skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please pardon if my comment came off as uncivil. My intent was to illustrate the potential ambiguity of ethics in national security issues by quoting a speech of Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) from a "A Few Good Men". I saw the message of Jessup's tirade as parallel to the discussion topic and as illustritive commentary on the ethical boundaries of the NSA. Who defines those boundaries and in what context? Military, intelligence, or civilian? Peacetime or a time or threat? While the emerging activities and powers of the NSA concern me, I do not believe the agency is inhabited by evil people, but rather by people that believe (correctly or not) that they are playing a key role in protecting our nation. Their ethical boundaries are likely defined by the context of the threats that they encounter during their work. Some may believe that the critique by some nerd at a computer(me), who is ignorant to many of those threats, is ironic and a demonstration of the freedom that they protect.
I did not intend to disrespect HN or it's users as this a informative and entertaining forum which is a daily stop for me. In retrospect, I probably should not have used all Caps, and I should have placed an explanation along with the quote.-Respectfully, Vibrio
Check back next year for Docker is dead article.
Movie and TV production has solved this problem with mobile living quarter trailers.
I must've missed a tech cycle (or two) - I had heard of Heroku but didn't know what it did. I've used lxc and Docker and read bits about CoreOS/rkt/appc/kubernetes/etcd.

I know it's tongue-in-cheek but few if any of these new fangled things are critically dependent on one another.
Probably more. I'd say, like, at least 30-40 years.

I mean, the infamous "UNIX way" of "do one thing, do it well" (something we nearly lost with popularity of "do everything in a manner incompatible with how others do it" approach in too many modern systems), when complex behavior was frequently achieved through the modularity of smaller programs communicating through well-defined interfaces.

Heck, microkernels are all about this, and their ideas haven't grew out of nowhere. And HURD (even though it was never finished) is quarter a century old already.
Stealing Bitcoins with badges: How Silk Road’s dirty cops got caught
1)

Yes, but then you need to manage IO thread affinity, this isn't commonly done. Also you need to manage what is running on which NUMA node as often on 2 node systems 1 is almost never interrupted except for cross CPU conversation.

Facebook moved to Single Socket Xeon-D's rather then bake task affinity to their HHVM run time. So yeah, people still screw this up a lot.

2)

The main answer to concurrency these days is to just swap thread stacks in userland when ever something blocks. Yeah this works fine, but it's no different then what the kernel does for you. The stack is just smaller, the swapping is baked into the user land program. So you end up breaking most debuggers, and your C-FFI gets very slow.

This isn't any faster then what the kernel is doing. It's just the language run-time limits stack size so the swapping happens faster. Setting smaller stack sizes and using Thread Groups yields similar performance.
When I use shell it's often exactly because I want to construct pipelines of processes and FIFOs and do all the other things that shell does very well and has done well for decades.

I'm likely to be using Python programs and other programs in those shell scripts. The beauty of shell is that it makes it so easy to compose programs written in different languages.
I don't do that in my professional work, I do that only in my personal projects. It's just my project so I guess I set the rules here ;)
Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.
That's very interesting. I wonder if the popular datetime libraries issued a patch for this case?
Docker really is the future
I don't think this makes the case for elegance at all.

Global vars set wherever in a program are preferable to explicit params when creating a new process? And there's no way to have default params or anything?
Do you think it's a reasonable strategy for an average person with daily struggles to put all their effort into coming up with a proof for the Riemann hypothesis?
I don't have any references -- I'm going off something one of my committee members said. But the basic idea is just that, if your weight is 0.2, you want to make sure you also obtain solutions for 0.18 and 0.22, to give you some sense of whether you're on the edge of a cliff. This is pretty cheap in general for convex optimization problems because you've already got a solution that should be close to optimal for the new weight.
I expect eventually margins on hardware will come up and new players will enter. Maybe not, but the siren song of software's high margins and flexibility is only going to last so long. Innovation in hardware is going to slow down a lot, and software people are going to have to start worrying about efficiency again, and will no longer be as able to shrug optimization off onto Moore's Law or abstract away the hardware altogether. Some people will come in with new hardware, offering to alleviate those pains, and we'll have a healthy hardware market again.

Or I'm totally wrong :)
Not really practical advice without some hint as to how one is supposed to spot those smart companies.
And for a limited time, you get a free set of Japanese cooking knives with every purchase.
Well, handwritten is not mousewritten ;) Have you tried real handwritten digits?
That's my point. The real question is whether "having access to it" is of value to people. I tend to say yes because I love knowledge and take any opportunity I can to better understand the universe I am part of. But not everyone feels this way.
When it comes to micro services and containers, we are are missing fairly detailed descriptions of real world architectures from successful projects. And actually that applies to many other technologies as well.

