skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My thoughts too. If we knew there were only 10,000 stars, it could seem likely that the chances of life existing are 1/50,000, and we happen to be lucky. But there are over 100 billion stars in the observable universe.

I think the law of large numbers applies here. The likelihood of life existing being high enough that we are the only ones, but low enough that our existence isn't winning some 1 in a googolplex chance just strikes me as an anthropocentric conceit.
Reading is Fundamental
I kinda wonder if internet discussions around martial arts are the way they are because practitioners (whatever their motivations) tends to posture / step up to challenges more.

Japanese budo went through a similar decline and soul-searching when the samurai went on the decline, and modernization went on the rise. Sure, there was that guy (forgot his name) who wrote this beautiful fiction to try to sell Westerners on the ideas of Japanese culture, only to have it adopted by the emerging nation-state of Japan to drum up nationalist fervor. And then there are works like, _The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts_, an awesome book even if it was not written by a practitioner.

A older martial brother put it this way: the idea of the Second Amendment where you can take up arms against a modern, tyrannical government is a dream. Modern technology will overwhelmingly flatten any attempts at that. This is a guy who served in the armed forces, practiced the same Chinese martial arts I do, in addition to Aikido. At one point, he was pitching Aikido to a local Montessori school as a "means for resolving conflict", and he does not mean it in the militaristic fantasizing-being-a-badass way where "resolving conflict" is a euphemism for beating the shit out of someone.

It echoes what Scott Meredith mentions -- martial arts, even MMA, does not work well against modern and near-future weapon technologies. So what's the point of practicing if one is motivated by some fantasy of being able "defend oneself?"

I've been able to answer "what is the role of martial arts in my life." Among the key lessons are things like _grit_, and identifying how violence can be used through words and emotions. One of the martial teachers I respect (he is dead now) wrote about the connection between rhetorics and the deeper teachings of martial arts. Being able to keep cool and skillfully navigate through intense emotions that arises while people are shouting at each other seems more useful in the modern world than fantasizing, or even knowing a practitioner can break someone's bones.

I had been poking around at different philosopher's writings about this. Ken Wilber points to a different philosopher (I forgot the name) about modernity. That view on modernity is a fairly good description of what happens with anything traditional. The modernist (and post-modernist) view tends to deny some of the things learned in the traditions. Some folks have been finding that this is not working out very well for us. We're not a happy society, despite having access to medications, economic prosperity (for some of us), and technological conveniences. Our ancestral traditions are lost, trying to find a new place in our modern world. We need them as much as they need us.
What kind of a sick system is that? Where I live, and in most of Europe, I think, the burden of proof lies with the accuser, not the accused. Common law is stupid...
Finding these heavily curated advertorials Apple has been pushing out (This and the recent wired advertorials come to mind) a bit of a sign that not everything is sunny at One Infinite Loop.
WW3 OBAMA IS THE ANTICHRIST,HERE IS Your PROOF
It is not tenuous to suggest that modern agricultural crops will yield more in a higher CO2 environment (look into greenhouses). It is actually far less tenuous than speculating that CO2 is causing runaway global warming.
To be safe, I think the picture should be awarded to Peter Doig. Perhaps on the grounds that the owner admits it confusable with his brand..
> If there is anything the article of this thread suggests, it is that we have created a needlessly complex instruction set, and that "efficient specialization" is not valuable to the software 99.99% of the time.

The only thing the article suggests is that the author's /usr/bin only includes about 2/3rds of possible x86 instructions, and that a few instructions occur most. The latter is unsurprising and expected in almost any grammar or formal system. The former is also expected given that most specialized instructions are for specialized use in high-performance applications, which are not likely all to be in any individual workstation's /usr/bin.

The cruft of specialization is legacy instructions, which as many other comments in this thread point out are usually implemented through microcode only. They don't contribute to complexity of the processor (which can choose to inefficiently implement this with other microinstructions) or the compiler (which can choose to not emit them).

I'm all for new blood in general-purpose architectures, but the bloat and inelegance of x86 isn't really something that's mattered for at least a decade.
The key difference being that in the case of Uber, those VCs and investors gave their money voluntarily.
On the bright side, they might give you some insight, and it might be a great product.

In the end though, its not worth risking your humanity over. If they show you the door, it's probably a bullet dodged.

I didn't start in software development: I was in forensics. But, though I loved the work, I didn't love what I found. I was losing faith in people, so I moved away to what had been only an interest area. You don't want to get caught up by a company that eats you alive.

There's not really a bad outcome here, the worst case is you get something boring on your plate.

