skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not really sure I completely understand where the conflict is here. Even in the "machine model" the church-turing thesis "fails spectacularly" once you start adding in unreasonable things like halting oracles. TM+Halting oracle > TM. It's just that the TM+halting oracle doesn't exist in our universe, even though you can define it mathematically.

When building a language, it's similarly easy to introduce "unreasonable" things that either require huge complexity to translate to the machine representation or might even be completely unrealizable in the real world! Even ignoring higher types, compiling a C++ program requires a potentially unbounded amount of work because templates are a turing-complete functional programming language. As stated in the article, just determining if a C++ program is valid is undecidable!

Nothing stops you from designing these languages, but you can't say that Church-Turing fails until you consider also the systems required to actually execute these languages in the real world. If you can't, then your programming language is perhaps an interesting mathematical abstraction, but just as useful ultimately as that TM+halting oracle model of computation.
So, the student gets the class at a discount?
There's two options for this (although, not $50 / month):

- Opportunity Overload: http://opportunityoverload.com/

- FE International is a broker that does this: http://feinternational.com/
Error correction is more intuitive for typing - typing errors are usually obvious transpositions or missing characters which our brains easily correct. When a speech recognition engine makes a mistake, it's less obvious to the user and usually more jarring and the word used is an actual word but just wrong in context. This makes it more difficult for the user to decipher. So every if it is more accurate or faster, the cost of inaccuracy seems higher.
Error correction is more intuitive for typing - errors are usually obvious transpositions or missing characters which our brains easily correct. When a speech recognition engine makes a mistake, it's less obvious to the user and usually more jarring and difficult for the user to decipher. So every if it is more accurate or faster, the cost of inaccuracy seems higher.
> In some cases the shovel is better, but you can't effectively compare the two of them.

Too late: the thread you are participating in has already made the comparison from the very beginning. It's like an HN article titled "Local Man uses nuclear-heated shovel to clear snow off driveway" where the first comment is about how JCB and CAT offer superior options...
Totally agreed. I have long been trying to figure out how an incoming graduate student may assess the quality of a professor beyond his academic publications and asking people who work with him. I have come to the conclusion that the best predictor is reputation amongst peers. I may be wrong here, but from what I have seen it usually is the most accurate. The issue is that there is no review site for professors outside of their teaching inside of classrooms. Would be very helpful in selecting mentors, imo.

Maybe even a matching market, much like medical residency in the US.
One more thing,

With pass through entities (eg LLC, K-1), you can accidentally pass on tax liabilities without disbursements. So your investors may be on the hook for taxes without receiving income.

If you are ever planning on seeking investors, do yourself a favor and skip straight to C-corp.
I agree with your point in general, but I'm not sure "unexplained" means the same as "having no explanation". After all, you can "explain" any phenomenon by mass hallucination of everyone who's observed it, or simply chocking it up to an extremely unlikely macroscopic quantum fluctuation. To decide whether something's a satisfactory explanation, you have to look at the a priori probability, not just how well it fits the facts. We don't actually know the a priori probability of detecting life, so it's hard to compare it against the also unknown probabilities of various other previously undiscovered astronomical phenomena, like the proposed "swarm of comets" around Tabby's star.

All that being said, in this case the fact that "SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics" does imply there's nothing in particular here to get excited about. But you know, all those other signals could have been aliens too...
Results come from multiple sources (backend servers) and it would be too computational expensive to look for duplicates before the user paginates. That's also the reason why Google used to print "about XY results".

I've seen genuine users click 'next' on 50 or even 100 pages, the absolute majority is scripts and scrapers though. I used to work on web search analysis for a large search engine.
Where Are the Aliens? [Life before Earth, 2013]
Publisher BulkyPix is being liquidated, allegedly stiffing devs in the process
Hi StavrosK,

you're absolutely right :) We did change it recently. Now Netlify Pages (Free plan) includes Custom Domain and HTTPS. It also gives you Continuous Delivery. Again, completely free of charge.

Lastly, any open source project get's the Pro Plan (normally $49 per month) for free as well :)
There is a decent documentary that watches a few teams respond to "Gun Violence" (1). It was basically a tour of people shooting themselves or their family. A bizarre left turn into mental health questions and responsibilities. It is clear that, of ~33k gun deaths (2) - most are suicides. Meanwhile, homicide is almost non-exisitant (3) - but it is all i see on the news :(

1) http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/requiem-for-the-dead-americ...

2) "11,208 homicides (3.5 per 100,000); 21,175 suicides; 505 deaths due to accidental/negligent discharge of a firearm; and 2818 deaths due to firearms-use with "undetermined"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

3) http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-16/fbi-us-homicide-rat...
From the SMhasher page:

> The hash table attacks described in SipHash... cannot not be the problem of the hash function, but the hash table collision resolution scheme. You can attack every single hash function, even the best and most secure if you detect the seed, e.g. from the sort-order, so you need to protect your collision handling scheme from the worst-case O(n)...

