skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of very cool math properties hidden in each of these examples so I want to start a discussion on modeling some of them:

For the "memory" example, each particle is moving Uniform(-k, k) at each timestep (where k is some just some fixed distance). So the the distribution of the position of a particle at timestep t is the sum of t identically independent distributions, which will converge to a normal distribution, specifically with Uniform(a, b) having variance (b - a)^2 / 12, you converge to:

N(0, t * k^2 / 3)

So it turns out these particles end up behaving kind of like brownian motion! (Note I didn't take into account hitting walls. I am not sure how to model that?)

For the "velocity" example, empirically you can see that if you just let it run forever the points will just end up bunching at the walls. This makes sense since if there's a positive velocity in either direction it's hard to flip your velocity back into the other direction to get off the wall. By symmetry you expect half to be bunched on one wall and half on the other.

A fun question to ask then is if the velocities will accumulate so much in one direction such that it will always stay stuck on one wall after you run it a long enough time. I believe the answer is no! It will always switch directions again due to the fact that the probability that a random walk on a line returning to the origin has probability 1 as you run it forever (google recurrent random walk in 1 or 2 dimensions). This means the velocity (which is doing the random walk) will have to cross 0 and flip signs at some point. So although you will mostly find these particles hugging the walls, they will keep switching sides forever!

I think there are a lot of other really cool properties in these fancy visualizations waiting to be discovered.
Indeed. al Assads next interview "Sure, I did not win the vote, but this is not a direct democracy, the presidential ballot is mere a poll".

Direct democracy for export to some (exclude Saudi), power for others.

All this Brexit event just highlights the hypocrisy when calling Russian political system names and criticizing it for lack of democracy and other positive terms-on-paper.
Meh.. It depends on the complexity of work. I sit in a cubicle and sometimes work from peaceful room at home. Guess what, I can handle/solve more complex problems at home, but if I need to build up that focus. At the cubicle, I can only do very simple tasks.
There is also another outcome from this - the one where you turn into an insufferable 'vaper'.
But they told us that pulling in 1.6 GB for "Hello World" is normal and no big deal.
Is every bum-on-seat-hour ACTUALLY valuable?

Maybe in a sweatshop....
Technically, you always created an account when you used Persona. Sometimes with a password, sometimes without. Sometimes old passwords would come back to haunt you if your domain added and then removed support for BrowserID. Sometimes you would accidentally set up two accounts, because you added a new address to the Persona UI in the wrong order. Sometimes addresses would mysteriously bounce between Persona accounts, because we updated the address/account association on each use. Sometimes you needed a password and sometimes you didn't for the same address, because we supported un-decentralizing Persona on a per-website basis.

...the account story in Persona was way more complicated than it should have been, mainly stemming from the notion that per-login email confirmation loops were too onerous to be viable, and from the idea that users wouldn't succeed with Persona unless it remembered and displayed all of their email addresses in a consistent, persisted account chooser.
I'm an UX/design person and I notice that too. I think you could put two capable teams to create a website for some company, one required to do a lot of research and documentation, and another left to design it as they please, and the result probably wouldn't differ much.

It's akin to software engineers spending time to automate tasks that aren't that recurring.
​Linux Foundation appoints two more women to its board of directors
It's not a real HN thread until someone makes this joke...
Unknown, but it's overstated how much of that $150 million cash injection actually helped.

It's more likely the undisclosed sum (well higher) that kept Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.
As a southerner - the answer was in their list. The correct term is "y'all", the plural (and sometimes singular) of "you".
I've coded in pearl and read code in pearl. Sure, it got a bad wrap and yes people did stuff you shouldn't have. However, all that is part of the language / community. Pearl isn't great to code in for the reasons you mentioned, regardless of how useful it was in the past.

To put as an analogy, pearl is like an iron or bronze blade, top of the line at the time. Now we have a ton of improved metals to choose from - steal, tungsten, titanium, etc. With improved method of producing ever sharper blades. Why would I want to use the old technology? Sure it can get the job done, but it's tougher to use, and rusts quicker.

If it helps, I also think the same of JavaScript. There are many faults that make it more difficult to code in than necessary.

For both its a preference shared by many, and being a software engineer we can probably pick (some of the time) what jobs we do, so we can avoid jobs with antiquated or difficult programing languages to use. Of course, I use JavaScript (and even some Pearl) regularly because I need to.

Finally, ill be honest, I know like 2 decent pearl developers and neither recommend using it / getting into a position maintaining it.
At work we all bring our coupons, stick them in a jar and everyone can pick the ones they need. You must hate us!
> The VA has ~313,000 employees. Why shouldn't they just hire an engineering team? Why should they outsource a project to 18F?

