skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked the '10 second' explanation on what quantum computing is that Scott gave some time ago, a propos the Justin Trudeau incident [0]. And here's other experts' '35 seconds' versions besides Trudeau's [1].

[0] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2694

"I say something about how a QC is a proposed device that would solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them today, by taking advantage of quantum mechanics, which generalizes the laws of classical probability.

Then I talk about how you’d never talk about a -20% chance of rain tomorrow, but quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative or even complex numbers.

And how, if an event can happen one way with a positive amplitude and another way with a negative amplitude, the two possibilities can “interfere destructively” and cancel each other out, so that the event never happens at all. And how the state of a QC with (say) 1000 bits would have one amplitude for each of 21000 possible settings of the bits—an astronomical amount of information, if one wanted to write it down classically, for example in order to simulate what the QC was doing classically.

But about how, when you measure the QC’s state, you just see a single random output (with its probability determined by its amplitude), not the gargantuan list of possibilities. And about how the goal, in QC, is always to choreograph things so that the possible paths leading to each wrong answer interfere destructively and cancel each other out, (say) some having positive amplitudes and others negative, whereas the paths leading to right answer reinforce.

And how this is a very weird and specialized capability—it’s not nearly as simple as “trying all the answers in parallel” (if you did that, you’d simply observe a random answer), nor is it just a smaller or faster version of ordinary computing (a QC might even be “bigger” or “slower” than an ordinary one; all the hoped-for advantage comes from the QC’s ability to create interference patterns).

Finally I talk about how a QC is known to give huge advantages over any known classical algorithm for a few tasks of practical importance (quantum simulation, breaking almost all the crypto used today…), and it might also give some advantages for broader goals like optimization and machine learning, but that’s an active research topic, and if the advantages exist they’ll probably be more modest and/or specialized."

[1] http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/trudeau-versus-the-ex...
Not to mention the opportunity cost for wage slaves.

If you're a programmer and are prevented from getting a new job right now, when it's a seller's market for talent, then you might be in a much worse situation in a year if the market changes.

Even getting 100% of your wage for that year could be a terrible deal.
Well google announced they were exploring a fiber rollout in Chicago. Now both AT&T along with Time Warner Cable have 1G service throughout parts of the city.

Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube can deliver more and better content.

For Google, this is a win/win proposition.
Sorry, to be clear I have no issue with netflix. However doubling the length of the season and any switch of sponsor carries some risk of deviation from the norm - which was very very high quality imo.

I didn't mean to imply that I thought netflix bad Channel4 good (i think it came from there).
Wikileaks: Apple is sending user data to the governments
Long-term space flight gives astronauts extra inches – and back problems
Wonder if Google fiber will just shut down and give a 30 day notice or something scummy like that.
More People Access News via Mobile Than Ever
Depending on the contracts they have I guess anything's possible, but MVNOs aren't a new thing and they don't typically get kicked off a network for being successful.
Twitter Shareholder Sues CEO and Board Members Over Inflated Share Price
Ask HN: SAAS runners, ever reduced your price and gained more customers?
Running a bootstrapped product (paid SAAS), we have been thinking of expanding the business by getting more customers. There is a lot of good "inbound" marketing that helps us get decent number of visitors but the conversion is ok. So far, we were fine as we wanted top grow slowly but now we need to push the pedal a bit (not hockey stick growth but at least a 20-30% increase over the next year or two).

One idea is to play with our pricing. Note that our pricing starts at $200/Month so it is not a cheap one already. Wondering if reducing it to say $100/month or $49/month will attract more customers ?

The fear is that reducing price attracts a different type of customer which we may not want. So I would love to hear about your experiences of specifically reducing pricing as an experiment considering all else remained same or almost same.

Note: My product site will not be able to handle being HN'd :). So not sharing the actual link here but happy to talk over email if anyone is interested.
Bay Area rents are falling, falling, falling
Investing in coastal construction, maintenance and emergency recovery seem fine ideas, as well as things like portable energy and long-distance shipping.
I would have loved for this kind of research to be my job. Should have done better in my classes :(
You posted a video of people moving something heavy with wheels. I guess in the civil engineering world: amazing!
Finding patterns in corrupted data
It can happen. I think right now, we are on path where it will happen. But it is simply the most expensive, inefficient, and environmentally damaging route we could take.

In big cities it may indeed help reduce the need for cars, making the few cases where public transportation is wildly inefficient (i.e. getting from Manhattan to somewhere in Jersey <30 miles away) bearable.

But besides the literal handful of U.S. cities with workable public transportation, this automated car revolution will not help anything besides making things more convenient. It will not allow us to come to terms with the massive pollution that cars generate. It will not help us achieve truly affordable transportation (even when this technology is perfected, it will not be able to give us $2.50 rides like public transportation can do today). Etc.

