skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a given CPU can do X amount of work, with a C-based language you can maybe get 0.8X performance from that CPU.

With elixir you might get 0.4X performance. From that perspective Elixir looks slow.

But you can deploy 10 servers and thus get 4X performance overall, with essentially no cost for Elixir. On the other hand to make distributed system in C you will spend 10X the development time.

So Elixir is fast in the sense that you get a distributed system much faster, and you can get more overall performance by scaling across multiple CPUs.

(And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your C program is really going to only use one core out of the box while elixir will use all four.)

These ratios are just examples, of course.
Nobody uses AAA ;) - and by way of proof, x64 doesn't have it!
They are crazy! Very interesting case. How they support such DB? As I know FPGA has limits on updates.

What tools they use to create relational algebra?
Knee reaping happens a lot in Sambo. Nothing dangerous when practitioners are well educated. Also it is allowed in many of the submission grappling competitions such as EBI and so far in their few shows I haven't seen anyone had an issue with it. Same way as they allow scissor takedown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwl4Bk_ZHgc)

The problem with not being able to practice a technique in sparring, or "live" with a resisting opponent is that you don't know how good you are when time comes and you have to apply it.
Why the earthquake in Italy was so destructive
eye roll Ok, please enlighten us. What's the role of martial arts in a society?
He's probably thinking of Freeman Dyson's Project Orion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
The telescope you'd need to look at an exoplanet
This is one I've never quite understood. Having written many scrapers I will say - Scraping is always hard to maintain. I've written regex and parser based scrapers many times, but it's still a need for constant updates as the page changes.

HTML will change about as often (only slightly less in my experiences) than regexes will need to be changed and can take more time to test and develop on each update, especially if you don't have access to a very durable parser which can stand broken HTML, unlike most XML parsers. So if a regex does the job, use it IMO.
Thanks for that! Hopefully folks will vote it higher, if they like it!
Apparently Goree wasn't actually the point of departure for many slaves: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/01...

Many orders of magnitude more went out through the nearby rivers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor%C3%A9e

Either way, I never knew about this island, and learning about it has been interesting, so thanks for mentioning it!
Yes, for instance the LOOP instruction: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35742570/why-is-the-loop-...
Interesting that two brand new accounts asked a question (on this thread only!) which seemed perfectly suited to Fr8's "why yes we can!" type of answer.
Microsoft's Open Management Infrastructure for Linux Now on GitHub
We changed the URL from https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2016/08/24/sweet32/ to this post because it seems more explanatory.

There's also http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/08/attack-of-we..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353314.
I had to scrape the comments out of a blog. As you might expect, there was a div for comments, with comments nested within it. This made it easy to grab the comments using an HTML parser with xpath support.

Unfortunately, the blog software had a bug and it was possible for markup to leak out of the comments. Sometimes a spurious </div> would close the comments div and the scraper would miss comments that came after it. However, the HTML did contain helpful HTML comments, something like "comments start here" and "comments end here". The reliable solution was to use a literal string search on these HTML comments to pull out the entire comments section, and then to use regexes to pull out the comments' content.

The only unbreakable rule is that there are no unbreakable rules.
Oh, I completely agree with you. I wasn't intending to condone or promote this culture at all.

My only point is that it may be helpful to treat it as a (temporarily unavoidable) externality, and deal with as one does with other annoyances in life that one has to (temporarily) slog through from time to time.
For starters, it doesn't seem impossible to build it, on earth or in space. You don't need a continuous mirror of that size.

I wonder if any of the LIGO technology can be applied to optical telescopes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
This discovery is about Proxima Centauri which is slightly closer: 4.25 ly.
IIRC, when a new version of OSX stops working on older hardware, it's usually because Apple started using a "new" version of SSE that's not supported on a given CPU.