> I.e. the usage of siphash for their hash table in Python 3.4, ruby, rust, systemd, OpenDNS, Haskell and OpenBSD is pure security theatre. siphash is not secure enough for security purposes and not fast enough for general usage. ... Provable secure is only uniform hashing, i.e. 2-5 independent Mult or Tabulation, or using a guaranteed logarithmic or linear collision scheme, such as Robin Hood or Cockoo hashing.
From what I've been able to tell with a bit of Googling, at the time the metric system was first developed the definitions of its basic units was somewhat fuzzy since they were based on physical quantities that weren't actually know very accurately or precisely.

The same was true for Imperial units at the time.

So why on God's name didn't someone figure out then that they could save the future a lot of pain if they defined the relationship between metric and Imperial lengths as 1 inch exactly equals 25 millimeters?

Also, I have been able to find no justification for the Celsius temperature scale. The only knock I've heard against Fahrenheit is that it was originally defined by setting the 0 point at the coldest temperature Fahrenheit was able to produce in his lab, and 100 at the temperature of the human body.

Celsius used a couple of more easily reproducible points to define his scale: 0 was the boiling point of water, and 100 was the freezing point of water. (Yes, you read that right. Celsius actually made his scale so that colder had higher numbers. Nearly everyone thought that was stupid, so they turned it around).

But I don't see why switching to boiling/freezing of water as your anchor points required a new scale. Why didn't they just change the definition of Fahrenheit to water freezes at 32 and boils at 212? That would have solved the problem of the anchor points being hard to reproduce accurately, without requiring switching to new thermometers.
>> When you find bugs in your code do you throw up your hands and proclaim that it could be anywhere so it's too hard to find and fix?

My rule of thumb for reasoning about things other than code: your code is like your code, and nothing else is quite like your code.

Ergo, don't expect that you can fix everything that's wrong with the Western civilisation just 'cause you can debug something you hacked together in a week or so.
Why do they not allow the inspection of the results past 1,000

It's probably a lot more work sorting the 1000th best result than the top 10 or 100. Imagine a stadium full of people (your search results) and a guy at the podium asking for the tallest 10 people (top 10 results). You can do this efficiently by getting the tallest person from each section of the stadium, and then lining them up by height and taking the first 10 (sharding). But if you ask for 10 tallest people between 5'7.5613" and 5'7.5614" you're going to have thousands of people to sort, and very little to differentiate them (long tail).
I doubt it's worth your time to do this, but it depends on who (and where) the customer is. I'd leave this up to the legal agreement and consider part of the (high) price tag to be compensating you for the (low) likelihood of wrongdoing on their part.
Mass Network to Offer Bitcoin-Based Solution to Online Advertising
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12402047
What would stop journals from blacklisting scientists who publish their articles under open access laws? Would anyone publish their article if they knew it meant never being able to publish in Nature again?
If you need more than static hosting, there are quite good VPS that are very cheap. I regularly go to a blog which lists cheap VPSs called LowEndBox (you can easily find it using any web search engine, I don't want this comment to be an advertisement, even if the whole point of this thread seems to be exactly that).

For instance I recently purchased small VPSs at $11/yr (yes, per year) with the following specs: 1 vCPU, 768MB ram, 15GB disk, 3GB monthly bandwidth, 1Gbps link, 1 IPv4, 30 IPv6 (and "DDoS protection" whatever that means).

I use them for example to host various copies of my website (as a Tor Hidden Service (.onion), as a EepSite (.i2p), on IPFS, and on ZeroNet). I also have one that I only use as MX backup since I self-host my emails.

None of this would be possible even on multiples $ per month static hosting offers, or even on AWS as some suggest here, and yet it costs me less than a dollar per month :).
Redesigning the Office - A van-to-mobile-office conversion
That was (very clearly) sarcasm.
Looking at the sentence structure I'm afraid it's obvioua toe he was still talking about the comparison of the two, he mentions both in the post, and the context of talking about the comparison is there.

Regardless, his/her interlocutor has hopefully had their eyes opened by the conversation, in which they said that even making the comparison was offensive.
It's not the job. If that was the job they'd hire kids out of high school to do it.
Thanks! When I see brutalism it conveys a sense of purpose and always looks futuristic. I guess I understand why people don't like it, but in my opinion, many of the buildings are much more interesting than seemingly cookie cutter modern glass towers.

Edit: wording
Given that Tesla, OpenAI, and SpaceX are successful, what does Elon work on next?
> The mapping exists, just not necessarily within the language

In practice, people write their programs in a programming language. Some languages (e.g., C, Java, Lisp) only provide leaky abstractions, so programmers always have access to the internal representation of everything, to the detriment of modularity. But there are languages (e.g., Standard ML) that aren't hobbled in this way.