With this autonomous cars movement, it looks like more Americans are finally ready to accept the idea of massive investment into transportation infrastructure (albeit by private companies instead of government). But the solution they are happy with is to re-purpose vehicles designed for individuals and make them into an adhoc transportation system. We need to think at true scale.
Yes, good tooling can shave minutes or hours off here and there, maybe pick out a few bugs but it won't save you from spending months or years writing an ill-conceived product.
Educators are only in a position of power in the eyes of a child.
But how is this not complaining that some buildings are concrete and some are wood and some are gasp a hybrid?

I mean, if those engineers were better at what they do, they'd use just one material, right?

And they have hundred or thousands of kinds of screws! Why do they keep reinventing them? They're just meant to hold things together -- one job!
i can't tell if this is serious or not
Building infrastructure is hard. Even 100 years later we still have original AT&T (Verizon and AT&T) as the dominant telecommunications company.

Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products:
Google+
Hangouts
Project Ara
Google Buzz
Google video
Orkut
Talk
Meebo
etc.

http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...
When you expand a hole, the only connection is at the end of the hole. Also, line expansions usually get connected to existing tail tracks. The 2nd Ave has a connection to an existing line that's not at the end, but that single connection isn't the reason for the cost or the slowness of construction.

This argument is pure BS that tries to explain New York's incompetence when it comes to planning and building infrastrucure by citing its exceptionalism.
I don't understand this perspective. Look at the person-hours spent in cars every day worldwide. Most of those are not in "our most economically productive zones" and a lot of them are spent just sitting in traffic.

I can understand thinking that autonomous cars aren't going to happen anytime soon (it's harder than it looks) but I can't understand thinking it will happen and not be a hugely transformative shift.
>> There are smaller SLR cameras now that are mirrorless

Hate being pedantic but a mirrorless camera can't be an SLR.
Any tips for employers looking to hire full time remote workers?
What you describe are not honor killings.

In North America, statistically speaking, the mother is more likely to kill the children than the father.
It's pretty much a fail.
Even if that did, the difficulty would increase and you'd get the same number of transaction/second
HDR only looks tacky when it's done tacky, ridiculously amping up the saturation and removing all the shadows
I limit it to three organizational tools:

- Bullet Journal

Major tasks, journaling, and goal tracking in a Bullet Journal on a per-day basis. Monthly goal lists live in a separate entry, and daily scheduling happens via a month page. Most self-driven work comes in through here, and I'll usually keep this open nearby while I'm working. The physicality of the journal helps a ton.

- Gmail

Inbox-as-todolist. "Starred first" view allows top priority tasks to be visually distinct. Most work from other people comes in through here, however it's really convenient to schedule or bounce things to the near future. Lots of people use Boomerang for this but I prefer followupthen.com - I can send/fwd an email to "tuesday", "january" or "3weeks" @fut.io and it pops back into my inbox that exact morning.

- Google Keep

Random unassigned tasks live in Google Keep, the Android "OK Google - Note to self, get new shoes" voice command saves directly into Keep. This is extremely convenient as a place to store random nagging thoughts while walking down the street. Having a Keep widget on my homescreens ensures that I see the list often.
I use a custom URI combined with userjs(tempermonkey), mplayer and youtube-dl for same purpose.

First you add custom URI in windows, lets call it magnet3 (this should be a clue, it works just like torrent magnet links):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3]
@="Magnet URI"
"URL Protocol"=""
"Content Type"="application/x-magnet"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell]
@="open"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell\open]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Users\\me\\Documents\\js\\youtube-dl mplayer.bat\" \"%1\""

then create your 'youtube-dl mplayer.bat' file (the %var:~9% nonsense removes first 9 characters from the passed link, '"magnet3:'):

set var=%1
for /f "delims=" %%A in ('d:\_learning\youtube-dl.exe -f best -g "%var:~9%') do start "" "C:\Program Files\smplayer\smplayer" "%%A"

or alternatively if your injected UserJS can extract direct link to media skip youtube-dl step:

set var=%1
start "" "C:\Program Files\smplayer\smplayer" "%var:~9%

now all you have to do is add userjs for the websites/services/players you want, for example I have a patched https://greasyfork.org/scripts/7096-convert-youtube-embeds-t... that replaces YT EMBEDs with a thumbnail linking to magnet3:link_to_yt, this is enough for starting mplayer on YT embeds.

Rube Goldberg sequence of hacks, but works perfectly.
Denetmen – useful micro check library for Crystal Language
Compared the the standard MVNO, they're less exposed because their system uses WiFi whenever possible. How much less that exposure is I have no idea.

