skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you provide more context to stimulate discussion?

I keep different notes in different places. Most of my notes are on paper, although there's also a good amount as plain text files saved on various computers I own. More incidental, spur-of-the-moment notes are in Google Keep, which serves as a (very) poor man's Evernote that syncs between my phone and the cloud.

The bulk of my notes isn't kept in the cloud because they're heavily context-dependent, and I get little benefit from having them available at all times.
IMO it's important to assume positive intent.
You don't need to try hard to make Russia look antagonistic - it's perfectly capable of doing it on its own. Here's one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkMT_oLempE
I'm with you.

I once spent days trying to figure out why a 10 hour timer on a battery charger chip was going off hours too early, leading to the device draining its battery instead of charging it. Turned out the manufacturing partner had substituted another part, functionally equivalent except for the one feature we were relying on...

I can't remember what it was that made me actually look at the chip to check the part number.
It is close to real CMOS circuits, but idealized -- I don't remember all the idealizations (and I'm really not an expert), but e.g. it'd accept a solution that depends on a race condition working out deterministically.
No they don't. Adderall is speed it just floods your brain with dopamine. Everyone feels more focussed. It's all propaganda pushed by the drug companies.

With all due respect, I am baffled at how people can believe this.
Piggybacking on this, can anyone recommend an approach for finding the cause of memory issues in v8?

In my case I'm tuning a 3D game, and the heap usage is a sawtooth pattern with GCs about once per second. Not awful, but it would be nice to smooth it out. But playing with Chrome's various memory profiling tools I've never been able to discover where the allocations are coming from - the results always seem to be dominated by apparently internal stuff (like entries called "(code deopt data") or such). Does anyone know any good techniques for such things?
That's what happens when you live your life on speed.
>> The size of Russia's military (especially the number of nuclear weapons) says that Russia is considerably more than a regional power.

It is a regional power because it doesn't have means to project power beyond its region. Even the operation in Syria is stretching the supply lines significantly.

Compare this to US with its several carrier strike groups.

The only weapon that Russia has that has truly global reach, comparable to those CSG, is its nukes, which aren't actually usable in any scenario other than an all-out nuclear exchange. Which is why "regional power with nukes" is so accurate.
Facebook Looking to Launch Free Basics in US
I'm not familiar with the "packing" concept. How does one go about manual packing? How does it affect maintenance?
> There must be something individual to each customer on cable, otherwise Internet access wouldn't work.

The modem MAC address. The cable company associates your modem with your account so that you can have access to the Internet.
Can you explain a little more about this? It sounds so cryptic. What were/are the cultural touchstones?
USSR had a much more potent military and I don't remember US employing a strategy of yielding to that.
This is typically the kind of absolutely clueless reaction that makes me even more depressed about human beings.
I can't believe I hadn't heard of it before. I just went through the tutorial and I'm duly impressed. I'll definitely try this for my next design. I couldn't find a way to donate, but I'd gladly send an appreciation to the people working on this.
Also, medicine is only concerned about bringing people with problems back to the "average normal" health state. What if I want to improve on the average?
Here's pricing info in the UK.[1] (Via a proxy site, because HM Government doesn't like access to their pricing data from outside the UK.)

EpiPen® Auto-injector 0.3 mg (delivering a single dose of adrenaline 300 micrograms), adrenaline 1 mg/mL (1 in 1000), net price:

2-mL auto-injector device = £26.45

2 × 2-mL auto-injector device = £52.90

This is the same product from the same vendor as in the US.

[1] https://www.justproxy.co.uk/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5ldmlk...
As someone affected by this in the Washington area, is there any other ISP somebody would recommend? Comcast was my last resort, but this just floors me. A terabyte is easy to blow through in a household!
Do you have a source for the discrimination?

Palantir was recently accused of discrimination against Asians because they hire them at a much lower rate.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/26/regulators-accuse-pal...
How shutting down Backpage, ‘world’s top online brothel,’ could hurt sex workers
More of a "You can't step into the same river twice" kind of thing.
Very few people are qualified to comment on his mathematical work, but lots of people have done speed.
> In Syria Russia sticks to the air,

FWIW, it's not entirely correct. There are specs ops and advisor teams on the ground (and there have already been officially reported casualties). But beyond that, some people who previously fought for the separatist militias in Ukraine told me that quite a few of their militia friends have been unofficially "contracted" to Syria. This appears a convenient arrangement, since when they get killed, it doesn't get reported as a military casualty, and doesn't really need to be reported at all.

Similar to the use of contractors by US in Iraq, I guess - but these guys are actually used at the frontline to support Assad troops in direct engagements, not just to provide security for civilians etc.

