skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, to an extent. When you actually study history of mathematics, you find many ideas swept under the rug as they are for whatever reason making some people uncomfortable. Simple example is a material implication, precisely handling false antecedents in binary logic (90% of population finds it weird as it doesn't correspond to their thought processes). The problem of its adoption was solved by waiting for logicians that didn't accept it to die. Arguably, this very logical connective is the cause of Goedel's incompleteness problem and some logics that reject it such as Relevance logic get to almost complete systems but are way more complicated (though also way more logical to lay persons and arguably more similar to how humans think). There is a reason why medicine doesn't use mathematical logic and rather is based on counter-factuals.

So you can compare current mathematics to be like a certain programming language. Let's say it's like FORTRAN. There might be C++ for the same concepts, there might be Python, Smalltalk, Prolog or Haskell for the same concepts, but everything you read is in FORTRAN. And very few people like or are capable reading FORTRAN.
This approach is what took my math skills to the next level. I would also frequently skip exercises and forget material that I learned previously. Since I started adding exercise books to my study routine I have seen enormous gains in knowledge retention and my ability to build on concepts already learned. It also doesn't have to be Olympiad style, there are also Math Circles and the general Problems in {Area} book, like one of my favorites Sequences, Combinations, Limits.
September 2016:

"Rhino horn acquisition in China is mostly reported for its investment value"

"The art and antiques market is a new threat to rhino conservation"

"Chinese rhino horn auction records (n = 7,042, 2000–2011) showed a significant positive correlation between the volume of rhino horn auctioned in China and the number of rhinos poached in South Africa"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716...
> I must not have driven any good automatics then

Probably not. Modern autos like CVTs don't actually even shift, not in the way that a manual or very old fashioned automatic. They can feel a little mushy, but on modern generation vehicles power is pretty instantaneous and about as continuous as you can get in a non-electric vehicle. They aren't "fun" though and tend to be built to maximize efficiency over speed or power. But they're mathematically more responsive than any manual could be and they're effectively always in the "right" gear, up/down shifting doesn't really make sense.

Other than the occasional rental or when riding in my friend's cars, and between our household cars and the occasional electric I've been in, I haven't felt a gear shift in a couple years. It actually feels a little alarming these days when you do feel one. Manuals are worse, they don't feel fun anymore, they feel like there's something mechanically wrong with the car.

Because of these qualities, most racing leagues have banned CVTs, since a performance oriented CVT would outperform any other shifting strategy in most kinds of racing. It was tried out by Williams decades ago for F1 and is said to have been astonishingly faster since it kept the engine in peak torque. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3UpBKXMRto

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2007/05/03/banned-continuously-va...

http://www.rstreet.org/2014/07/15/the-twisting-tale-of-the-c...

But the industry is starting to move beyond CVTs now and direct drive is starting to hit cars. Teslas are like this, but even some consumer hybrids don't have any sort of gearing anymore. CVTs beat manuals for shift speed, but direct drive, because there's no such thing, beat CVTs. These are both the correct answer, manuals are some sort of weird vestigial technology that clings on because of all kinds of weird myths about performance and efficiency and notions about what's "fun".

I'll toss this out, a ludicrous launch in a Tesla is much more fun than any ICE engine transmission system.
Certainly I started thinking about better ways once this image made it clear what we (humans) are dealing with here.

I can imagine a cage-like outer shell where the robot inside is able to rotate on two axes under power. Let it tumble any which way and then use sensors to determine the correct orientation and right itself.

NASA has a concept for this:
https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/tenseg...
Even if you don't use an actual harbor but just a "harbor", you need control of that area or someone you sell the drugs to needs to have that control.

You also need people that put money on the drone. No point in shipping the drugs, if you don't have a way to transport the proceeds into the other direction.
Backing up the password manager data (provided you did store all passwords in there, and that you don't forget at least the master password) would _definitely_ help in this scenario.
I don't think this article is rolling anything too low-level by hand.

Avoiding allocations is generally good advice. Compilers have a hard time eliminating them for you and so you can't be guaranteed that the compiler will eliminate a pointless optimization. Any allocation that isn't eliminated brings you one step closer to a GC, and it makes sense to optimize GCs away.