Disclaimer: I'm a Project Fi subscriber for the last half year or so.
The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k)
Originally a 'Show HN': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12675993
I believe that there are factors that go beyond visible composition. Just a though experiment, I imagine that the brain would evaluate easthetics of two similar images differently depending on whether it is an image of an object it recognizes or not - when evaluating the image with an object other qualities of the object (that are not necessarily visible in the image) will be taken into account.
Actually, doing things like stepping through code might be made easier. Since the key positions can be remapped, you could split the bar into 3 big "keys" - back / step / forward. Or maybe even do something like pressing harder to step continuously through code.

I think, with a little imagination, this could be a really good thing. I'm a touch typist but generally I have to look at the function keys when I need them. If they could be remapped on the fly for different programs, WiFi networks, etc. then it would make things much easier. How about a "boss" button when playing a game? Or a button to kill all sound output when your in Chrome?
How Network Neuroscience Is Creating a New Era of Mind Control
Office work:

I usually use a combination of OneNote & Outlook for office work organization.

- One note: For organizing web clippings, information, self help tutorials, information that I might need to reference back some day etc.

- Outlook: For my meeting requests, reminders, appointments, TODO tasks etc.

Personal:

- Trello : For my goals and my self-learning stuff (which I rarely re-visit after creating it ;))

- Google Keep: For quick lists/reminders

- EverNote: For some important articles/algorithms/programs that I might need to refer time and again at an urgent notice over my smartphone.

- Google calendar: I failed at integrating this with Trello, but otherwise, this is an excellent tool for scheduling your day (exercise hours, recurring tasks etc).

Overall, I find OneNote to be an amazing tool at organizing information and I think this has the potential to be that solution for 'one size fits all' scenario. I'm really surprised MS just gives it away for free and doesn't market as much as its other Office tools. The only reason I don't use it for my personal tasks is due to the lack of a good android port. OneNote was(still is?) atrocious w.r.t memory and execution on android. The desktop/mobile app would hardly sync well most of the times and the layout design was messed up. Felt to me that someone just copy/pasted the desktop app on android with little modifications.
not true at all.... kernel developers are not mythical beasts, they're just regular low-level developers. Nothing special.

I've got 20 years experience developing this kind of stuff and to me, its not as simple as it could be, therefore it could be better.
I still love JSON regardless :) Client / server side languages have first class support for serialization and in most cases the data structures are rather easy.

I'd be very skeptical if one would suggest an alternative format for a web based project, however I can imagine such situations.
Why? The onus isn't on a person who has given you the evidence to prove you wrong to invalidate their own evidence.

You don't have to "spend the paragraphs of effort", just provide something which shows their evidence, which they base their stance on, is incorrect.
I did exactly this when my Mac ran out of memory yesterday. Safari hung with a 'your computer is running out of memory' warning (168 tabs open!) and I didn't want to lose them all by force quitting. But the Safari process itself wasn't "Not Responding" and we were back to 0% CPU.

So I quit everything else, SIGCONT'd Safari, and it started responding again, so I tried unsuccessfully to close some tabs. Of course, Safari somewhat isolates pages in separate processes, so I ran `ps aux | grep WebContent | grep -v grep | cut -d' ' -f11 | xargs kill -SIGCONT` as well.

It all sprang back to life, and all the tabs I'd shut in vain zipped away. Got that one saved for later. It's probably easier just to use -1 now I've learned what that is!

I do wonder what's suspending these processes indefinitely. I should have done more inspection to see what state they were in. I'm not familiar with how WebKit content threads communicate though, so that's for another day.
Windows 10 10/26/2016 event liveblog
The Floating-Point Guide: What Every Programmer Should Know
The Rushline frontpage animation suggests anonymization involves dropping avatars and replacing names, but this actually does very little to ensure anonymity.

Everything from geographic hints and topic involvement to word choice and punctuation make a person uniquely identifiable, and the vast assortment of public social networking feeds and blogs is a perfect source for training data.

Right now, only state actors and service providers can intercept most private communications. It appears to me that Rushline will only lower the bar such that anyone can do so with a bit of Python.

Moreover, I strongly doubt corporations, research institutes, or government agencies would permit secrets to be shared openly on any public communications platform, even with the pretense of anonymity. These organizations would be ideal sources of "insight," and you won't have them.

For all the things about which people do want to converse openly, there is IRC, Twitter, Reddit, and so on, but on these platforms, it is at least implicitly understood that anonymity is something users create for themselves.

Ultimately, you could have made a pretty GUI on top of existing XMPP infrastructure, and there would almost certainly be no difference in the features provided. What value does Rushline actually deliver?
GF has been tearing up our neighborhood this week and last laying cable (I'm in Chapel Hill). AT&T did the same about 6 months back. I was holding out for Google, but this makes me think even when they get it up and running, the support will be nonexistent. So maybe better to go with the devil we know (we already have AT&T U-Verse, just not gigabit). At least they lasted long enough to force AT&T's hand...
Dude. You're really focusing on the wrong thing here. No one is lying or attempting to deceive. At worst, the term is being used loosely - at worst. At best it's only referring to the portion of the work that happens during "multi player".