When it comes to micro service, it would be interesting to know simple things like what kind of services were created, how large are, how communiction is handled, how large team(s) behind the service etc.

For some companies these are of course trade secrets, but sometimes opening things up might be good marketing. An example is Backblaze with their very detailed descriptions of their storage pods.
To be clear, intent is a particularly key part of any criminal case. Clinton may have had some technical incompetence, but there was clear there was no intent to leak classified information. Meanwhile, Julian Assange directly intended to leak classified information.

There's no incredible double standard, it's just that Assange clearly doesn't understand the most fundamental aspect of criminal law.
If only Super Soaker were the only gun people carried.
Listening is a journey. Now I seek conversation with people usually unaccustomed to being listened to. To give my trust as they give theirs, a conversation can be a beautiful joyous thing.
> should a child like that not rather spend time with children at the same age

I doubt a child as gifted as this would have a "normal" time spent with other children of the same age.
If you had a test for the issue, you probably wouldn't have deployed the software in the first place.
Would you find this presentation useful?

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/microservices-comparison...
3) Depends on the scale. If the task was running for 60 minutes then you would only have to wait 1.87 minutes which is a massive difference.

You are also forgetting the psychological impact that a few seconds can make. After 3 seconds of waiting without any progress indicator you've generally lost the attention of the user and they will do something else in the meantime.
Most of these compute heavy tasks boil down to that game engines are very fast C++ programs, but the game itself is an embedded LUA script.

If you are using C++ all the way down event based IO is way more efficient for this. Having compute threads is useful depending how much physics/calculations you are doing.
Techies are naturally curious , wanting to know more about everything. Now, japanese culture is so deep and vast that it just stokes their curiosity.
Another factor could be the huge amount of technological innovation that came from Japan.
Checking in on Chat Bots
The thing is that for a lot of people, work is a balancing act - between how much you like doing something, and how much you like money. If a "bad" company pays you a tonne of money, you might still work for them because you like having shiny things. However, for each person the line is someplace else - I know some people who will take shit pay just to do what they enjoy, and I know people who don't have a problem working in the most frustrating environments 80 hours a week because they like being paid big $$$. It's all relative to what's important for you.
9 women still can't have 1 baby in 1 month.
I wonder to what extent he's actually correct that end-to-end & reputation really aren't compatible. After all, if one ignores forwarding for a moment then a server will always know the peer who is sending it email, and if it knows that peer then it can calculate reputation for it (it can know the total emails it has received from that peer, and the number reported by users as spam). The problem then becomes one of making it more expensive to create a new peer, which I think is doable.
The author seems to conflate general math (arithmetic, variables, functions, basic modelling) with specialized math, used for advanced research topics like topology, number theory, etc.

Apart from this conflation, the article is very confused, mixes lots of unrelated topics, and is hard to follow. Maybe a rewrite is in order? Or perhaps writing logical arguments, with clear ideas that make sense is also an elitist thing we should avoid?
Neuroscientists scanned Sting’s brain. Here’s what they learned
> If that assumption were to be violated then everyone would have to rethink their authentication systems, for instance, because there'd be no way to send password reset emails to people.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Running email is simple enough that ISPs (to include mobile ISPs) could return to doing it for their customers. Heck, if you're a node on the Internet then by default you can receive email anyway …
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
p1 = Popen(["foo"], stdout=PIPE)
p2 = Popen(["bar"], stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=PIPE)
p1.stdout.close() # Allow p1 to receive a SIGPIPE if p2 exits.
output, _ = p2.communicate()

https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/subprocess.html#replacin...
Workers, don't fear the robot revolution
Summer reading suggestions from scientist Bob Horvitz
Memory bandwidth is the issue for scaling CPU cores. Very, very few problems can saturate 32 cores worth of computational work with the N-channel DDR memory, so there's no reason to design a Xeon or Opteron with more than that many. There may be challenges related to N-way cache coherency too.

> memory bandwidth limits mean the difference between optimized CPU, GPU and FPGA systems is not that much.

Well, not really -- the enormous memory throughput of GDDRx is much of what's fueled the growth in the GPGPU market over the last decade.
You can get full blown Xeon chips with 22 cores per socket nowadays. You don't have to go ARM or Xeon-D to get a ton of cores.
http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
If it's spawning threads, it's controlling the control flow. Either it's calling you, or the control flow is out of control.
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming is a history of climate models and data, published by MIT Press. https://www.amazon.com/Vast-Machine-Computer-Politics-Infras...
Well briefly, concerning the countries that don't have amazon, newegg, etc. Recipc connects the customers to their local suppliers, which will surely reduce shipment fees to start off with (does concern the middle east, africa, and some european countries so far). Surely recipc will have a build checker, to ensure that the parts are compatible (not so advantageous). However, users once they build their pc's, they'd end up knowing how good the pc is in different fields (gaming, graphic designing, 3d rendering, development, bitcoin, etc). Finally, user point system will be included, which does include rewards in return, and events will be practiced from time to time as well.