For handcoded assembly, it's not uncommon for code to check a CPU's capabilities at runtime (e.g. OpenSSL checks at runtime if it can use the really fast AES-NI instructions,. If not, it fall backs to other assembly or C implementations). That way you don't need different binaries tuned for every possible combination of available instructions. I don't think any compilers do this automatically, but most of the time generating assembly for the lowest common denominator is fast enough.
Don't forget about developers who enjoy *nix operating systems and also not being handicapped by Linux-Desktop(TM).
Not in the code on my machine at least.
Was there an error in an early version of this article? There are two comments in here saying 500ly away. Proxima is only ~4ly away.
This discovery will greatly increase interest in gigantic telescopes, to allow a closer look at the planet and its atmosphere.
Not the best link but here's something to chew on:

http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to...

>However, despite these advantages in fuel-efficiency and specific impulse, the most sophisticated NTP concept has a maximum specific impulse of 5000 seconds (50 kN·s/kg). Using nuclear engines driven by fission or fusion, NASA scientists estimate it would could take a spaceship only 90 days to get to Mars when the planet was at “opposition” – i.e. as close as 55,000,000 km from Earth.

> But adjusted for a one-way journey to Proxima Centauri, a nuclear rocket would still take centuries to accelerate to the point where it was flying a fraction of the speed of light. It would then require several decades of travel time, followed by many more centuries of deceleration before reaching it destination. All told, were still talking about 1000 years before it reaches its destination. Good for interplanetary missions, not so good for interstellar ones.

There's talk of other drive systems being able to pull it off but this is the only one that actually has been tested but never built to scale.
Do you think Judo is a martial art?
From the link 'evilduck posted, it seems that's big indeed, but possibly big.

240km is a big thing, but within the realm of possibility; also I'm personally hoping someone will invent some magic mathematical trick around phased arrays or whatever, and cut that size by an order of magnitude or two :).
I'm reminded of the books Illium and Olympos by Dan Simmons.
F*ck Trump (CRV Founder Visa Program)
I think pg came from System V.
The planet is about 0.05 AU from Proxima Centauri, meaning we need an angular resolution of about 1.9e-7 radians to even distinguish it from its host star. Is that realistic?

In theory, an orbiting space telescope has a diffraction-limited resolution of approximately 1.22λ/D (λ = wavelength, D = aperture size). Modern image processing techniques can improve on this somewhat, but it makes a good order-of-magnitude estimate. Anyway, this formula tells us a 4-meter telescope has a maximum angular resolution of about 1.8e-7 radians at a typical visible light wavelength of 600 nm. That would be just good enough... except that we don't actually have a 4 meter orbiting space telescope. Resolving even large features on the planet would require a much larger telescope, probably kilometers or more.

For ground based telescopes, the situation is even worse because of atmospheric effects. Despite being 10 meters in aperture, the Keck telescopes in Hawaii are limited to an angular resolution of about 2e-7 radians because of the atmosphere. However, there is reason to hope that the even larger European Extremely Large Telescope will have enough resolution (about 5e-8 radians? hard to tell from their official publications) to image Proxima b directly. https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2011/VLTI2011/presentations... Again, this is still not enough to resolve surface features.

So, long story short the answer is unfortunately no at present. Maybe space-based manufacturing will let us build a big enough telescope someday?
I figured. Although this isn't PowerPC, but Power, and what little I was able to find quickly seems to indicate the instruction set has evolved since it was branched for PowerPC. I imagine even if PowerPC targeted binaries work on Power, they wouldn't use the platform to the fullest.
This is where I take the time to explain to everyone that "Yeah, while it may save you time to do it manually, if you do it THIS way instead, you never have to write it from scratch again, and your output goes waaay up".

Every job I've ever had, I always look at how my predecessors do the job, then automate the crap that I don't want to deal with. :/
Do you have a recommendation of a similar type of post that has correct information? I'm just getting into PostgreSQL so I don't know what the best resources are.
Visual Studio Code's TypeScript IoC/DI Framework
The PC release of No Man's Sky apparently was built to use SSE4.1 instructions, leading to unexpected problems for users with older processors that would otherwise have been fine.