They're working on that! Marina Martin, the CTO of the VA, has been building out the VA Digital Services team with some awesome people. Vets.gov is growing fast, and is open source, and should hopefully help a lot of veterans.

I work with a lot of those people, and they're doing really good work.
NeXT did fail by most standards. It didn't turn profit and went out of business after a generation or so of products that failed to penetrate the market.
Yeah, I'm 32, and my wife is still having doubts because she wants to finish her studies before... I need babies asap.
Show HN: Browse dead and dying startups
What question? You seem to have already decided on the answer without asking anything.
Happens with every piece of software that is actively developed past initial release. In other words, c'est la vie.
Fan of Pokémon Go? Read this before you vote on Nov. 8
Ack. However from the paper Schneier links to:

> The Dual EC DRBG is atypical, in that no other standardized ECC protocol has any known way to insert a back door.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf
For this reason, I found it much easier to get started with Emacs and manually including evil mode in my configuration.
This is how I found hacker news and combinatorial back in 2011.

I'd just gotten my first smartphone and I went and searched for a "hacking app". An app for hacker news came up instead.

Several usr names and smartphones (and two dumb phones) later, I check check this site daily.
I realize that I'm defending vinegar-based sauces on a BBQ discussion board that is committed to tomato-based sauces, and run by a powerful tomato conglomerate.

But I've been here a long time (just like you), and my account predates Paul Graham's fatwa about startups. If he chooses to redefine other words in future essays, I reserve the right to link to the dictionary again.

My goal is not to be obnoxious, but to keep the terms of debate open for people who have a more expansive view of what online businesses can look like, and what values might be important to their founders.
Title is a bit clickbaity

> Thanks to the Jülich supercomputer, the calculations now provide physicists with a concrete range in which their search for axions is likely to be most promising.

They have a range in which a particle that MIGHT be what makes up dark matter MIGHT show up. The difficulty of defining a particle that only interacts gravitationally is not lost on me, but the title is still somewhat misleading.
Troubled Between Career Choices – Then This Might Help (Non-Tech Stuff)
Yes. "But it's just text, so you can access it in any program" is an attractive (and in a sense, perfectly valid) argument, but it's the same problem with Markdown's different slightly incompatible flavours.
It's hard enough to find a single semi-competent employee by "overpaying". I don't think it's as simple as increasing the salary on the job listing by 20% and watching the super qualified candidates pour in.
The day I became a Millionaire: DHH
Nobody uses it because:

1) HTTP Basic Auth sends passwords over plaintext. (Digest Auth at least hashes passwords, but isn't a huge security win either.)

2) Basic Auth still requires user management and if you are going to build a user management database you might as well build a login flow in HTML instead of basic auth (not just because basic auth is ugly but because you can own that login flow and provide handy things like password recovery which basic auth doesn't support).

As pointed out elsewhere, HTTPS Client Certificates are a much better option baked into every browser, but we've never figured out the UX to make it convenient for the average user.
I'm using consoleZ, its.. ok. Console 2 seemed a little more robust, may give that a shot again. Getting things like right click context menu "console here" involves fun registry editing..

https://github.com/cbucher/console
The issue with Amendment 71 is it tightens the wrong side of the funnel. It makes it harder to propose amendments. Once proposed, they remain just as easy to pass.

The correct (in my opinion) approach here is to keep proposals easy, more ideas are always better, but to make the passage of proposals require a supermajority, or something near that. As it is written now, 71 effectively allows those with the money to continue to propose amendments far easier than the rest of us.
Is there a licence issue preventing the use of http://www.cocotron.org/, an existing Cocoa for Windows/Linux?
I'm thinking of moving away from pycharm when this year runs out and moving to vs code + python. It has full debug, scm, virtualenv support (which was broken in pycharm 2016.x for a time) and intellisense. I would still use Brackets for html and css because I love quick-edit, the ability to edit a css rule or color by hovering and hitting ctl-e.
For posterity, some non-reproductions of the Russian paper:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1063776106010092

http://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.85.012...
It's true that there are some editors which highlight SQL inside strings, but most don't.
The microwave transmissions stay in the analog realm to get their signal boosted at the intermediate towers, so you don't lose time in D/A-A/D sampling conversions like in the typical fiber signal booster (there are optical signal boosters for fiber under development).
I have used this site. It seems fairly accurate - does everyone else find this too?
This is an interesting result but I have trouble taking stock in it. QCD disagrees with proton mass by ~2%, and is insufficient to explain why He3 is a stable. I realize the 3body, and 9body (!!) problem are complex but when a theory disagrees with nature that fundamentally it casts doubt in my mind.
You have zero loss of data, it's still in a future-proof plaintext file. Changes are mostly trivial. So I wouldn't say it's such a big sin against future-proofing. Improving the design vs. retaining backwards compatibility is a tradeoff.
For a year or so I smoked casually when i was a teen in the 90s (to look cool) with intermittent bouts of heavy smoking over days at friends homes/etc. Probably average ~1-2 packs a week. One day i just got bored and stopped. Never felt any withdrawal signs.