> Those all speak to the issue of how difficult it is (for e.g. a human) to implement the function, not whether language/computation model can compute it at all.

No. In Standard ML, writing a function that inspects the representation of an abstract type isn't “difficult” - it's literally impossible. If you want to do it, you have to use a different language. The type system enforces the separation of concerns, so that you don't have to rely on your discipline alone.

> If you have a computation for which no TM (or asm, C, etc program) exists that computes it, let us know!

Re-read my sentence. I was talking about the converse: There exist programming languages that don't allow you to do everything the target machine can do.
It was a true iron age.

Do you have any refs on the Earth's appearance at the time?
Very cool!

A killer feature, if you don't already have it, is to have researchers answer a set of questions then leverage their answers to apply for many grants at once or pre-populate 70% of an application.

We've been working on the other side of this problem, improving how research labs track and spend their funding effectively.

https://labspend.com/

Feel free to reach out as we're both trying to reach a similar set of people.
My Views on Mark Zuckerberg Visit to Nigeria
> It will not catch on unless a privacy device is made so that people in office enivonements csn do it without disturbing their co-workers.

The privacy device is called "an individual office", and its pretty important for people in "office environments" to be effective, independently of use of voice recognition.

They've been around for quite a while, but their popularity goes up and down periodically.
Your first line of defense will be contracts/lawyers. Make it clear unauthorized access is stealing of trade secrets or such.
You can encrypt the file system which needs somebody to type in a password (via a remote console) after every reboot. Ideally it's rare and you have two servers of course.
> This comes out to 2-3 months extra per year per person.

That's what I just said...

> The real question is...

Not really. I was just pointing out that your amazing free month of rent isn't really amazing at all.
> I'd suggest you look for _productive C++ developers_ that know their limitations. I think you might even get better candidates that way.

It sounds like they are. The "expert" is a self described one.
How is it possible for Hashcat to crack a 20 character long random password in 6ms? That is mind boggling.

I thought he was just going to hash the password and see if it fit the leaked hash, but no, it looks like he actually did the reverse and cracked the hash to see if it fit the password, right?

Edit: oh it looks like he provided the password to hashcat in the form of a psudo 'dictionary' to use. So Hashcat was not really cracking it - just iterating through a 1 word dictionary - like he said.
Scientists discover 3.7B-year-old fossils
I'm a big fan of Looker[1]. It's one of the best BI tools I've used and it lets you work with SQL but abstracts away much of the minutiae of writing it. It's an enterprise SaaS app, although they do allow you to self host.

For side projects and such I use Metabase[2] which is open source and pretty useful for giving business users access to query data. Its visualizations are rudimentary but workable.

1. https://looker.com

2. https://github.com/metabase/metabase
> What would stop journals from blacklisting scientists who publish their articles under open access laws?

Nothing; of course, that just hastens the death of the journal system.
It should take 5 minutes for an entry level dev.
Interesting. The plot thickens.

I don't have any fancy script to check these addresses - I have to go into my spam headers manually, and I've not done that for a long time. Perhaps there was a common issue a while ago that got patched. I'll have to check whether modern addresses are being spammed.
I worked on Readability for its launch. I remember they had difficulty monetising it. But more importantly, the firm that built it, Arc90 (now Postlight), was acquired by SFX a few years ago who has no interest in that space. I'm surprised it has stayed up this long.
On front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401042
The Impossible Dream: Computing e to 116000 Places on a Personal Computer (1980)
There is definitely some of that (but then he spends some time discussing why modern hunter-gatherers can be a poor representation for prehistoric ones). May be an overreaction to the old sentiment about "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives of prehistoric humans.

Also, there is little surprise that different value systems provide different value judgments. According to hunter-gatherers our lifestyle would surely be described as terribly sedentary and full of anxiety about tomorrow.

As for me, I find evidence that human brain could actually decrease in size throughout history a good reason not to be so smug about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans.
If that's the case (and if GP's analysis is correct) then the post title seems misleading to me.