We have in the past received different binaries from vendors to use depending on which processors we're using.
Why are people in this thread constantly citing 500 light-years? Proxima Centauri's 4 ly away, which, granted, isn't a walk in the park, but it's remarkably near to us.
Yes, I do think it's less than 0.0036%.

First we see from the data that CPS declared 2.5 million of those 3.2 as "non-victims" so we can eliminate type 1 errors from almost 80% of the population right there.

Of the remaining 700k it's not inconceivable at all that in a big percentage of cases there were actually significant parental problems. Frankly I bet that type 2 errors are much more common that type 1 for this population.
They still stay up by generating lift with wings tough. Looks pretty airplaney to me.
Here's a nice article:

http://www.soundandvision.com/content/vinyl-obsession-revill...
It's not that just about having an inherent distrust of one another. When they do have a dispute, it is necessary to have very good documentation to bring to court. Legally doing a mediocre job with keeping records is barely better than not keeping records at all. So they end up spending a lot to mind their p's and q's, even though they do have a good amount of trust.

With a blockchain it becomes cheap to add a layer of ex-post verifiable mutual agreement between mostly-trusted parties.
PCI-DSS says 112 bits of security is "strong cryptography", just so people can continue using 3DES.
> I have never seen this be a serious consideration in this industry.

You've been lucky - I've been turned down for positions I was otherwise qualified for because of "too many job changes" (and yes, they told me so). I've also seen hiring managers (from the other side) not even consider resumes with too many jobs of too short a duration. I don't think it's the kiss of death, as long as you're competent; I've never been out of work, in spite of a four-year period where I held four different jobs, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind.
FiveThirtyEight: Hurricane Ensemble Forecasting
To put things in perspective, what was the angular resolution of Hubble's Ultra Deep Field measurements/photos? (keeping in mind that angular resolution isn't the only challenge here)
It's $300/year from what I can see. Not free, but if you think it's a valuable part of your design, a small cost, unless you just don't have a viable business in the first place.
It doesn't because when would a compiler issue syscall? Maybe if you count instructions emitted by inline assembly
Something else with the same name, in case you came here by mistake, and wanted that instead.
> And its real estate is among the world’s most expensive, making it difficult for training studios to afford soaring rents.

It seems that everyday on HN there are articles showing examples of how cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable - this one makes me feel really sad.
Without reading too much into it, I think they just recognise (like everyone else) that mobile devices are far more pervasive and profitable in 2016.

It's also way easier to sell someone a new smartphone or tablet with gimmicky bullshit features (notice how all these shitty laptop-tablet devices are in vogue?) than new computers, at least at the rate hardware is advancing past mainstream software.
As child mortality decreases people tend to have fewer children. This data point contradicts your assertion.

It makes people uncomfortable to think about people in economic terms(1) but that doesn't mean those uncomfortable people are right.

1. We see this in many areas of society from health care funding to liability laws.
When I drive (which is a lot less than I bike), I drive a stick, and at least at reds, I put the car in neutral and engage the parking brake so I can rest my feet, which (except for the loss of momentum) is comparable to the trouble incurred in dismounting for a bike.

In general, driving or biking, I think we should stop trying to decrease effort, and increase it instead. It's good for you. As a cyclist you get stronger, faster, more skilled. As a driver, you get more skilled and are forced to stay more alert. All of these things make you and everyone around you safer, so savor and put as much of yourself as possible into your cycling and driving, for everyone's sake. You don't get good at things you don't do.
The planet is about 0.05 AU from Proxima Centauri, meaning
we need an angular resolution of about 1.9e-7 radians to
even distinguish it from its host star. Is that realistic?

