skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work on IBM Streams, which was discussed and dismissed. The author is correct that we need to have more public benchmarks. I think our system should be in the upper right of the high-level view, but of course I would think that, as someone who works on it.

Something I can point to is a modified Linear Road benchmark: https://github.com/IBMStreams/benchmarks/tree/master/Streams...

This benchmark was made at the request of a potential customer. Our implementation scaled to 200 "lanes." The other systems tested did not scale past 50. Unfortunately, that's as much as I feel I can say until I speak with some of the people involved in the comparison.
It's a good start, and something that's very useful for people coding HTML emails.

That said, we still need to get this sort of thing in Microsoft Outlook, and both that and Gmail really need to support CSS to something of a normal standard, like with say Apple Mail or what not. There's no real reason email standards should be different to browser ones, except with the former not having Javascript included.
People earning below US minimum wage (in purchasing power terms) are not slaves. Those at the margins would benefit from being employed. It teaches them valuable skills that improve their position for the future.
Washington Post calls for prosecution of Snowden, who leaked docs to paper
Guys guys hear me out ... the solution is to use "middle in" (not to be confused with middle out from Pied Piper).

If you download from front and back simultaneously only the middle blocks would be scarce and you still get at least half your original streaming rate. And no weirdo will stop watching midway through a movie.
If you change something that has that many parameters there's a very high chance you will introduce a bug. You better have a test for each variations. Or simply keep them separate so that they do not affect each other.
I was playing around with Firebase a bit during the last few days.

My biggest complaint so far: they haven't made the unminified source for the JS client available! You go on npm and you get the minified source. How is that acceptable? Heck, it's completely pointless too, because if I really wanted to "steal" the source I could prettify it and clean it up. It'd take a bit of effort, but it doesn't protect or hide anything. The reason why I wanted to use firebase was so I could hack up something quick. But as I was wiring stuff up, I got confused with their docs and figured I'd take a look at the source... Only to find a minified mess.

On top of that, they're not developing the project in the open. There's no public repo, so you can't contribute. I tweeted at them earlier today; hopefully it's an oversight and they fix it.

Otherwise, it's unlikely I'll consider ever using firebase for anything, if they continue with these anti-developer practices.
DRY is a problem because it's so catchy and seems so self-explanatory.

The original formulation of DRY spoke in terms of information. Any piece of information should exist in exactly one place in your code. As I've said before, modulo some caveats related to double-entry bookkeeping, this seems exactly right. An inveighing against anything that looks repetitive is not.

The goal is not compression, it's ease of understanding and ease of making correct modifications.

I've started using "Huffman coding" to refer to the practice of misapplying DRY by deduplicating superficial similarity rather than information content.
> 9. Eat your frogs first. Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when you are fresh.

I agree with that in general, but I do also find that it's much less intimidating to start out on something easy (so you're more likely to start) and also helps you to ease into a state of focus. In college I would usually start with a reading (while taking reading notes) since it was something I knew I could always do without too much fuss. Afterward, it was much easier to start in on thornier stuff.
And now they're apparently threatening Valve with legal action in response:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1280358

'Brilliant' move there guys!
The article fails to cover that this course is actually short and simple unlike the other MOOC courses which contributes to the success of this course. Maybe there is a lesson here for other MOOCs which is make your courses more byte sized and simple so people can actually complete them instead of putting your class room course as is online.
I could not do this in a satisfactory way -- I admit it was a poor choice of words that I spent some time making.

Do you think it would be good to be much more specific? I worry the "ask" tab would be a mess if it were filled with such threads. I'm also uneasy with the relevant terminology.
a lot of the hams i've known in the past were/are former military, emergency services, police, or other kind of public safety servant. i imagine their collective voice in the arrl holds a lot of sway.

also, some of them are older and retired and can spend basically unlimited amounts of time on their hobby, including the lobbying.
I always wish we could go back to plaintext emails.
>Needing to bounce all over the codebase to figure out what those little functions are actually doing is hugely distracting while I'm trying to read.

Ideally those functions should be named such that their jobs are fairly obvious.
Fucking hate sites which hijack my browser's back button!
Its a DaaS. That's literally what it's for. That's like saying, why would you use the cloud? That's silly. Host it in your closet like we all did in the 90's, because that never caused any problems... Or what, use firebase only for chat data? So when you leave the company, some junior has to figure out 10 different places that the data is coming from when his boss starts breathing down his neck? Sounds like a freakin nightmare. There's nothing wrong with trying to keep things simple.
That doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around. A reasonable compromise would be to use any "spare" bandwidth to fetch random blocks.
NSF Small Business Technology Transfer Program Phase I for Startups
"...I don't see an obvious connection between matter and consciousness even if they are linked in some way."