I'm pretty sure US users would find that somehow useless, but hey, other countries would be needing such services as well no?

Note: No affiliate links will be used, suppliers themselves are going to be managing their products on the site (prices and stock). Recipc is still in alpha phase and is in need of a bigger team.
Does CISC have any technical merit at all?

RISC and CISC are both philophies that rose out of the contstraints of the eras they originated in and both, in their pure forms, are totally obsolete.

The effort that goes into the design of a modern CPU micro architecture is so high that the number of instructions has a pretty small impact on the overall design effort. The descendants of the original RISC ISAs have kept adding new instructions and for good reason.

On the other hand part of the increase in micro architectural complexity is that chips are designed to decode and issue multiple instructions per clock cycle. So the ease of multiple decode where every instruction is aligned to 32 bit boundaries is actually a noticable advantage.

The size of the instruction stream is still an issue but on that front x86-64 and ARM-64 are more or less tied these days in terms of bytes of instruction per task so that's a wash in practice these days.
Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word "idea") are incredibly valuable.

Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.

That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute something you'll get great results).
It totally depends on your algo. If you play to the GPUs strengths it will own CPU through pure additional grunt, but you have to design for it.
Yes. Isn't that what I just said?
That's entirely possible and they could also spin their own silicon for ARM instead of just doing a cookie cutter job. This might however end up like their attempts to take over 4G where they either can't get power utilization under control or they price themselves out of the market.
s/vesp/wasp/
Show HN: Open source prototyping board for making EL wire touch sensitive
As a black father as well I've had this very same discussion, repeatedly.
Show HN: Integrate LinkedIn with React-Native(tutorial)
Still no Python 3 support though
Yes, some people by virtue of their completely average mediocrity can't excel. But isn't this the case for every field? Why is that mathematics' problem?
"An implanted memory prosthetic would have electrodes to record signals during learning, a microprocessor to do the computations, and electrodes that stimulate neurons to encode the information as a memory."

or in other words -- we record "signals", then compute something, and finally "stimulate" the neurons. I appreciate that this isn't a scientific report but this borders on parody.

The magnitude of technical, computational and biological problems to be solved here in order to achieve anything even remotely close to the headline would require 3-4 major scientific breakthroughs. With all respect, you don't publish them in IEEE proceedings.
AI Won't Takeover the World, and What Our Fears of the Robopocalypse Reveal
What containers do for you is two and only two coarse-grained things. 1. Make you more productive rolling out validated infra 2. Better utilize your hardware. Both of these things imply that you were using VM/AMIs before and you were hand-crafting your entire stack using things like Chef and Ansible. If you weren't doing that before (like, if you were using Google App Engine or Elastic Beanstalk or Lambda), Docker will make you less productive than you are today.
Does this package only support HTTPs domain validation? Would be nice if it would help with DNS based validation as well.

I'm using github.com/hlandau/acme/acmeapi at the moment, but the API isn't documented well. Their command line client is better, but library is more convenient when you have custom storage for certs.

Also a question for someone who has it running in production. What is the best way to handle TOS updates? Do you just setup some notifications when this happens or accept automatically? I'm not sure how often this happens, but the last update was this month.
Introducing Scrapy Cloud with Python 3 Support
I don't think the level success comes from one dimension, but I don't think either that we could have achieved the resiliency without breaking it in micro-services (or just services that happened to be small if you will).

One key factor was decoupling the high volume updates from the users requests so one didn't affect the other one.
I believe microservice is the wrong term used to describe SOA. The word 'micro' make it looks simple & applicable for tiny apps 10-50K SLOC. I believe you should start chopping off your monolithic app only when it reach > 100K SLOC. Still you can split it up by well defined modules with clear interface, without necessarily using SOA if it is running on same box.

Having monolithic app does not make it bad. What makes it bad is not having proper modules with proper interfaces.

SOA comes handy when you want to distribute your workload, so now we have proper modules but those modules needs more computing power, so split them up into boxes and pay the pain for managing that, because you have no option.
I feel I should toss up XKCD's golden ratio overlays[1] but I think it's really a chicken or the egg kind of argument- did processes involuntarily use math to come to these arrangements, or did we apply math to understand them?