Much more than that; that's the angle for HALF-maximum brightness, but since the star's many orders of magnitude brighter than the planet, you'd need a much larger reduction than 1/2. Unfortunately, the diffraction-limited pattern [0] has fat tails -- it's not Gaussian, the brightness is slow to drop off away from the center (polynomially slow? [1]). I understand you'd need >100 times the FWHM angle in practice, on the order of 1" for JWST for instance [2]

This is why coronagraphs will be so useful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk#Mathematical_details

[1] a log-log graph shows the envelope is close to inverse-cubic (x^-3)

[2] http://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2016/NIRCam_Planets_and_B...
Maven Central says it's around 4.4MB (with some things still pending to be dropped before the release of the final version)[1].

[1] https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.scala-lang/scala-libr...

I would disagree with the comment on verbosity compared to Java 8/Haskell/Ocaml.
Most of the things I do regularly in Scala would require a magnitude of more code.
Ocaml doesn't even have higher-kinded types or implicits, so I don't think it can win much on that front (except of saving a line where Scala's curly brace might be).
With Haskell it really depends. There are certainly ways to write much more succinct code, but what I see in practice is that it's not that much different from Scala. Haskell has it's own unsolved issues though: broken typeclasses, lacking module system, poor tooling, and a weekly-changing, terrible dependency management.
Presumably at some point we'll be able to use several orbiting telescopes as a virtual array.
Combinatorial Designs: Constructions and Analysis [pdf]
Hubble's angular resolution is about 0.05 arcsec = 2.4e-7 radians. And you're absolutely right that angular resolution isn't the only challenge here - some way of filtering out the extremely bright (relatively) light from the host star is needed as well, for starters.
Ask HN: How to receive money when you don't trust the buyer?
I'm selling an Android app to somebody in Asia. Unfortunately I have no reason to trust the buyer.

Wire transfers require my account numbers, and PayPal is too easily reversible.

Does anyone have experience with something like this? How can I facilitate a transfer without leaving myself open to high risk?
Torture (by US military and domestic police) already exists, and is employed more widely than the general populace seems to care about. This has been going on a long time. Is the fight against torture already lost, in which case we're just down to figuring out utilization?

> almost every single intersection has CCTV aiming down at driver's faces & license plates in all directions.

I'm not against trying to reign in the surveillance that exists. By all means, lets push for ways to do so. The difference we have is that you seem to be more interested in how best to use all this cool tech than in any sort of principle opposing it.

What is inevitable about all those street cameras? Do they just grow out of the poles like branches on trees?
More precisely, XP SChannel.
I extended the Borland debugger's disassembler (as used by Delphi and C++ Builder IDEs) to x64, so I had professional reason to inspect the encodings. There are whole categories of instructions not used by most compilers, relating to virtualization, multiple versions of MMX and SSE (most are rarely output by compilers), security like DRM instructions (SMX feature aka Safer Mode), diagnostics, etc.

On LEA: LEA is often used to pack integer arithmetic into the ModRM and SIB prefix bytes of the address encoding, rather than needing separate instructions to express a calculation. Using these, you can specify some multiplication factors, a couple of registers and a constant all in a single bit-packed encoding scheme. Whether or not it uses different integer units in the CPU is independent of the fact that it saves code cache size.
Two Girls, a Golden Balloon, and Fate
I recommend following Christophe Pettus - PostgreSQL Proficiency for Python People - PyCon 2016 video for postgresql basics and optimization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knUitQQnpJo
The hurricane analysis and visualization the article refers to is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): http://www.ral.ucar.edu/hurricanes/realtime/current/
Yup, but the right way to do it would be a defaultdict, or a Counter anyway.

from collections import defaultdict

def count_names():
names = defaultdict(int)
for name in sys.stdin.readlines():
name = name.strip()
names[name] += 1
...
Creating design style guides
Word Games: What the NSA Means by “Targeted” Surveillance Under Section 702
> And of what consquence is this purported "error" to the reader of this article?