Dualism has worse problems, though. If there is no connection between consciousness and matter, how do psychoactive substances alter consciousness? How do conscious decisions cause material movements?
Current thinking is that nicotine isn't "addictive" unless coadministered with monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which happen to be present in tobacco
Thank you - that is my point.
But: they try!

To not do anything is silly. I lock the door to my house. Can you pick a lock: Yes. And that is the point. Do something.
Much damage is done by people with too much time on their hands.
If one wants to treat all expressions as functions, they're far far better off with a proper functional language built on lambda calculus and the power of full function composition primitives.

Most projects fail badly trying to twist OOP to get there. The code patterns are so predictable, its not even a surprise anymore.
I'm not sure I get his solution. "...massive new government programs to supervise a massive wealth redistribution totaling tens of billions of dollars" How? Is he thinking that high school dropouts will all of a sudden go back to school? Or just longer unemployment and more welfare, which are unhealthy for people to be on for extended periods.
Why not just go back to morse code.
No, what will happen is that one of your colleagues fixes a bug in a couple of places, someone else fixes some other bugs somewhere else, and at the end the buggy duplicated code becomes a buggy mess in which no one has any idea of what should be the right behaviour.
How, how, leaving duplicates and starting this bloody mess can be ever better?
I honestly can't see it.
Wellll, that was a very different situation. Ted Kaczynski was not a leaker. They published it in the hope that someone would recognize it and identify him -- which is exactly what happened.
Are You Throwing Away Good Links? Stop the Madness
Agree with your general point, but want to add here that cricket puts of a lot of statistical emphasis on the venue, and order of innings too.
For a more visual explanation of the "cost of abstractions" watch this presentation by Cheng Lou (Facebook). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVVNJKv9esE
If you left the door open to your house and did not lock it - then it is on you.

Lock the door. Yes you can pick a lock, but that is not my point. Do something.
Michał Bultrowicz: Choosing a CI service for your open-source project
Safe harbor only protected hosts from content they were unaware customers were hosting. You can still be brought into the fray once you know you're hosting that content. E.g. Google search results may have a link at the bottom with a list of sites that were excluded due to DMCA requests (ironically I've heard people say it's a great way to find out links to legitimate pirated content)
Was in the same boat about 2 years ago, was creating a mobile app that was a calendar + real time chat/location sharing. Used Parse and Firebase and it was really great but never got to scale to know how it would have held up.
I think he is referencing this old anti-piracy ad that used to air in movie theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_vHwfDNGdg
I've always wondered if anyone has pointed out to Penrose that asserting all behavior is random is not better than the alternatives, philosophically speaking.
Extensive discussion of Greenwald's article critiquing the Post's editorial here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525616
My own experience with DRY is that it has diminishing value in a distributed systems ecosystem. There is definitely still value, but code coupling between components of a distributed system is very costly. I'm pretty fed up with coordinated deployments, big bang upgrades, etc., so I'm very conservative about applying DRY. Often I'd rather copy a bit of code to avoid the dependencies, which usually pays off better in the long run.
This sounds similar to thought-terminating cliche.
I think we need to address this giant elephant in the room called object oriented programming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRTfhkiAqPw
I pointed to sports medicine specifically as a counter point to your claim that doctors generally prrform only the function of getting one back to normal.

And to say that "when I mature" I might choose differently... One can be mature without being moribund. One can be wise and still be progressive or even radical. Most to your point though, you're still moralizing, suggesting that when I know what you know, I'll finally grant that you were right all the time.

Moralizing,,, enough already.
> I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software

Mine are, at least.
A bunch of trash only enough to fill a beach is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean even if it gets to it.
If consciousness is just a complicated computation, which seems the simplest explanation, then it can be analogous to the attitude toward "old computer science beliefs". As a side issue, someday much like people make furniture using 300 year old technology there will be craftsman making programs using no algorithm discovered (learned? found? created?) post 1970.

Its a good thing we invented computers in recorded history and they're not prehistorical or delivered from space aliens, or we'd be having the same sophistry about philosophical discussions about computers as we do about consciousness. What, you claim a mere arrangement of impure silicon atoms implements the majesty and beauty of the lambda and the red black tree? When you think of binding a value to a variable, how do you propose to do that with mere atoms alone? So you think you can build a computer completely out of NOR gates, well, that's very nice but seeing as computers came from space aliens and no human has ever made a computer we'll wait on that theory until we see you run "hello world" on it. Surely an "intelligent designer" created computers and such complexity cannot operate via mere atoms, much like mere atoms arranged in peculiar shapes makes hard steel.