[1]https://xkcd.com/spiral/
I just want to add one disadvantage before I give some advantages. There's a lot of operational complexity involved in routing, monitoring, and keeping every instance of every microservice running. That complexity also makes debugging in production much more difficult, as one must track a relay of network requests through many separate layers to find the point where it actually got stuck.

As for advantages, microservices tend to keep code relatively simple and free from complex inheritance schemes. There's rarely a massive tangled-up engine full of special cases in the mix, as there often is in monolithic apps. This substantially decreases technical debt and learning curve, and can make it simple to understand the function an isolated microservice performs.

There is the obvious advantage that if you have disparate applications executing nearly-identical logic to read or write data to the same location, and the application platforms can't execute the same library code, you can centralize that logic into an HTTP API, which reduces maintenance burden and prevents potentially major bugs.

My opinion is that adopting microservices as a paradigm leads to a slow, difficult-to-debug application, primarily because people take the "micro" in microservices too seriously. One shouldn't be afraid to split functionality out into an ordinary service after it's been shown to be reasonable to do so.
I think the author is deliberately conflating two interpretations of "Math is Everywhere." It's hard to argue that it isn't, when we talk about different fields of endeavor. Deep in any remunerative profession, from selling groceries to manufacturing semiconductors, there are quantitative models, and it helps to know at least trigonometry and calculus, if not differential equations, to understand them. But the author isn't actually talking about quantitative models -- this is the bait-and-switch -- he's actually talking about dramatically uneven mathematical education and widespread innumeracy.
Wow, that conclusion is crap. Mathematics is one of the most open fields of science. There are excellent free resources for learning math, even cutting edge research is usually easily found for free, the scientists are very open to sharing ideas. Anyone who has the necessary talent can learn any part of Mathematics they fancy.
> Nobody writes multi-threaded code

Fires up your activity monitor or task manager and you can see that most applications have much more than one thread. Many even have tens or several tens of threads.
Forbes to Publish 10 under 10 List
Ah thanks, that makes sense. Fun trade-offs: Either run out of memory when you call fork, or fight with the out-of-memory killer at a later time :)
You can still distribute processes across cores and there are lots of them on modern OSes.
Please look up what 'amnesty' means. Apple isn't doing anything wrong or illegal by keeping its cash outside of the US. Also note the the US tax code is the only one (in advanced countries) to try to tax earnings made outside of its jurisdiction (e.g. for earnings made in Japan, and already taxed locally there).

Cook is not saying Apple shouldn't pay taxes, he simply says the IRS has no business taking 40% of earnings not made in the US. If you were an expat you would strongly agree with him.
what kind of workload did you intended to you use this beast for ? I really wish i had a use case to buy on of those :).

How did you decided to go with the X99 chipset instead of the c230/c236 (traditionally used with xeons)
To extremely simplify the business: the company who has more r&d and capital spending will, to a large extent, win moore's law's. With current smartphones - TSMC and Intel are about equal in that parameter, and TSMC even beats Intel sometimes . Not good for Intel, but maybe livable.

But now people are talking about augmented/virtual reality. lots of silicon. phones or phone like devices might take a big part in that.LG's chip will probably be for that purpose excatly . What happens if Intel loses that market ? maybe TSMC wins.
> It's convenient to be reminded of an upcoming flight (that was sent to me as an email from a carrier) when I go to run a search for something related like "flight status". That's the kind of automated intelligence that really can make your life better (in small ways).

The thing is, that sort of useful service can survive with end-to-end encryption: when I decrypt my messages on my device, I can pass them on to any agent I wish, to include a check-for-flights agent, a check-for-packages agent &c. — and those agents can then post status messages on my local (or even a remote — encrypted, natch) queue. I don't need a cloud service to run a few regexps; my phone, tablet, desktop & laptop are plenty powerful enough to do that.
well, then you have a pretty non-standard definition of framework.
Most people have a single, important foreground app which is the only one they care about latency of. The others are ticking over in the background, but because they don't have window focus the user doesn't care about their responsiveness so much.
It was probably this-
https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...
I guess this is meant to be hyperbolic but honestly it's true.

> So I just need to split my simple CRUD app into 12 microservices, each with their own APIs which call each others’ APIs but handle failure resiliently, put them into Docker containers, launch a fleet of 8 machines which are Docker hosts running CoreOS, “orchestrate” them using a small Kubernetes cluster running etcd, figure out the “open questions” of networking and storage, and then I continuously deliver multiple redundant copies of each microservice to my fleet. Is that it?

> -Yes! Isn’t it glorious?

> I’m going back to Heroku.