skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advances in algorithms are a fundamental starting point, but I think it's a common mistake to conflate the efficiency of an algorithm in the abstract sense to how those benefits are manifested in the applied sense. While true, all things held equal a new algorithm will advance the field, providing "gains" as you said, but it's false to assume that algorithms are more important than understand computer architecture, full stop.

A simple example is dijkstra's algorithm vs bellman ford. Sure, in the abstract sense, the greed algorithm wins. However, it would be wrong to assume that dijkstra's algorithm is faster than bellman ford, because it's not. That's because dijkastra's algorithm doesn't parallelize as well, where as bellman ford parallelizes very well (and by "well" I mean it exploits the architecture - in a sense has "mechanical sympathy"). You end up creating very exotic data structures that are good for caching and stealing work from unused threads. There are many other examples, check out matrix matrix multiplication if your interested.

I'm not making the argument that one is more important than the other, but I think it's a bit reductive to say algorithm only matter because there are so many examples of where computer architecture matters more (and vice versa).

Another way to say what I mean is that ultimately reality matters.

> The likes of Karp, Valiant, Cook, Blum, Vazirani, Papdimitriou, Micali, Goldwasser, Goldreich, Shamir, Rivest and etc.?
I doubt these people know the inner workings of computers, but they have revolutionized our view of what it means to compute.

Um, why would you think that they don't understand the inner workings of computers? Is that just your intuition or is that based on some practical knowledge? I'm not saying I know the answer (I haven't quizzed them), but since we're guessing here I'm going to say that they probably know a lot about the inner workings of computer - and there's no harm in us mortals trying to do the same. They probably don't know like specific things about how intel's branch prediction works or anything like that, but as a general concept, the inner workings of computers is pretty fundamental stuff and is very helpful to know, along with algorithms.
Your whole post is a huge straw man. You say 'the objection is against setting official truth-setters' but nobody was proposing that and the post you're replying to to never even mentioned Snopes.

The reality is that Facebook - responding to consumer demand - is partnering up with several commercial fact-checking outfits, in addition to tweaking its algorithm to select from something other than sensational content that generates lots of reactions (not an easy problem). IF those research/fact-checking service suppliers don't do a good job, market theory suggests they'll be displaced by a competitor.

divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.

How does some 'possibly fake' tag on a shared article on social media prevent anyone from thinking for themselves or checking facts? They can still do that by choosing to ignore the 'possibly fake' tag and clicking through to the source and researching it further. You're crafting a narrative here in which people in group 1 restrict the freedom of people in group 2, but that's not actually happening because in reality nobody is being forced or has to give up any options. I'm oddly reminded of the meat industry objecting to country-of-origin labels on the grounds that consumers don't need to know that stuff.

You adopted a very high handed tone to the poster above, saying that you would fact-check their fact-checking, but then you made multiple misrepresentations of that poster's argument, interspersed with groundless claims of your own.
Scala based Gitbucket 4.8 released with improved search and comments
Author seems to have some deep lying trouble with India/Hinduism.

More on the point, I think this article ignores a lot of things very conveniently to make the point that we should not listen to Jason Fried because "Basecamp is a failure".

This is wrong on two points:

Firstly what evidence does the author have that Basecamp is a failure? That Asana and Trello have more signups? But those tools are targetted at a very different audience than Basecamp. I know individuals who use Asana and Trello for personal management and I don't know anybody who uses Basecamp. This also ignores that Basecamp is not a VC backed startup. They have bootstrapped their business from the start. This is unlike Asana (VC) or Trello (product from Fog Creek). I mean, if some vague estimation of weekly/monthly signups is your idea of what makes a failure then you need to rethink your arguments.

Secondly, even if we assume that Basecamp is a failure, that doesn't mean that what Jason Fried has to say is invalid. I mean, by making this point the author has contradicted his own point that we should be listening to the less-heard voices out there. Jason Fried frequently has some very good points to make about running a business and people find value in his words. What is the problem? If you don't like it, don't take it. If you want Andrew Filev to be heard as much, ask him to write more! I also find it surprising that the author thinks that nobody challenges the views of established writers like pg, because I see people call him out all the time!

I wouldn't call this a hit piece but I have no idea what value I derive from this article apart from the author's bitterness.
You're right in general, of course, but you're talking to someone who just told us he recently lost a loved one in a traumatic manner. Responding to a specific pain with a general argument doesn't help, and being right makes it worse.
Certainly. I chalk that up a certain amount of optimism surrounding solar energy (and renewables in general), not willful ignorance of the real costs of deploying any sort of infrastructure on a national scale.

