disgusting. There is no way to look up to this guy, unless you get turned-on by those kinds of immoral business practices.

[1] http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerge...
Chatting with your friends and looking at their pictures are not services?

The lengths to which you guys will go to for justification of your sense of entitlement is staggering.
I just want to express how nice it is to see someone use vanilla tools on Linux to solve a problem. Whenever I see a thread on using gdb or jdb, invariably it is full of suggestions on the use of a half baked debugging wrapper that hasn't been maintained in 2+ years under the guise of it somehow being better because it has colors.
This view gives equal opportunity a bad rep. Look at the discrimination against males as kindergarten employees, why is nobody fighting for them?
They can guesstimate by geolocating your IP.
Can OpenBazaar Make Free Trade Unstoppable?
That is akin to saying that shops have accepted the market price of shoplifting, and that hiring a security guard or secret shoppers is trying to interfere with it.
But a military contractor type of company has lots of obfuscation leeway with "top secret" type of things, doesn't it? And I'd imagine a defence contractor is the type of company that would be interested in the kind of info this kind of malware can gather.
I did that, works great and with speed test cli it (did it without that at first) it's even better!

https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

If you are going to setup a cronjob/service for it, I suggest using the --simple flag.
I wonder what the cost is of bad, inefficient or unnecessary code, networking, ad tech etc running on <insert your # of users> devices...

It was reported a while back Android users could get a 20% boost in battery life by removing Facebook so for 100s of millions of people a big portion of their total phone electricity consumption is w/e Facebook felt like doing. Google probably consume a staggering amount of coal distributed all around the world too, ad/tracker blocking also enables huge battery and performance gain.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/uninstall...
WiLine (http://www.wiline.com/) in San Francisco is one such high-speed, point-to-point wireless provider. Up to 10 Gbps symmetrical bandwidth and sub-10ms latency.
What about poison? or fires? I'm sure there's other means I can't think of right now

Modern tech has made it a bit easier, but it was still fairly easy throughout most of history.
The only general intelligence we know of is us. It stands to reason that the first step towards creating AGI is to copy the one machine we know is capable of that type of processing. Why doesn't our research focus on understanding and copying biological brains? Numenta did, with good results, but it isn't an industry trend.
I get 72 (fast.com) vs 92 (speedtest)
>Didn't the DAO creators and enthusiasts insist up and down that the code is the irrefutable interpretation of the contract?

Yes, but again this is not unique to the DAO. Moreover, it occurs all the time that marketing materials are put out with disclaimers that the marketing material is just that marketing material and that any inconsistencies between the marketing material and the contract, the contract prevails. It doesn't always make it so and there is good public policy reason why.

My analogies are always kind of shot down as it relates to the DAO, but I think they help flush out the legal reasoning. How about valeting your car, obviously there is an implied contract that you will pay the fee and get your car back (maybe even a verbal representation, "just bring the stub back and we will pull your car around") but what if the stub includes language (as they do) that you agree the valet will not be responsible for stolen property and then they don't bring your car back. Who knows who took your car? Maybe the valet, maybe the valet gave the keys to someone else, maybe someone legit broke in and stole your car without the valet being aware... even though you agreed to the contract/terms of the valet ticket it does not become a contractual right for valet to take your car, they could still be liable (potentially criminally in addition to civilly).

Moreover, representations remain false even with disclaimers acknowledging the representation may be false.
Pedantry time: mach isn't a build tool, it's a command dispatch framework. So yes, |mach build| will build Firefox (or servo), but, for example, |mach try| will push code to the try server, and |mach mdn| will search MDN.

However to address the original point, Python is indeed widely used at Mozilla, not just for websites but for test harnesses, build tools, analysis scripts, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if it was second to only to javascript on the basis of "number of developers who have written >0 lines of code in this language for Mozilla projects".
Towards a transgressive hermaneutics of colonial replication in postmodern data storage?
4. In terms of VPC and networking. I am definitely not satisfied with AWS.

- On GCE the security groups are created automatically and managed by the "role" of instances.

On AWS there is no link between instances and security groups. I currently have to emulate the working of GCE over AWS with extremely complex ansible scripts just so that an instance called "repository" can actually be assigned to a group called "repository".

- ELB (load balancer on AWS) cannot have a fixed IP (we've been waiting for that for YEARS). An ELB can only be accessed over a DNS name, and the underlying IP can change every 60 second. (Have fun with applications which are caching DNS).

By comparison, GCE has had load balancers with fixed IPs forever.

- AWS is a region nightmare. Many resources only exist in one region and cannot be accessed or even acknowledged to exist from another region.

e.g. an AMI only exists in a single region. It's not possible to create a host with it in another region. It's not even possible to take that existing AMI and push it to another region. (As far as a region is concerned, other regions don't exist).

All services on AWS are acutely region centric. I am currently expanding my infra to multiple regions and there are many obstacles to overcome. The networking and interconnections is definitely one of them.

By comparison Google is not region centric like that. It's a lot easier to manage at planet scale.

---

Just three major pain points on the top of my head.
Fair enough! If you felt like adding it as a footnote, great, if it doesn't fit the purpose, that's fine too. And to reiterate, it's a beautifully laid out, concise, high-content piece of writing. I should have phrased it differently; how it's said may matter more than what's said.

Essentially I wrote a reaction post but, given the amount of revising and reanalysis/examination-of-assumptions I've been doing lately, I ought to have said something like:

"This piece is an excellent tutorial on how to do linear regression, why gradient descent is fundamental (far beyond OLS or fixed effects models), and so forth. However, if you are interested in why all of these things are possible in the multivariate case as well as the simple bivariate case, you might find the Gauss-Markov theorem to be a 'light bulb' moment." Because that's how it happened to me.

Cheers, and thanks for writing a great piece that I will be pointing others towards.
You see, you can't run heavy software on crappy hardware and expect everything to go smoothly.

Things you can do:

1. Install a debian chroot (gnuroot is your friend), start an x server and just run eclipse. You're going go to awful performance but hey, that's the hardware.

2. Run eclipse somewhere else and display the output on your tablet. It's going to work mostly okay until connection drops for whatever reason. Also, you need some good hardware somewhere, accessible somehow. And you're likely to have to pay something for it. I had a very positive performance with x2go but you're still under the assumption that network is fast and you have a very low round-trip-time.

You just can't expect to have optimal performance on super cheap hardware with very little resources.
If you accept that for many uses of publicly verifiable data structures that centralization is actually OK (and actually often a good thing, as it matches well how most democratic societies function), then there are other simpler alternatives to proof-of-work that still give many of the same benefits.

See for examples the append-only logs used in Certificate Transparency (https://www.certificate-transparency.org), and a more generalized hosted form provided by Continusec (https://www.continusec.com) that builds on the same principles. (disclaimer: founder of Continusec)
Bitcoins energy consumption is related to the USD value of bitcoins mined every day, not the value of each individual bitcoin.

Consider the extreme case: Tomorrow, the block reward changes such that only one bitcoin is mined a day @ $600/coin. The hashrate would definitely drop in that case, even though the price stayed the same!

> The last couple of halvings appeared to have little effect on the global hashrate, and so had little effect on the energy consumption.

True, but the system was not at equilibrium--the cost to mine a bitcoin had not yet approached the value gained from selling one, so after the halving most miners were profitable, and the hashrate stayed the same.
As a Webpass customer it definitely competes. I frequently get 500Mbs during prime time hours. Webpass is microwave wireless to the building, then the "last yards" to the unit is gigabit ethernet.
I got 150 on Fast, and 120 on Speedtest. I think it just depends where the CDNs are in comparison to you.