I'm not countering your point of it being addictive. I was so, so so lucky not to have been hooked by that at all. I don't know if i just didn't smoke enough, or what... but it's one of the few points in my life i feel like i made the right choice.
Weirder yet, it wasn't even a choice.. i just sort of stopped.
Frameworks and standards like that are more often needed because there's a huge ecosystem of custom, proprietary libraries and frameworks that also exists within government. Previous attempts to try to release standards that only address specific frameworks that are popular within the open source world may only ever apply for 20% or so of federal agencies. There's even "agency-specific" forks of open source software that looks nothing like what they were based upon now. But really, you have tons and tons of different frameworks out there that have wasted taxpayer money delivering nothing material in value except "the government owns its IP" meaning "it avoids political / legal problems." See https://github.com/ozoneplatform/owf-framework for an example

Second of all, nothing precludes them from releasing standards-compliant variants of frameworks after the higher level standards are complete.
What wheel does React reinvent?
> Would you call a bootstrapped fast food shop a startup

People literally do in SF/SV... Remember 'The Melt'
Interesting piece of commentary about this by Alistair Sloan here:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/10/uk-choice-h...
But if Uber went the "correct and complete" route, which would cost them either a lot more or drastically reduce the number of writes, that would actively hamper their business. At what point do you consider it a valid tradeoff to keep the business alive?
Banks get fined for data breaches. Regulators will also fine banks for not having clearly documented and auditable release procedures.
Metadata can get you investigated, Facebook has 1Bln mobile DAUs and more
Good post. I use one of Jetbrains IDEs and I am big fan of their auto-formatting. You select the dialect of your SQL (or connect it to the data source) and the IDE almost formats it ideally. Sometimes I enforce certain line breaks but for the most part it does a really good job.
I don't buy this. Too much of a leap to connect one and the other directly. Yes, the campaign has been one of hate and fear, no, I don't think Pokemon Go wouldn't exist or would have been restricted by a Trump presidency.
Native App Over HTTP
> I'm a liberal guy. I don't believe in waste.

> I could care less about 32 million.

Hmm..
> You DONT need atomicity all the time, sometimes you do (Financial Transactions), but a lot of the time you dont:

In fact, financial transactions rather famously do not implement strict consistency.
Was it ever made open source? I tried installing it a few years ago, and IIRC one of my complaints was that I could not self-host it. Am I remembering correctly?
If the hours are likewise limited, that can be a valuable benefit for some people.
Fresh graduate salaries in Sophia are ~€33k-€40k. Negotiate hard, as getting a raise later is tough.
The problem is any potential productivity benefits are usually shut down at the employer level - I've never seen an employer (specifically office environment) that allows vaping in the workplace. My employer requires people to clock out for a smoke break and go outside anyway, so to get the next hit people have to go break momentum away from their desk for a while - and that'd probably be quite frequently too; from my somewhat brief stint(s) of trying to adopt vaping over combustion, I'd find myself puffing on it far more frequently than I'd go for a smoke (which at work is about 1 every 1-2 hours or so~)
Crowd Sourced Fiber in Boston
The semantic web is still in play, in the form of linked data, scheme.org, etc. I was looking at SKOS yesterday to help solve a particular problem yesterday. Google's and Facebook's knowledge graphs are born out of knowledge engineering, semantic web, etc.

I for one, am willing to declare victory for semantic web technology.
How Daemons, the Init Process, and Process Forking Work
First of all, since when did "guys" uniquely refer to the male gender? Second, how was this even worth the time it took to create?
Building the stack above and below OpenStack
One developer's 'river' is another's 'grid'. Being able to scan down quickly makes it easier to compare lines against each other. That's not something you do when reading a novel or a newspaper article, but it's something you do all the time when reading code.
Shai Agassi of Better Place comes to mind: https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
That's good then (and it does look neat). I wasn't meaning to sound too critical either, my apologies.

Out of interest, how did you market it / raise awareness of it?
I could see a case being made that iTunes with its disruption of the music industry should count as a success on its own. Same for the iPhone and App Store. Same possibly in the future for Apple TV (we'll see), although obviously Steve's participation in thst one was limited to the envisioning phase. But you might get me on a technicality by saying that n represents actual successful IPOs. In that case take this comment as not being about n, but more about simply business successes.
I left out that I meant 2 orders of magnitude in government. Comparing federal spending to what would be waste in a town or county is an example of giving into propaganda steered stupidity as an acceptable norm.