Using bitfields is a classic trick that is harder to do for the implementation than it is for the user. If an implementation wanted to turn a bunch of boolean fields into a bitfield, it would have to first prove that they are all boolean, then it would have to recompile all accesses to those fields into bitfield accesses, and then it would have to walk the whole heap to make sure that there weren't any more objects that used the old shape (separate fields) instead of the new one (bitfield). You could skip the last step if boolean fields were always eagerly represented as bitfields (which would surely slow down start-up time, something that JS implementations don't want to do because page loading is so important) or if you were happy to live with objects having both representations simultaneously (which would slow down every access). I'm guessing that a good implementation would wait for the next GC after realizing that a cluster of fields is proved boolean, and then it would reshape those objects while GCing. So, it would be one of those "maybe you'll get it if you're lucky" optimizations that make you look good on benchmarks but won't really help developers. Even if an implementation did have any version of this trick - even one that worked eagerly, there are so many parts to the proof burden for the optimization that the smart play for users would still be to do the optimization themselves rather than hope that the compiler gets it right.

Finally, I love the no-op function trick. This is not a low-level optimization at all! It's just a simple and clever way to structure your code that results in you getting to hook into the JS implementation's existing watchpoint optimizations: JS VMs will certainly set a watchpoint on a global function pointer that has been immutable so far, and they will definitely inline calls to that function via that global pointer subject to that watchpoint. So, by doing something that looks perfectly clean at a high level you are getting some really gnarly optimizations for free.
Sometimes they are trying to deceive people though: Not about the spec, but about their own certitude and level of technical expertise.
Do we have a better source than the "World Socialist Web Site"?
> Other reasons are the case-insensitivity and complexity
> of current Lisp systems.

I hope they're not trying to imply that CL is case-insensitive...

This is definitely an opionated language, and that can be a good thing. It seems that the conveniences of CL/Scheme/Clojure (particularly CL and Chez Scheme) doesn't really result in huge performance penalties, at least the kind the FAQ is talking about.
It's not doing very much before validating, which would reduce the risk. But more importantly it doesn't have any information to leak. The whole block of data is public.
Excellent - I will be submitting an app today. Assuming I had the correct person, I send you a note on LinkedIn, but if you prefer email I have it in my profile here. Thanks again.
The Facts of Life
This is stupid. The hard part about a Math degree is the number of hours you have to put in. If you cannot go to university full time, go part time. If you cannot go part time, you don't have enough time to actually learn any of these topics on your own.

I've done these classes. It's typically 150 hours per class and it's not something you do after coming exhausted home from work either. After those 150 hours you'll get a basic understanding of the topic. You won't be an expert by any means. That will require more exposure, more time.

The lectures themselves are not that useful, I find. The lecturers are mostly useful in guiding you along, telling you which aspects of the theory to focus on and weeding through the study material to deliver you the best bits. The problem sets are indispensable. Exams make sure you actually know the basics in depth instead of just knowing about them.

My advice: enrol part-time, take one class at a time, catch up on the lectures and do the problem sets and the homework over the weekend.
Just because something seems obvious does not mean that it is.

Famously, for example, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead prove in Volume II of their Principia Mathematica, using theorem 54.43 from page 379, Volume I, that 1+1=2 (adding that "the above proposition is occasionally useful.")

Now, that is clearly obvious to everyone, and yet what Russell and Whitehead achieved in the intervening 400+ pages was more than just obfuscation.
The recent SpaceX event was not a launch. It was a test a few days before the scheduled launch.
China is capable of doing this now that they have wrenched themselves out of poverty. Africa has hardly even begun to make significant progress and that is largely a prerequisite for these conservation programs to be functional. They need both capital and strong rule of law to enforce it.

Poaching and black markets are quite effective in dysfunctional states and/or places with questionable ethical bases of cultures in regards to animal exploitation (traditional justifications, deprioritization towards longstanding human issues, rerouting of funding to corrupt officials, etc, etc).

Hopefully Congo and other surrounding countries manages to deal with this problem. Gorillas are some of the most interesting and intelligent animals on the planet and heavily relevant to us understanding our own human history.

Maybe there aren't many people like Jane Goodall left with influence in the local governments to protect them like in the old British colonial days. I remember reading how she married a local politician who invested quite a bit in creating large Gorilla habitats.
Odd that 7 years later, and JS build tools still don't match the level of optimization you get in Closure Compiler.

IMHO, the speed of the build tool is less of a priority than the speed of the code it produces. You pay the cost of the build tool mostly in integration tests or production builds but shouldn't pay it during development.

However your users pay for inefficiencies times the number of times the app is loaded. The state of JS tooling is woefully behind other languages and IMHO still behind the state of the art 5 years ago. Any non trivial sized app for example will require global dead code analysis and method and field level pruning as your dependencies grow over the lifetime of your app, all apps tend to bloat from unneeded code pulled in.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/31/fbi_wants_adult_conv...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/31/encryptio...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2469296/fbi-directo...

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world...

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/293786-comey-targets...
Performance is complex, in this case the performance is measured in computing capacity for a $ or computing capacity per Watt, and all that at yields not substantially worse than what Silicon can already do.