Further, it sounds like wash.io was doing the natural thing in an environment of rising real estate prices -- move the big bulky machines somewhere else (where the real estate is cheaper) and pickup/deliver.
Assuming the size of the decompressor isn't larger than the savings you gained from using this compression algo over another...
EBay tech blog on one time code authentication using FSM
What are his thoughts on the role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in medicine?
You do realize this can not ever work :)?
Whats the policy for dealing with abusers?
(Imagines poles and fires.....)
What would you want to learn from this course? Are you looking for a strategy or an explanation on how options/spreads/etc. work or something else entirely?
This is excellent news. The people of a country should absolutely have access to the research they have funded. France has taken an important step in standing up to the anachronistic publishing cartels who siphon public money in order to lock down rather than disseminate knowledge. Here's to hoping the rest of the world follows this example.
How would 250 million horses pissing and shitting everywhere, plus needing to be stabled, fed, and used on a daily basis be better? I'd need to see more analysis before I believe that what worked 100 years ago would scale up to what would be needed today without serious problems, environmental and otherwise.
In a related bit of paleogeology, a large share of iron ore, particularly banded iron formations (BIF) date from about this time -- they're typically about 1.2 - 3.7 billion years old, and date to the periods of early life, a large amount of free molecular (unoxidised) iron, a methane atmosphere, and early cyanobacteria whose metabolic waste product was oxygen. This combined with free dissolved iron in early oceans, precipitated out as iron oxides, and left the deposits now mined for ores. Exhaustion of the dissolved iron resource lead to a rise in atmospheric oxygen (poisonous to the cyanobacteria), a depletion of the methane which served to warm the Earth under the light of a much cooler sun, and resulted in a half-billion year "Snowball Earth" period -- an earlier form of overzealous biological organisms triggering catastrophic environmental pollution and climate change.

I find it fascinating to think about how and where minerals came from (iron originates in stellar fusion, it's the low point of the atomic potential curve, and hence you cannot fuse nor fission iron nuclei to release energy), and how they came to be organised in deposits. Many minerals are concentrated through prior biological activity -- iron, limestone, and of course, coal and petroleum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation

(Edit: Corrected erronious initial explanation of iron deposition -- precipitation, not biological binding.)
Indeed. They got $2M in funding - must have run out of money and not been able to secure follow-up funding. Unfortunate.
> Somewhat ironically, our conversation here highlights why it is important. If you initially tested these three lines of code to your satisfaction and didn't find the bug, how could you assume that your unit tests would catch the bug?

If you can't define the behavior for such a simple function how are they supposed to know if it's working or not? Several posts later you still haven't. Is foo meant to append to the array? Is it meant to initialize a new one? Is it meant to create one if it's null?
There is no shortage of delusional people eager to sign up for this kind of serfdom.
Wait in the US this already happens, so is this law just France catching up to the US?
Build products people use or create products people would want to use?
How's Tesla or SpaceX doing it?
> How do hospitals hire doctors? How do law firms hire lawyers?

Both of those examples have rigorous training requirements before it's even legal to call yourself one and even then they still have some level of fraud.

Anyone can call themselves a programmer and the only real world requirement is being able to program.
it should be written as "Cheap Labor". I can vouch this as I went to graduate school where I worked for 5 years at 8-10 hours/day including Saturday and Sunday for $12,000/year to get a PhD in Biological Science. And it was in one of the most expensive state in US. So could not afford to start a family because of perpetual state of sharing apartment and not enough money and time to go out and find a partner. And at the end I was very delighted to get a post-doc position for $40,000 year at a small town. After working for few years I was burn out due to constant pressure/stress of writing grant to bring money instead of doing real research so ended of quitting science. Now working in a completely different field with much better work-life balance and great salary. Now a days every time I meet an aspirant scientist ready to jump for PhD, I have just one suggestion to them. If you can get into top 2-3 school then go. Else do not waste your time and energy.
Might be useful to link this on the front page too. Also, I usually do a "<ctrl-f> rss" to try to find a link when it doesn't show up in Pocketcasts.
Sorry, dang. Posting this wasted a small but irretrievable part of our lives and was a bad decision all round.

Please remove this chain of comments, or the whole account, if you want.
Yeah, sure, why not :)
I will have some spare time at the weekend, so then I will try to implement evenything that has been proposed in the feedback that i've got.
Can you going into some details about this? Like proofs?
Why not just use keychain?
Slide 4 here has one: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12405967/ANSsem.pdf
> From the TOC perspective, there is no such thing as functions at all.

I agree with you on this one. What actually exists in computing is procedures, which may or may not compute functions. For instance, even in Haskell, so-called “functions” may call `error` or diverge.

However, it's very useful to treat extensionally equal procedures (considering both their effects and their final results) as equal, even if they're syntactically different. This is the basis for compiler optimizations. And the lambda calculus (suitably extended with effectful computations) is better equipped than any machine model to make this identification.

(OTOH, the lambda calculus is a grossly inadequate foundation for concurrency, which is about communication, rather than computation. The main solution I've seen proposed by proponents of functional languages, namely, abusing callCC to get something like cooperative concurrency, is very, very, very bad.)

> Interpreting a computation as one computing functions on the natural numbers or any other set is an entirely interpretive activity that is external to the computation itself.

In practice, people care about the meaning they ascribe to the symbols with which they compute. We use symbols to denote. A meaningless symbol might as well never have been computed at all.