I don't disagree that this is a terrific value. I disagree with it coming up for discussion like this in absolute terms when nothing the federal government does that is blatantly absurd could ever discussed in absolute terms without seemingly like an unworldly statistic at any local level besides, maybe, in NYC.

There are 34,000 $32 million dollar units in federal discretionary spending. I'm willing to bet that if someone randomly samples another one it will be worse than this one.

That 32 million may be enough for a town to redo it its main library if it received it through complex graft using a rider (and then some kind of magic to get it to the town level) is a bizarre distraction from anything meaningful at the federal level.
Tech OpenAir Is Hiring a Graphic Designer
Emacs has very few self-contained mega packages; in its own way, Emacs software is built by chaining together smaller packages. Many packages are little more than extensions to other packages.
My math may be off, but if Pixar traded at 39 (at its highest) that would value it at ~ 1.4 billion. The employees that had stock split 20% ~= 280 million
yes, it can - http://portainer.io/install.html
A Boom in Startup Investing Is Breeding Conflicts in Silicon Valley Boardrooms
As a counterpoint, https://www.rdegges.com/2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
Labour, as the official opposition, are supposed to represent an alternative government. I think it's perfectly right to expect them to set out what they want from Brexit. However, they won't even answer any of the 170 questions they asked the government.

I don't want the Conservative government to have a monopoly over deciding how Brexit is implemented. But if other parties want to have a say, then they do need to say what they want from Brexit! They need to take a more pro-active stance. Problem is that Labour is still rather divided, UKIP is literally beating itself up, and the Lib Dems (whilst united in opposing Brexit) are still rather weak. What we really need is a strong opposition, and unfortunately we don't have one right now.
Relax.

The GP's point is that definitions are important and litigating the definition of the word startup has been tried before and doesn't end up benefiting anyone.

The logic flows as such:

1. People making judgements about startups

2. Not everyone can agree what the definition of a startup is (even if the benevolent dictator has stated their opinion on the matter)

3. Therefore it's incredibly difficult to agree or disagree about judgements of startups because the underlying definition is not clear

You may claim that #3 should be pg's definition "because its HN/YC", but not all HN members agree.
Fw: Uncensored view on hiring technology/digital/analytics people
>> Did I miss anything?

Civility?
Tobacco taxes tend to represent a very small part of government revenue, and fairly large parts of government costs and revenue are affected by the adverse effects of tobacco use (healthcare costs, sickness benefit, reduced taxable income from people becoming seriously ill). Even if the two don't balance, the government has plenty of scope to adjust the tax base over time. Many if not most other sources of tax income are far less predictable. The prospect that public infrastructure will "tank" as a result of people choosing to smoke less is simply not a real world problem.

Tobacco levies being disproportionately a "tax on the poor" is true, but health problems also are suffered more by the poor and one of the side effects of high tobacco levies in an era where e-cigarettes are a widely-available commercial product is nicotine replacement becoming much more affordable than tobacco
This is really neat. I've seen similar projects. Adding this project to my "look at the internals" list.
Then, it will be moved to Texas, where its focus will be tested, and then to California for some final assembly. The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.

Glad they learned something from the Hubble debacle, where it was not ground correctly and they didn't bother to do an end to end test before launch. "Refocused" also really doesn't described the fix, it was more like adding eyeglasses to the optical path to mitigate the problem.
Do keep in mind that's entirely irrelevant for uniquely-keyed data points. (append-only database usage)
This great advice - especially for new engineers. An outlook invite doesn't trump more important tasks. If you need to be working at that time, decline the invite and send a note back saying you can't make it due to other responsibilities. It's better to miss the meeting than to be at the meeting and look like you don't care about the conversation.
But that's exactly what survivor bias IS. Jobs took some very long shots, and hit the bullseye on each of them. (He also missed a couple cough NeXT cough.) How long would you say the odds of him making the right call all those times? A million to one?

There were at least a million other people who started in about the same situation, and worked just as hard, and made similarly risky calls. They didn't get heads all the way, and now you're not reading their autobiography or talking about them on HN.

Don't discard your priors.
UK is bringing this on itself.

I'm sorry, time to wake up from fantasyland of sovereignity. Decisions have consequences and it was rather obvious that the incentives become rather misaligned when UK decides to tell EU to go fuck itself.

UK did enough damage already, the latest and most glorious example is blocking finance reform so you could protect your criminal banker city (which, ironically will probably pack up and leave after brexit)

EU has no obligation to make special concessions, quite the contrary - it is obvious you cannot get a better deal than for example Norway, nor can you continue to benefit from common market without agreeing to it's most core terms

Sure, the Euro is in dire need of remaking, maybe explosive collapse of UK will be glorious enough to force some changes in that regard, so...thanks!