Though, anecdotally, just about every contract I've had wanted exclusivity, to ensure I didn't steal their ideas, or borrow any code I wrote on their dime. It was annoying, but I mostly dealt with it by: a. Putting my projects on a temporary hold, or b. Getting them to acknowledge I already had support contracts for my projects, and wouldn't they want support from me, too? (I usually have 6 months support in my agreements, after that... Depends how much I like the client.)

But again, it isn't really something to sweat over, but it does seem to be getting more common.
If anybody has the resources to start building dedicated FPGA (or whatever) instances for SQL workloads it would be one of the public cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP).
I didn't know that retention for Chromebooks was poor. Surprising. I suppose that it depends strongly for what Chromebooks are used for. As a developer, I work largely on a large memory, multi-core remote server so if I like the SSH shell support, then I am happy. I really like my 1080p screen Chromebook, and my iPad Pro - so much so that I don't need to reach for a Linux laptop very often.

I agree with you about Google's grip on the education market. I would like to see kids using Raspberry Pis, learning to code, doing electronics experiments, etc.
I'd venture that it's probably because Apple don't encourage discussion. As demonstrated in this article and pointed out by other commenters there's a large veil of secrecy that comes down when it comes to detailing specifics, which is all well and good when things are working, but when it isn't what you're faced with is marketing bluster and iron fisted PR. I'll reiterate once more, that for a company that continually touts itself as "top end" just isn't good enough.
Going to San Jose is explicitly not covered "when your trip begins and ends north of Cesar Chavez St. in San Francisco."
Unless "The Moties" send one here, first :-)

Yet another comment plugging a story involving some novel interplanetary travel (this one involving a species from a red dwarf): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye
At a glance, that looks a lot like that Syntactic Closures model: Modeling the environment as both mappings between variables and values, and identifiers and variables. However, I fail to see how renaming is problematic in recursive macros, save being unweildy. I'm not sure, but AFAICT, this may be a solution in search of a problem. It is interesting though, and might be an actual better solution. It's hard for me to tell without a long, slow readthrough, which may happen later.

But this is just a concrete instance of my opinion of Racket in a nutshell: Cool ideas, but sometimes overly complex for my liking, interesting systems that don't always mix well, a syntax over the ideas that I find distasteful on occasion, and documentation that is comprehensive, but hard to understand.

It's okay if you like it, and it's a good language for Getting S%#! Done, but it's not really my thing: I prefer Chicken: Simpler, less academic and cutting edge, but still really good at Getting S%#! Done. But that's my problem, not Racket's
If what AI/ML talent wants is to do research and draw a Silicon Valley salary then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple.

Some people don't want to work at Apple because they can't describe their job on their LinkedIn pages or tell their friends and family about what they do. Others don't like that they have to buy their own meals at Caffe Macs. I don't think Apple worries about this too much.

What they do worry about is finding people that fit Apple's culture and want to work on products used by hundreds of millions of people.

In any case, being perceived or not to be at the top of the field and being able/unable to hire the best ML/AI talent isn't an existential threat. ML/AI isn't magic, it's a technology. If there's one thing that the tech industry should have learned from Steve Jobs, it's that you make good products by working backward to the technology. In that respect, what Federighi mentioned about not having a ML/AI division was reassuring.
Finished Ultima a couple of weeks ago, didn't know it was the second in a series. I'm looking forward to reading Proxima when I can get to it on my list.
I haven't noticed anything because the only thing it ever managed to do reliably is set timers so that's all I ever used it for.

and one in 20 times you'll get a "here is the timer" where it just shows you yesterdays already complete dinner timer
Not sure what happened there! Restored.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12347595
BoJack – Powerful in-memory database for Crystal
Thanks for the correction! Bad memory on my part.

So the article refutes [1] because the relatively easy to manage mechanical effects of those alpha particles on the spacecraft exterior mean that it actually functions as an effective, long-term shield against alpha particles?
That's an interesting perspective. I always thought that cmov was more important if the CPU had really bad branch prediction - the MIPS CPUs that were in the PS2 and PSP had famously bad branch prediction; there were all sorts of interesting cases where we could manually recode using cmov to avoid mispredictions in hot-path code.

But I guess if the compiler knew enough about the branch prediction strategy employed by the CPU, it could do this optimization itself when prediction wouldn't work right, even on a CPU with good prediction.
Please keep nationalistic putdowns off HN.
Show HN: Badgerly – A CSS 3 library for rendering badges
backdoor != exploit
Forget about Users Focus on Profit Instead
Currently at top of front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353441
The long term goal is loftier than almost all others except for extending human life and populating other star systems.
Abu Dhabi sexy escort +971507475118
I found another pt performance issue. Searching an 8GB file:

% time pt -i hello4294967296 big_file.txt
big_file.txt
134217728:hello4294967296

pt -i hello4294967296 big_file.txt 535.86s user 1.35s system 100% cpu 8:56.97 total

That's right: pt takes 9 minutes to do a case-insensitive match on an 8GB file. On the same machine doing the same search, ag takes 7 seconds and grep takes 4s.