BTW, ironically, they have a very low opinion of the local troops. One guy over there joked that the war is essentially fought by foreign troops against each other on either side (Assad and ISIS), whereas local recruits on either side are really unmotivated to fight, and are easily routed or forced to surrender. The only locals he considered to be a viable, motivated fighting force capable of winning without foreign manpower backing them are the Kurds.

(This is unverified Internet rumors, I don't know those people personally, you don't know me personally, so take it all with a grain of salt.)
Comcast dismantles Net Neutrality with back door tactic
He did not not stop the DRMs by this single measure, he put a brake on it. A delay, he bought time, he made it more expensive for people to implement them.

Which is what everybody in this industry should do if we want to avoid a DRM future.

The goal is not to stop DRMs, the goal is to slow down enough so that their development efforts can't cope up with the rate of change in the tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
Though you don't know if he's clinically depressed, just has a rough week, or generally lives in a rather bleak environment.
There seems to be some common blinders here about open source models, venture capital as a tool, and startup risks:

* 100% open source models: Why 100% open source everything? What's the real goal, and what's a slogan? Even Mozilla hides a lot. Open what you can and what is really important to you, and if you really want it to be everything, you can do that on a defensible delay. (We're starting with our non-differentiating framework layers, and now that we're starting on our next layer of differentiating tech, are considering how to open the previously differentiating stuff.) If the choice is slow open growth vs massive partially-open growth, the total amount of open source is actually SMALLER in the 100% open approach. Likewise, if the choice is death over partial open source, not dying means you can do more open work.

* Use of venture capital: The risk of going on the treadmill of always needing the next round is real -- we went slooow on spending ours to avoid that. It's not inherently a bad idea though: companies have successfully bought their way into success. Pay enough great execs for enough time, and cheapen the cost of product enough to avoid competition, and something real will pop out. HOWEVER, a conservative way to think about it is (A) there is a step function to getting to a real worthwhile & sustainable product, which requires capital (sweat, time, VC, whatever.) And (B) after you get there, and revenue growth gets predictable, it's worth increasing spending more this year to have bigger revenue next year. If you bet wrong, you simply slow hiring and wait for natural revenue growth to catch up (it's math!). This is hard, and if you fail at (A), that means layoffs while you try again. It's not necessarily death -- RethinkDB called it quits instead of going to a skeleton team.

* Risk: For the same reason as above, I actually view not reaching the point of a sustainable product as risky in the short-term, and not reaching a maintainable competitive position risky in the long term (esp. in tech, where the world changes every 2-3 years!) It's worth considering why, if you fail getting to point (A) above with VC, how you'd have succeeded without VC. (Taking VC != going all out on a single marketing & sales blitz)

With that view, what Github and Jupyter are doing is (arguably!) leading to better and more sustainable software than Sage's approach, and leading to more open source code than Sage.

(And more a throwaway: A VC is a buyer of a chunk of your company and needs to turn it into a different sized chunk based on the size of their fund. If they're a big VC, they will only buy it if they see it turning into a $1B+ return. Your job as a company builder is to know what revenue you can get & when; it's weird to approach it as some sort of laissez faire random walk. Likewise, as a salesman to a VC, your job is to show you're selling what they need to buy. Not being aware of what the customer wants is a bad start. Doing my best to understand this stuff is part of my obligations to my team.)
For me (with a normal prescription), it just never worked like that.

I felt the side effects too strongly and while I did many, many things, I could only crank out unimportant widgets and the executive functions of my brain were diminished as to whether this thing I can do at an incredible [speed / pace] actually mattered.

One example from college is reading chapters of a physics book and copying the vocabulary and definitions for a hundred or more words in a single session. In an unaltered state, I could maybe do half to a whole chapter and 1–2 dozen words before feeling saturated.
WikiLeaks Releases Transcripts of Clinton Speeches
Carol Smith seems to have confused "math" with "whatever's covered in math 101/103 and some particular place".

Calling for "mathematics to not be a pre-requisite to programming is like calling for mathematics to not be a pre-requisite for trigonometry. Programming is constructing and manipulating syntactic objects. Programming is, literally and unambiguously, "doing math". They are not separable activities.

Aside from which, elementary algebra is actually extremely important stuff for any programmer to understand. We're not talking group theory, we're talking knowing the difference between a graph of x vs. a graph of x^2 vs. a graph of 2^x. How to manipulate conjunctions and disjunctions and implications. I can't imagine programming anything particularly useful without knowing that sort of stuff. Which doesn't mean that formal elementary algebra is a reasonable pre-requisite course, but it really is pre-requisite knowledge.
That's a whole 'nother can of worms concerning participation / nonparticipation elections by various services.

And the question of when a service ought / ought not allow participation.