I get your frustration with software development jargon but this seems like an odd choice to attack.

And to two of your points, here's a version that is "serverless", and can run completely from the file system.

https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc

But is it truly "serverless"? I mean the file system is serving the file up to the browser!

C'mon.

Oh, and in case you were going to point out that there's a server involved in the link I posted because, "the WebRTC offer/answer exchange is performed manually by the users, for example via IM", (emphasis mine) - the information could just as easily be written on a piece of paper and exchanged via carrier pigeon. The pigeon may still technically be a server, in an architectural sense I suppose, but hopefully at that point you'd agree we're taking the argument past the point of any sensibility.
What fate would that be? Fiber isn't going away, they have just stopped expansion. There are also hints about investing in other tech instead of laying new fiber across an entire city (WebPass as the article mentions).

I agree that Fiber isn't Google business, which is why Alphabet was created. It allows for the company to try expanding into areas that aren't just software. Also, Google does a LOT of infrastructure work with datacenters and the fiber they own across the country/world. (though that is more business focused than consumer/residential)
> Educators are not in positions of power

Well we definitely don't agree on that. Growing up I had no choice whether I wanted to attend school or not. It was illegal for me not to go. If that's not power, I don't know what is.

Also, if you really want to help get your point across you should look at your own interactions (which are pretty typical of feminists tbh). You say questioning your opinions is "crazy", you tell a sibling comment to crawl back into their "men's rights hidey hole". That's not the level of discourse we should be having yet it's modus operandi for western feminism.
> In conclusion, JSON is not a data format you can rely on blindly.

That was definitely not my take-away from the article. More like "JSON is not a data format you can rely on blindly if you are using an esoteric edge-case and/or an alpha-stage parsing library." I haven't ever run into a single JSON issue that wasn't due to my own fat fingers or trying to serialize data that would have been better suited to something like BSON.
I think the main lesson that's there, is that in edge cases, it is sometimes helpful to work with pointers which point to the structures you're actually working with, instead of considering the structures themselves. This especially seems to work for getting rid of null checks.

This takes some getting used to, but it allows you to write more efficient code. I would do this in kernel development (smart people, high demands on performance), but I would not recommend to write code like this is enterprise software.

When you zoom out a bit, and describe the task with natural language, you can also see that this might be a good idea: "Find the node that is equal to entry, then, if the previous node exists, set the 'next' pointer of the previous node to the 'next' pointer of the current node." sounds a lot more tedious than "Find the pointer that points to entry, and set it to the 'next' pointer of entry.".

This also works for more complicated tasks:

// removes all instances from the linked list and return the number of entries removed
int removeentries(valuetoremove, list)
{
removedentries = 0;	// how many entries we've removed
prevpt = NULL;	// pointer to previous
entrypt = list.head;	// get pointer to first node

// walk the list (be careful, head can be a nullpointer)
while (entrypt) {
if (*entrypt == valuetoremove)
if (prevpt) {
prevpt->next = entrypt->next;
removedentries++;
}
prevpt = entrypt;	// save current node as prev for next node
entrypt = entrypt->next;	// move to next node
}
return removedentries;
}

can be re-written to:

int removeentries(valuetoremove)
{
removedentries = 0;	// how many entries we've removed
indirect = &head;	// points to the current node

// walk the list
while (indirect) {
// remove current entry from list if its value equals valuetoremove
if (indirect->value == valuetoremove) {
*indirect = *indirect->nextpt;
removedentries++;
}
indirect = indirect->nextpt;
}
return removedentries;
}
Ask HN: Has anyone been able to truly practice David Allen's GTD?
I'm looking for people who were able to acheive results like Allen describes in his book. Also looking to get a sense of how many here are interested or using the methodology of Getting Things Done. http://gettingthingsdone.com
Textpattern CMS 4.6.2 released: version string theory
I do something similar but I gave up using org-mode (mostly because that was all I was using emacs for and I spent more time configuring the thing 'just so' than I did actually using it.

Now I just keep everything in plain text and aliased it to 'tj' (todays journal).

alias tj="touch ~/Dropbox/journal/$(date +%d-%m-%Y).org && code ~/Dropbox/journal/$(date +%d-%m-%Y).org"

Effortless backups as well (and as a side benefit the NSA now knows I need to look at better ways of handling css in packages pulled in from npm etc).
building new infrastructure is much harder now than decades ago. It's been much easier for the companies to retain infrastructure