Something like this already almost exists between the EE/microcontroller type people vs the CS/algo people. Note my plethora of weasel words, something, almost, etc.

Aside from the philosophical analogies being entertaining by themselves, it would make interesting hard sci fi. Imagine a world where god is blamed for giving us clay tablets containing most of automata theory. Wouldn't that be an interesting sci fi setting?
Bittorrent is designed to not depend on such central, always-on servers. Avoiding piece availability bottlenecks is one of its robustness features.

If you substitute built-in robustness with servers then yes, of course it will still work. But you're weakening the decentralized nature of the protocol by doing so.
Our vision isn't what we think it is, with some quite large discrepancies, but it's still completely nuts to say it doesn't exist!
PipelineDB can scale out to multiple nodes (for $).
I thought I was missing something. I'm glad it wasn't me.
In my experience the best places for bacon are at independent grocers. Both of them carry bacon in the cool cases like other meats, not behind the deli counter. One was $5 per pound and the other was $4.50 per pound. It's just plain bacon, not the fancy smoked kind, but it's massively better than the usual Hormel stuff.

Both of them also carry ends-and-pieces for even cheaper. Some of the packages have pretty big pieces, like third or half slices. Tends to be a bit fattier overall but that may be to some people's tastes.
Apartments for homeless hit snags over labor, land
"I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

"The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour."

The author seems to be traveling a road very close to solipsism.

If the only thing you can know is your own consciousness...
> In accepting documents from Snowden and profiting from them, did the Post assume an obligation never to advocate against Snowden's interests?

That's too broad. The question is whether the Post assumed an obligation not to advocate for Snowden to be prosecuted for leaking the specific material they chose to publish.

I don't know what "evidence" would apply to a moral argument, but it seems like common sense to me. If I help you commit a crime, what moral standing do I have to publicly call for your prosecution?
One of my favorite moments from Michael Lewis' Moneyball is how Billy Beane's introduces Lenny Dykstra:

> Physically, Lenny didn’t belong in the same league with him. He was half Billy’s size, and had a fraction of Billy’s promise—which is why the Mets hadn’t drafted him until the thirteenth round. Mentally, Lenny was superior, which was odd considering Lenny wasn’t what you’d call a student of the game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the opposing pitcher warm up. “Lenny says, ‘So who’s that big dumb ass out there on the hill?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, you’re kidding me, right? That’s Steve Carlton. He’s maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.’ Lenny says, ‘Oh yeah! I knew that!’ He sits there for a minute and says, “So, what’s he got?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He’s got heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.’ And in. Finally he just says, ‘Shit, I’ll stick him.’ I’m sitting there thinking, that’s a magazine cover out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he’ll stick him.

---

A little backstory. Billy Beane was a phenomenal baseball prospect that only ever flirted with the major league. As opposed to Lenny Dykstra -- who had very little in expectations as a prospect -- became a 3x All-Star Outfielder, won a Silver Slugger (1993, OF), MVP Runner-up (1993) and a World Series Champion with the 1986 Mets during a 14 year career.

Of course the, Beane\Lewis caricature of Dykstra is merely anecdotal, but it falls in line with the anecdotes at the end of this article. I won't further perpetuate the characterization, but it does seem like there's a _je ne sais quoi?_ ability that allows someone to focus on a task by eliminating all distractions and situational qualifications. Maybe ignorance helps out, but I get the feeling that it has very little to due with long term success.
Then they should stop seizing property until they can count the cash. I suspect the real reason involves a coverup.
Pretty sure this is used by LIGO to find evidence of gravitational waves.
My words mean exactly what I wish them to mean.
Guys, we all know that Bezos is a micromanaging maniac. Because of this, he must have known (and approved) the stance that the Washington Post was taking on Snowden, right? What do you think?

I must say that I'm disappointed with Bezos...

(Separate point, I've recently been discovering that The Intercept is an outstanding paper. They have some real investigative journalism)
Yes sometimes they're intentional. If you can trick a batter into swinging at something they're unlikely to hit (or will hit poorly), that's probably the best kind of pitch you can make. Also it can be part of a psychological strategy.

This pitch was probably unintentionally bad, but maybe not by much.
> but it would work.

Downloaders are only incentivized to give back data until they are done. Seeders are not really incentivized at all, so they can go away at any moment.

So if everyone downloads sequentially and seeders go away, then you can end up getting stuck in a situation where everyone has the beginning of a file but nobody has the last parts.

When you're streaming the protocol is not robust.

With random order you have a robust protocol that just degrades in throughput if people are selfish.