Also, it looks like pt was beating ag because it defaults to case-sensitive search. If I make ag do the same case-sensitive search, it's slightly faster in my benchmarks (0.63s to search my ~/code directory vs pt's 0.65s).
The Wii and Wii U are using PowerPC CPUs.
The problem with inherited wealth in general is that you end up with aristocracies. I mean, that's literally how aristocracies formed in the first place. Wealth begets wealth, so the fixed point of a society without confiscatory inheritance tax is feudalism.

> Why do we even care about billionaires anyway?

For one thing, money is power. It's undemocratic to allow some people to be worth millions of times others. If you allow some individuals to become infinitely wealthy, they will eventually buy your political system and bend it to benefit them. In principle, that's bad. In practice, it's happened.

For another, the way the wealthy got rich constitutes a wholesale transfer of wealth from the nation. Bill Gates is a rich man because he benefited from government spending and welfare for the rich. Specifically from a form of welfare for the rich known as 'intellectual property law', which means people have to pay a large fee to Microsoft, enforced by the US government, to copy some 1's and 0's. He got rich from government spending on education, infrastructure and defense, which built a stable middle class that could buy computers. He also got rich from the defense and research spending that built the internet and gave the technology freely to the people. Finally, he got even richer from monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, and tax evasion which put Microsoft's tax address in Nevada, and from the political lobbying that allowed this theft to happen.

Bill Gates, like all billionaires, is a welfare queen, and the wealth he's sitting on should be returned to the nation he took it from.
Even (in)famous forgeries aren't worth much. Art is all about who touched it.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
There sure is! Check out Orleans by Microsoft Research. It's built for .NET, and is being used in production by large companies.

We're currently evaluating it for our own infrastructure. It looks very promising.
Clicking on the link launched the Uber app for me. I then rage quitted it before reading anything more.

Also happens in "no so" private mode on the iPhone. Apple should really fix that as it leaks information.
That's close to my perception. If you gave one of Python's stars to Ruby and RoR, gave two of Go's to Elixir and created an entry for Lisp with six stars, it would be pretty much exactly what I'd estimated from this site.
To be fair to the GP, I don't think the US is considered a bastion of civil liberties...
> Also if not using asdf, the quickload form should be
> wrapped in an eval-when. It will fail If I Try to
> compile the file (C-c C-k) on a fresh session.

OH! Thank you... :) That's always bugged me!
NVidia introduces Parker SOC with 256 GPU cores, 2 Denver+4 A57 CPU cores
Legal industry, in a branch of the law that's very high volume. We were paying a consultant $175/hr just to create basic SSRS reports until I learned to do it. I'm sure plenty of other firms are still hiring outside devs at exorbitant rates.

And when I explain what I do (mostly automating clerical or data entry/retrieval processes) to friends in other fields, a lot of them have said "Wow, we could use a lot of that at our company. We do X and Y and Z over and over and it's a huge waste of time." Small companies often force highly-skilled workers to complete their own repetitive clerical tasks, and medium companies seem to hire teams of $10/hr drones. They never think "At what point is this worth automating?" or they don't know where to look for a dev who can do it for them.

I think the small/medium business CRUD app market is extremely neglected because it's not as glamorous as machine learning or whatever else all the MIT grads are doing these days.
If you think psychology is shoddy science wait until you hear some cosmology! The universe is very big so there MUST be life elsewhere. It just can't be otherwise!
Let's hope the trend will reverse, because I am very worried by the growing racist sentiment across the entire world. Not to mention that racism is exactly the wrong way to go about fixing things.
With this field advancing so fast, I guess if we could do something like this, that would be great:

Maintain a running list of:

- 3-5 most important papers in the last 3 months

- 3-5 in the last 1 year (not all in the 3 month list would make into this list)

- 3-5 in the last 5 years.

I guess it's difficult for a small number of people to rank the papers. Maybe a hackernews or reddit style upvote/downvote system can be used, with a list that essentially scrapes arxiv for papers.
Yes it would tend to reduce demand for professors, but if there was fewer professors the grant success rate would be higher. Less competition for grant funding should have a positive influence on the quality of science as people should feel under less pressure to rush out results.

The current academic system is a Ponzi scheme that has to end at some stage and it might as well be now.
The third to last paragraph

> The artist’s lawyers said they identified the real Pete Doige, whose records matched Fletcher’s description. Doige died in 2012, but his sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, testified at the trial that the work was created by her late brother.