Just size, clock frequency or any other single parameter does not indicate viability of a technology.
> To turn it around, every time I see a cloudflare captcha they obviously have failed.

They how can you tell when they succeeded?

Your perspective is one-sided because you are always a good guy.
This is the actual text of his speech:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/the-fbis-approach-to-the-c...

I must admit, I'm impressed the old stalinist organisations are still being funded. That's almost making his point for him.
There have been several articles recently about the FBI's "concern" about encryption. Here's one that got a lot of discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237868
The basic physics may be the same now and in the 60's, but there is allot that can be done better in the rocket building industry.

Lutz Kayser (of OTRAG [1]) once said that rocketry currently is like "transporting potatoes in a Rolls-Royce".

Build inexpensive, modular rockets like OTRAG, that can be clustered (and possible reused) and you may cut at least some cost out of the equation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG
> There have been countless times that I was working on some formula which looked good to me, and even had correct results (some of the time), only to find that it was completely backwards when someone else looked at.

I think many people forget that THIS is what a Scientist is. Someone subjected to their peers. This humble way of looking at things (that our work isn't accepted until it's verified/peer-reviewed), is our way of life. It's a shame to me that the current culture has a massive backlog of research, without peer review.

I'm grateful for your reply as it will give others insight into the 'less trodden path' of trying things yourself. It worked for you, so that should motive others. And hopefully I added to the conversation to encourage others to seek out peers/mentors, since that will accelerate their learning.
I guess it varies from person to person. I don't get much from lectures personally. Just go there to force myself to go through some proofs of major theorems cause otherwise I know I wouldn't.

I don't recall ever asking a lecturer anything. Whenever I'm stuck I like to double down and stare the sheet until I do some progress.

And unlike you, I most definitely don't feel like a genius in class lol.
Not a very good analogy. It's more like "Now that anyone can use a word processor, is type-setting dead?", to which the answer is yep, pretty much.

Or "Now that anyone can cut a vinyl sign, is sign-painting dead?" Same answer.
Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis
As you say, it's far harder for Americans to get regular consumer bank accounts at big Swiss banks than it used to be.

On the other hand, it's hard not to see at least some banks as (still) having a culture of helping foreign customers evade their governments. E.g. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis...:

"Birkenfeld himself had provided a variety of “concierge” tax-evasion services: he once bought diamonds for an American client, then smuggled them into the U.S. inside a toothpaste tube.

"A 2014 U.S. Senate report describes a Credit Suisse banker travelling to America to meet a client for breakfast at a Mandarin Oriental hotel, and passing along an issue of Sports Illustrated in which account statements were concealed between the pages."
There's also "Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller" written by Neil Stephenson in 1988, who's written a lot of other classic cyberpunk you may have heard of.

>The protagonist is inspired by environmental chemist Marco Kaltofen. Taylor is a recreational user of nitrous oxide, justifying his choice of drug by the eponymous Sangamon's principle: "the simpler the molecule, the better the drug".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(novel)
How do these various organizations know you are running a relay?
Ask HN: What is the value of a website that is on the first page of Google?
I run a website that is ranked on the first page on Google for quite a valuable keyword.

When you search for this particular keyword, Google shows over 450 million results.

The website has about 5000+ unique visitors a month.

The actual website does not generate any money as I'm not selling any products/services or advertising.

I've now been approached by a company that is interested in buying the website due to its placing on Google.

How would you value such a website? I assume it is more a question of how much value the potential acquirer perceives rather than hard numbers.

Please share your thoughts.
Wonderful book, btw, for maths as a hobby is "Proofs from THE BOOK" [1].

One of Erdős's quirky notions was THE BOOK, in which God collected the most elegant and wonderful mathematical proofs. He said "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in THE BOOK."

The book above collects some wonderful proofs that could have made it into THE BOOK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK
Developer Anarchy or Extreme Agile
u have to measure and pick your battles. Im gonna try the int bool trick later to see if there are any gains.
require('style!css!../css/style.css');

What is this I don't even.
Thanks for the info!

You're definitely right about rc.local -- I mostly mentioned it as sort of the "greatest common denominator" of boot-time config across Linux distributions. Systemd notwithstanding, every distribution has (had?) its own method of setting the vtty keymap. I didn't know that about Debian's config, though -- that's really neat, and imho how such config should be done (though I'm a Slacker myself).

A couple of the more "BSD-ish" distributions do have an rc.conf.local (CRUX comes to mind, and iirc Arch had one in the pre-systemd days). Slackware, at least, still has an rc.local, and it's always the last step in multiuser boot (init 3, or just before the display manager is launched in init 4).