And with a webpage-bsed service being selfish is as easy as closing a tab.
Nextcloud Box – a private cloud and IoT solution for home users
I think by reading the quotations I have selectively excerpted from the original article, a thoughtful reader can infer the substance of my concern. There is no need to spell everything out as if we're all unsophisticated dullards.
This suggests a path to a solution - a higher minimum wage for immigrants. At the low end, this could be implemented by requiring 2x the minimum wage for anyone whose residency or citizenship hadn't been verified through E-verify. At the high end, we just need tougher enforcement of the H1-B visa pay rules.

To make this work, if you've been underpaid as a non-US person, you can file a complaint, and even if you're illegal in the US, that would get you a U visa, which allows up to four years residency. Winning the complaint would get the employee double pay retroactively plus a green card. That would encourage employees to file complaints, and would encourage employers to be much more careful about whom they hire.

California could try this on its own, and should.
For those of you who have not been following along at home (like me), here is a description of the Red programming language from the about page[1]:

Red is a next-gen programming language, strongly inspired by REBOL. Main features are:

* Homoiconic (Red is its own meta-language and own data-format)
* Functional, imperative, reactive and symbolic programming
* Prototype-based object support
* Gradual and multi-typing
* Rich set of built-in datatypes (50+)
* Both statically and JIT-compiled to native code
* Cross-compilation done right.
* Produces executables of less than 1MB, with no dependencies.
* Concurrency and parallelism strong support (actors, parallel collections)
* Low-level system programming abilities through the built-in Red/System DSL
* Powerful PEG parser DSL
* Cross-platform native GUI system, with a UI DSL and drawing DSL.
* Bridging to the JVM
* High-level scripting and REPL console included
* Highly embeddable
* Low memory footprint, garbage collected
* Single-file (~1MB) contains whole toolchain, standard library and REPL.
* No install
* Fun, guaranteed. ;-)

[1] http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html
> Imagine our technology got so good that housing, clothing and feeding most of the population is affordable without raising taxes

Why do we have to do it without raising taxes? What's wrong with paying taxes? (A shocking thing to say these days, I know!)

The U.S. could now house, feed, cloth, educate, and provide healthcare to its entire population. Is that a worthy goal? U.S. citizens pooled their money to put a person on the moon; they do it for medical research, aircraft carriers, rural telecommunication, and plenty of education and healthcare already. Why not this?

(In fairness, I say the U.S. could do it. I have no data or research, but the U.S. is pretty close to doing it, it's the wealthiest country in the history of the world, other countries do it - I'm confident it's doable.)
Maybe there is much truth in the statement from Microsoft. The standard of living in Canada is not worse than in the US. And Canada's immigration system is point-based - if you meet the criteria (education, age, language &c) the equivalent of a green card is a certainty. In the US, on the other hand, most every job applicant must go through H1-B lottery, which opens up once a year, and it isn't guaranteed that the desired applicant will get a spot.
Living in Texas, while almost every provider has a free nights plan now most won't give you very aggressive daytime rates that make them worth it compared to other averaging plans (Unless you have on premis solar). Air-conditioning during the day still drives the bulk of residential consumption. I'm waiting on energy storage like zinc-bromide to mature and drop in price or something better to come along.
Hackers that can't copy door keys are probably not hackers
That would be challenging, we try to keep windows air tight for the winter to avoid any leaks.
Nothing beats the patch for consistent delivery. With vaping I have it more in bursts.

It's possible that's true about absorption. I wonder if maybe more nicotine is wasted vaporizing because you breathe most of it out or something, or maybe I'm not breathing deeply enough, but with the method of vaping that makes me most comfortable I "use" >3x the mg of nicotine I had before, 4ml of 6mg/ml strength juice a day compared to one 7mg patch.

I would say the patch is more consistent throughout the day, and the vape is easier to adjust throughout the day. Both are effective.
Yes. In the follow-up linked above he also describes the authors' responses to this. The predictions are not de facto false. He argues that they are intuitively false, which is a matter of personal belief but not empirical research. The same goes for some counterarguments.
Auto-resolving low grade acute procrastination, for sure. Chronic low grade procrastination, for sure.

Severe acute? Probably.

It's the severe chronic you need to look out for.
What I expect from an answer to the hard problem of consciousness is a basic high level explanation for how the moving of atoms in certain ways can actually give rise to qualia. You seem to be starting with the presumption that it does. But I'm not convinced that the moving of atoms alone can possibly give rise to qualia, because our knowledge so far about how atoms move seems completely different from our experience of qualia.

On the other hand, I don't understand all the details of what goes into a Macbook Pro, from network protocols to graphics rendering, but I have a basic high level understanding of how the things it does are possible, and it doesn't take a Library of Congress to explain that. My high level knowledge of how atoms move provide sufficient assurance and understanding of how a Macbook Pro experience is created. That is simply not true for qualia.