Suggests that there was reason for the corrections officer to believe he had a genuine painting, and not a counterfeit. However as this made it to court it may be that the plaintiffs were in a little too deep.
Why MemSQL's Pokemon-themed testing solution dumped VMs for containers
Show HN: Carbide – A New Programming Environment
A couple of years back, I did a little (LITTLE! Very superficial!) research into doing BCD on x86, and if my very fuzzy memory of that time is not totally wrong, the BCD support in x86 was never all that great. Certainly nowhere near the support for arithmetic on fixed-sized binary integers. Also, being mostly unused, Intel had little incentive to to make these instructions run fast.

So there might be programs somewhere that actually use these instructions, but I would not be surprised if there also were programs that do BCD arithmetic without using the x86 BCD instructions. (Especially if these were written in in a HLL, compiled by a compiler that has no idea what you are trying to do.)
I hear you. One way of de-escalating arguments is for people to speak from/about their concrete experiences, like you implicitly did in the last paragraph here. People who disagree strongly seem to find it easier to engage one another through that channel than by arguing in the abstract. Often, one finds that the other person's position is grounded in experiences of their own, even though they may have drawn incorrect conclusions from those experiences. That makes conversation easier.

Conversely, arguments in the abstract that are fueled by emotion coming from personal experience tend to get stuck, and nobody much enjoys them.
If they can kill the competition they can then crank the prices back up and profit of this for years and years. It feels slightly 'evil' but it does make business sense, especially if they know they can outlast their competitors.
Windows 8 won't work on some of the early AMD 64 bit processors because they don't support 128 bit atomic compare and swap.
Planet rotation is 83 days [1]. So no, no perpetual days or nights on Proxima b.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/24/health/proxima-b-centauri-...
To be fair, the HN discussion was mostly focused on the lack of substantial details or an actual research paper to back up that claim. Google would probably need to show that only DeepMind, or an equivalent device, would have been presently likely to find the energy savings that it ended up finding.
Well, yes. That's why the official recommendation from Schneier has been at least Threefish forever.
Term “DAO” considered harmful: Protocols, not organizations
You're absolutely right, of course. I'm not even sure why I thought that made sense when I said it; thanks for catching the oversight.
15 Free Tools to Take Your Side-Hustle to the Next Level
If you're laid off, I'm pretty sure you'll have an easy time getting into a not-big-4-tech-companies. Big 4s are pretty great resume boosters.

It sounds like you lack assertiveness. Its nothing to be ashamed of. Navigating social situations is hard.

Do you like you? Do you have people around you that like you? If you have those things, having a troubled career can be okay. If you don't, you make yourself a lot more vulnerable to bumps along the way.
He should team up with the family and make a collection called "Pete come Peter" - composed of Peter's reinterpretations of original works by Pete.
I thought that was clear. What were you confusing that with? I'm trying to understand what you initially thought it was.
It's holding back positive progress in a number of fields.
Cranky as this is, it's interesting to see the subsequent post about Universal Music Group ending exclusive streaming deals.
>"Venus mean surface temperature is 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F) making Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System. Earth had a similar early atmosphere to Venus, but lost it in the giant impact event."

Ever since I saw it done in the new Universe series, a pet peeve of mine has been treating the giant impact hypothesis as some kind of established fact. Even the name on the wikipedia page includes the term "hypothesis":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis

The hubris surrounding the presentation of that particular hypothesis to the public is really, really awful. I actually stopped watching that new Universe series mid-episode after hearing it presented as fact (this was sometime in the first few episodes, maybe the first episode) and stopped reading this wikipedia page just now.
They do need some way to prevent people from taking a $500 trip on a flat fare.

However, it seems like they could handle that with something like "Must start and end in San Francisco, with a single destination" (meaning, not a "go here, wait for me to get back, then go here" trip).
> if an artist doesn't claim a painting, that should be good enough.

Disagree. While the linked case is indeed ridiculous, I can imagine a scenario where an artist might deny creating a work to harm the work's owner. That's something that clearly falls under tort law and a simple denial shouldn't provide immunity.

If you're mean, there are many ways to make individuals miserable through fringe use of the civil courts. All of it perfectly legal.
The <i> tag in modern HTML does not mean "italics", though the examples given to illustrate its new semantics are all things conventionally set in italics.

"The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts." [0]

Its use for text-as-icon is arguably, despite obviously not being a use classically set in italics, within the defined semantics of the <i> tag.

EDIT: Though FAs use isn't actually text-as-icon, it uses empty tag as an icon. That's not consistent with the semantics of the tag.

[0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-i-...
The first no-brainer that springs to mind is <nav> so that search engines can tell words related to the current page apart from words related to pages you might navigate to.
You're probably talking about sift

https://sift-tool.org/