I'm strongly in the camp of controlling my own personal online interactions. Which is somewhat curious in the case of HN as that's not possible -- there are no user blocks. HN's moderation policies and practices ensure that this is virtually never necessary.

However I've got issues with how and why various online services draw the line at participation. I agree with some of the groups banned from Reddit, for example. I take exception to Imzy's banning my account (largely for being hounded, misrepresented, and harassed by others on the service). I'm exceptionally critical of Google, on Google+, but that's not resulted in repercussions (there are times when an adversary's belief in "the marketplace of ideas" is an advantage).

I'd prefer a world in which relying on access to other's soapboxes and spaces wasn't so necessary.
Django Deployment checklist
No, but US didn't openly engage Soviet forces anywhere, either. In proxy wars, it was always covert for either side (as in e.g. Vietnam or Afghanistan), or sometimes both (as in many places in Africa).
ROSE LACE BODYSTOCKING
This is a great point and the responses are classic HN; algorithms etc...but whats wrong with locking the truck?
EDIT: spelling
novice: follows the rules because he's told to

master: follows the rules because he understands them

guru: transcends the rules because he understands where they don't apply
I've always found Tcl interesting-yet-strange, but any language that lands on the CLR gets bonus points, especially if the interop design for calling into the .NET base class libraries is clean.
> Companies have a hard time finding people with decent CS knowledge

Agreed.

> you can get to the top (or near it) of the web dev field with little to no CS knowledge.

That depends on what your definition of top is. A person with little to no CS knowledge won't be working for any of the big 4. They won't work for any of the top tech firms because they will never make it passed the tech interview.

Unfortunately the term "web developer" is fairly broad. Its so inclusive that a designer that can struggle their way through jquery will frequently be lumped in with an engineer at Facebook working on React.
Not really. This is typical in consultancy, where you deal with averages when you create a budget. Extremities would make the bidding risky.
I can also tell you that cryptography libraries are complete piles of failure if you want to run on an embedded device.

C++ is a non-starter. Non-open licenses are non-starters since nobody will review the library. GPL libraries are radioactive legally. Opinionated libraries are wonderful--unless you have to interoperate (see NaCl and libsodium). Dynamic allocation is death in embedded (looking at you libgcrypt and your stupid s-expressions garbage).

And, if you want some hardware acceleration, your choices are ...

Zip. Nada. Zilch.

And then everybody wonders why security in IoT sucks.

(Botan is probably the least bad. It's C++, but they went out of their way to provide a C API and even have Python bindings in the source(!). Unfortunately, it's lots of atomized C++ classes and inheritance to trace through for what looks like not a lot of gain. It's not immediately clear how to inject hardware acceleration either.)
What market exists? How can it address these concerns?
Canada Learning Code to provide 10m Canadians with access to tech education
I don't like any programming language invented after 1985 or so.
It's not just about being able to find a job. It's about being able to find a job that pays the same money for the same skill & experience, and offers the same career opportunities in the future.

Based on the statistics that we have, it's definitely a problem, at least in the tech sector.
People thought education in the 1960s was broken, too. See the book "Why Johnny Can't Read".

Then, the "new math" was invented, and people concluded education was broken.

Now, "common core" and it's deja vu all over again.
Compilers typically align struct fields to a boundary to favor execution speed. This may be good for most use cases where there aren't thousands of instances of that struct wasting a lot of memory making it a bad tradeoff.

So C/C++ compilers allow you turn this off either by specifying the data length yourself (bit fields) and/or specifying attribute(__packed__) directive in the case of GCC for example. In this case the packed directive resulted in suboptimal packing so they must have gone with bit fields I suppose to do manual packing.
> wow, what universe do you live in where conquering a whole nation is justified by a few lifes lost or stopping a commercial agreement? disgusting

And which whole nation was conquered?
As long as all data sources are treated equally, I don't see a 'net neutrality' issue with caps. I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, here.

If you combine caps with special treatment for data sources (ie, they don't count against your capped data) that's another issue.
We had a famous leak with forged data a few years ago in France. It was the Clearstream affair. A listing of people involved in wrongdoings was leaked to judges, containing name of senior politicians, including Nicolas Sarkozy. It was later proven to be a forgery and it helped him develop a taste for conspiracy theories among his followers.
The only thing that's mandatory in systemd is the init and the journal. Everything else is optional.
The patent is for the delivery system.
Yeah you might want to spell that acronym out next time. BLM certainly has a bigger association for Black Lives Matter with most people, I would think. Was equally baffled.
There's probably, in spirit, a graph version of the BWT, but I'm not familiar enough to know it. The approach is less straightforward because you're not just modifying BWT to allow for indels/errors, but rather a graph compression algorithm to allow for fragment searching along vertices of a sequence graph. That said, it has to happen eventually. It's been a while since I took comp bio (sequences & graphs) but what you mentioned is what I learned (and I took it from Waterman, so what I'm saying is that I think you've got it).