Thanks for the FreeBSD info, as well. Unfortunately, my (admittedly ancient) HDD crashed in my FreeBSD box recently (relatedly, if you know where I can find some big-ass IDE/PATA HDDs, I'm on the market... seems like NewEgg doesn't even sell IDE drives anymore, and Amazon's selection is rather shit).

nosh sounds really cool. How have I not heard of this before?!

Anyway, thanks for the learning :)
It is scientifically useful, but mostly people are just pleasantly surprised that the proverbial needle in the haystack was actually found before the mission of Rosetta itself ends, and happy to get closure for the story of the little probe that went MIA. It's an emotional response first and foremost, just being human.
Is Arch missing emacs.map?
I was thinking the same thing. Even a link to an official government site with a transcript of the speech would be helpful. It's very hard to take a Marxist/Leninist site seriously.

Kevin Reed wrote the story as a primary account -- given his credentials, I doubt he was in attendance, thus begging the question: what was his source? Zero attribution.

I don't even care about the content as much as I care that anything pretending to be journalism ought to at least provide some attribution. Even Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh provide links/soundclips/etc.

By the way, I am not necessarily defending Breitbart or Rush.. merely pointing out that even agenda driven reporting and commentary provides some means for verification other than just 'trust me, he really said it!'

It is ironic that a Marxist/Leninist website would be worried about privacy and encryption rights. A political philosophy that brought us the NKVD, the KGB and the Stasi.
Are you saying that 10k CUDA cores executed the same workload 50 times faster than 10k CPU cores?
Titles article about Plan 9, ... proceeds to rave about Forth performance and dev time...
What else do we lose when we lose sight of the stars?
They both have magical powers.
> So, indirectly the US put Germany on a the road to become the most powerful country in Europe

i'm no geopolitical or history expert (i just like to travel and observe) but i don't think it was indirect at all. germany (and central europe in general) has shown that unless it is powerful, rich and well-integrated with the rest of the world, it will lead to very, very bad things. if you've ever been to germany and talked with normal people, they are absolutely convinced that their way is the best. this is something to be harnessed and directed, not rejected.

the post-war plan was to ensure that happened, on our terms. the soviets nearly fucked it all up, but thankfully we won that war also. we drive around in german cars, the whole of europe borrows their money, we eat their food, drink their beer, buy their overpriced coffee grinders and other assorted bauhaus-influenced home goods, and that makes everybody happy. we're all nice and fat and contented with our shiny and delicious german stuff and stuff financed by german cash, and they don't feel the need to forcibly take over the world to shove it down our throats (or worse). it's a fantastic arrangement that's worked out swimmingly so far.

fwiw, the refugee crisis and mass immigration from the middle east into this region concerns me.

p.s. the same goes for japan too, except their border policy is basically completely racist (even though in my experience japanese people are extremely friendly and open-minded -- it's a very strange and unique dichotomy) so they'll just invent robots to do the work that the non-existant immigrants would have done. german industrial robots are no slouch but so far the domestic/service situation is still handled by people, as far as i can tell. in japan they're trying to automate away all that inconvenient people-to-people stuff.
So why the heck would someone post a link to the least credible 'news' site to share this story?
> Perhaps the author of this post has selected those that are more appropriate [for autodidacts]

The Springer SUMS series (which appears on this list a couple of times) is very nice for autodidacts, so your conjecture could well be correct.
I drive a Hyundai that has a navigation system. I purchased it in 2010. I have to dish out $250 or something at the dealer to get updated maps. The nav system's update process is password-locked so I can't just do it myself.
A Seattle vigilante who beats the police to bike thieves
> The message isn't even about load time performance, it's about runtime optimizations.

There tends to be a fetishization of load time and time to paint performance on web, and gross neglect of run time performance and user experience once the web app loads. Some devs seem to forget someone is going to want to actually interact with this thing once it loads and 5fps needlessly jittery, janky UI (among other things) has contributed to the death of mobile web altogether in favor of native apps.
Now I have been censored by Facebook
What is a system call in Forth? NEXT (load an address and jump to it)? If so, yes, forth "system calls" are faster than Plan 9s, but only because Forth doesn't have the separation of user-/kernel land. It's really not a fair comparison.
Ask HN: What is the most economical method of developing iOS apps?
I have a Windows laptop and for the foreseeable future I won't be able to afford a new Mac computer but I want to develop in xCode, because I am learning React Native and I feel limited without a Mac. It also would increase my job opportunities in freelancing as well as finding a job. A job I am interviewing for uses X Code to create all their React Native apps. Is there a way for me to develop with X Code that is economical? Is getting a Mac the only option? And if so, what is the most economical way of obtaining a Mac?
Found it on reddit, sorry.