Did you even read my comments? I already listed one falsehood that pervades our industry because types are misunderstand in exactly this way: "It's important not to perpetuate the false notion that sets of simple values suffice to explain types, because it entails the common and equally false notion that full test coverage in a dynamically typed language suffices to match the safety of a statically typed language."

This is blatantly, perniciously false, no doubt leading many people to choose dynamically typed languages to their detriment, yet this is what a reasonable person could conclude from the definitions in this article.

Finally, Newtonian physics governs every interaction an average person will have in their lifetime. The analogy that types-as-sets will suffice for nearly every interaction with types that a programmer will have in their lifetime is simply false. The fact that some programmers don't go beyond their first introduction to types makes a wrong definition almost dangerously false, given how much of our society is run by software.
The Alcubierre drive is just a solution to the equations of general relativity that most probably can not be achieved in practice. Sure, maybe one day we will have drives like that, but we do not have any idea currently that even remotely resembles a warp drive permitted by the laws of nature.
Would a lot more comprehensible if the article were to use SI units (or MKS or even cgs). Just like technical and scientific people have been doing in the UK for many decades. I think it is most unlikely that the designers used mph.
Yes. Although this post was submitted a minute sooner, the other one got the more active discussion and is closer to being an original source, so we've left that one up.
That would require us to create matter with a negative energy density, which has never been detected and is likely impossible.
There's a $100 million effort to develop tiny spacecraft that are accelerated to 10%-20% the speed of light with ground-based lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
So the point is that one can use the more visually-centric social media platforms to do a bit of R&D prior to travelling; that's cool, good idea. I especially like the note on:

"This approach also affords a window into cultural insights
I might not get other­wise. The year before, in Morocco, a
group of friends and I were unsure how best to dress when
walking around a small town outside Tangier — we wanted to
be especially respectful because we were visiting during
Ramadan — so we browsed local Instagram posts until we had
a sense of what was appropriate..."

I think I'll try this for my next travel.
Another good article: http://www.nature.com/news/earth-sized-planet-around-nearby-... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353448.
Living Life on a Magnet
Looks for escrow services. That's how domains are usually sold. E.g. https://www.escrow.com/
Proxima b is our neighbor… better get used to it
I don't understand why this is a bad thing on the PC list. They are pictures to be clear, and attractive pictures tend to have more likes. We're also humans, and being attracted to other humans is in our DNA, so, we should stop shaming people for it.

Besides, it's only 9 posts, and they aren't all of "hot chicks." The (argh!!) used-to-be-chronological list starts above the fold. This seems silly to be upset by.
A Categorical Basis for Conditional Probability [pdf]
How does it slow down?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353441
> There are now new Linux users starting every day, and asking them to learn that less is better than more is not funny.

When do you even need to tell them this? Does it fundamentally change how they use the tool somehow? No, they'll see that you pipe stuff through less and that's it. Heck, I've been using Linux for 15+ years, and about 10 of those full time. The first I ever heard that "less is more" was probably ~3 years ago. It just doesn't matter.

What you're complaining about is esoteria (that is still littered all over the Windows ecosystem, e.g. the fingerprints of 8.3 file names still persist, long after it ceased to be a thing)
Melnorme are known to hang out around that system.
I think that his point is that so many of the non big-4 places are trying to mimic their hiring practices, and that's what the OP is wanting to go away.

I'm inclined to agree with the OP. Not every employer is going to be Google/Facebook/etc, so they shouldn't try to hire like they are already.
Woz to Apple: You Don't Know Jack
With the way states were blocking them from operating in them at such a rapid pace for a while once FD/DK started advertising like crazy, I don't know if they will ever be able to get back to where they were. Once you are lumped in as gambling the rules change and get much harder online.
Along with the other remarks, I believe it would be fair to say "all things being equal". That is, a given person would benefit from a CS degree in the following ways.
Oh yeah, right. Point is, yeah, not yet. I wonder what LLVM's support of these arches is.