You can look at Pall's work to see how the current approaches may evolve into something compressible:

https://github.com/GFA-spec/GFA-spec

As far as articles? McVean's, without a doubt!

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n6/full/ng.3257.html

An implementation paper for graph assembly HLA typing is at:

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/24/035253

Interesting times ahead, with people recognizing that GxE and GxExE matters far more than G alone.
I don't agree with some of what you said, but at least you are taking a chance to try and figure out what when wrong. You have been bookmarked :)
No it doesn't, but thanks for playing.
WikiLeaks releases what appear to be Clinton's paid Wall Street speeches
I like thinking of money as universal sandpaper because it's so great at smoothing out life's edges
Rozofs: scale-out NAS file system
If you don't understand arithmetic, a $5 calculator will inevitably produce the wrong answer for you.

Sometimes people question the value of teaching math to kids. But I can say anecdotally that the people I've met who did not understand arithmetic correlated strongly with people who were disasters with their personal financial affairs.
Why Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds prefers x86 chips over ARM processors
Asymmetry. Asymmetry of "transparency" can benefit one side over the other. Not that hard buddy.
There's a few on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...

Eg: Robin Kills the Enemy
I wish he had a choice about it.
Kosterlitz–Thouless Transition
Or drinking too much water.
Definitely going to try this out. However, I don't feel great about not having...

- any concept of clustering for reliability and failover
- any easy/clear way to distribute load to the object server
- an easy way to run backups

I may just be blind in the docs. I really don't want to go back to running my own database server. Services like compose.io are soooo nice. Clustering, automatic failover, backups...
Online food delivery still presents a $210B market opportunity
I think several aspects of it have disturbed the HN community and elsewhere--

(1) The founders are extremely nice and thoughtful people, as well as everyone I've ever met from there (seriously, top notch). Seeing someone like Uber with their poor ethical reputation succeed and a company like Rethink close down is disheartening.

(2) It's more ammo for the "open source can never make money" crowd which I think is frustrating for HNers like myself who enjoy the idea of running or working for such a business.

(3) Rethink did things the right way engineering and UX wise and had a great reputation for this compared to, say, MongoDB. So as another commenter noted, "worse is better" is still holding true in 2016.
Hi,

I might be a particularly tough sell since I grew up in the US but have been living in Europe for quite some time now ;)

I think what you're seeing on is AI hype in action. The marketing of Keegan suggests that it's AI should be capturing some of what is usually perceived as subjective taste (e.g. whether or not the image is "interesting"). This ends up disappointing because the AI (which is clearly an incredible technical feat) is really just capturing objective elements of composition.

Perhaps you just need to fine-tune the language so as to do some expectation management?
Is it space elevator worthy?
Yes. However, airplanes also need help from a multi-billion dollar agency, schedules planned far in advance, propogation of delayed or early arriving flights throughout the whole system, scores of ground and tower air traffic controllers to assist in taking off, landing, taxiing, and mid-air collisions, and the pilots, I imagine, need to learn a voluminous amount of laws, regulations, signals, etc.

Assuming flying cars travel at the roughly same altitude as helicopters, even if I didn't take all of the above into account, I have serious doubts as to whether autopilot could handle flying through Manhattan by itself.

There do exist personal flying devices for the ultra-rich. But if you look at how inefficient our current system is and try to put as many planes in the sky as there are cars on the ground....not looking good.

Plus, imagine you live in NYC or LA. You'd barely get any sunlight on the ground with all the planes in the air. I thought flying cars would be cool too. Then I looked at traffic conditions in LA and said "If this is the best we can do on the ground, then I don't want to see flying cars in my lifetime. The Futurama tube looks much more practical."
>moving bits does require physical materials which are limited

Physical materials limit concurrent throughput, not monthly transfer. ISPs oversell their throughput and then hope that monthly transfer limits will dissuade users from actually saturating "their" bandwidth too often.

The honest strategy here is to sell much lower throughput links such that everyone gets to saturate theirs 24x7 without causing problems for anyone else.

Such an option might make BitTorrent users happy, but we live in a streaming world now - most consumers seem to want bursts of extremely high bandwidth followed by hours of nothing.

VPS providers have substantially the same problem with RAM, and for a time their approach was to state the baseline and "burstable" RAM of a given price point separately.
Soon in my forties. When I need to take a few days to look into something, I do it as part of my work. That's part of the maintenance of having a senior and experienced programmer.

Some times, my boss asks me about a new fancy tech. "I'll look into it" means I'll take a few hours of my time to give a good appraisal of it.
i'm reminded of 'suspended' from infocom...