Based on what you said, the EU seems to have figured out a responsible way to handle those costs, at least on the individual level.
More likely, but how much more? That seems necessary to discern to make that decision rationally.
Ask HN: What milestone do you want to achieve in 2017?
What is the single milestone you'd like to achieve in 2017?
I'm with czep on this one.
i actively develop time management techniques

the best experience i've ever had was with meeting a reading deadline

i needed to read through a final draft of a book i was writing with friends before the publication date

i had read the book a thousand times but in pieces

so it was important for me to read it through cover to cover before it was published

i knew when the deadline was and was putting it off until three days before the day and i still had 130 pages to read and edit

i decided to dedicate a day to finishing it

130 pages, 1 day.. i could easily pull off 10 pages per hour and effectively work from 9am, to 10pm

10 pages per hour seems silly but it really is a mechanism to subvert what i call my reward response

put in the time to read 10 pages at the start of any hour and the rest of the hour is mine to do whatever i want to

stretch, workout, run, eat, context switch, information dope

sometimes those 10 pages would take 5 minutes, woot! 55 minutes to work on some other project

sometimes i would be so distracted that those 10 pages could take 40 minutes, so i'd make myself some tea and stare out a window for 10 minutes before the next hour

reading simplifies this model because you can quickly gauge how many hours you want to work, how much reading you have to do, and roughly how fast you can read

it's a bit different for other endeavors

for instance, 10 lines of code can take 2 seconds or 2 years

so instead of hard hour breaks i'll work until i finish a definitive partition of a larger project and wherever i lie in the current hour chunk determines the length of the reward, to be limited by the start of the next hour

same game different rules
The substance of the text has merit, but it was difficult to get through a whole article written in ALL CAPS. It also makes it look less professional.
Dude, do whatever works. Don't dismiss advices, try them, revisit them from time to time but walk your own path, shamelessly.

For me a metronome is not a source of frustration, it probably calibrate my sense of time and is like a wingman for locking into place. Usually it makes warm up efficient, and when my hands are loose I can just walk the neck as I feel.

I've heard the RockSmith critics. I can understand but I felt it's not a bad step, although it's quite incomparable from making your instrument sing. Kinda like driving a car vs Gran Turismo.
Get outa here. These are red states in red districts. They've been controlled by right wing agenda for years now. If change is going to happen it's going to happen at the local and state level, not at the national level. If nothing's been done it because the republicans choose to do nothing.
That last example sounds like someone incompetent at email and choosing teammates, chose one who's incompetent at deciding what's critical. Oops-a-daisy. For competent adults, having the recipient unilaterally decide what's critical (critical to whom? being a key question) is insulting.
Do you have a phone number? Ever received a package? Do you pay taxes? Then you are already on the internet.
The shift back toward nationalism guarantees substantial new military conflicts will arise in the next few decades. The only question is how serious they'll be, not whether they'll happen. Nationalism vs globalism will come and go in cycles; we've been rapidly heading into an obvious nationalism cycle. That will see the raising of barriers, both physically and communication-wise between nations, increasing the odds of misunderstanding. The Eurozone is almost guaranteed to dissolve and it's likely the EU will struggle to retain its former scope. Russia and China will be more aggressive about annexing territory as the US pulls back from its formerly over-extended global military reach. The net result will be increased security fears and chaos for most other nations (not to mention greater military expenditures, which will damage most European welfare states and push Japan to the edge financially). The increase in nationalism is also guaranteed to result in a few new nuclear powers being born out of security fear (Brazil, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are three candidates).
Not really. You can remotely tell if a system is broken based on the power it producing, and you usually clean the panels at least every few years. So any cracks would be discovered relatively quickly, but they are pretty rare anyway. The glass they use to protect the panels is super strong, and designed to withstand large hail. The only time I've seen broken panels is when someone hits a baseball into one.

However, drone imagery is heavily used in the solar industry for roof inspection. For rooftop solar, you need to inspect the roof to make sure the panels will fit and won't be obstructed. Google maps can give you a ballpark, but closer imagery is needed. There's a few companies doing this (Solar Census, Google Sunroof, Sun Number, etc.), so might check them out.

FYI, the coolest cleantech application I've see for areal imagery is Ceres Imaging, who flies over crops to detect where you need to water. Something like a 50%+ water savings because you can target water to where it's needed. Crazy effective.
Terminally ill boy raises 2.5M for others to reach his age
The profile page for user christianbryant links to a page on darkreading.com that claims the name for that user is Christian Bryant, so, if the name isn't Christian Bryant, he (or maybe 'she'?) shows another way to 'delete' information about oneself from the internet: bury it in misinformation.

That's a lot of work and won't erase everything, but it can help.
This is true, but software engineers often prefer to work in software-driven companies instead of companies where software is used to reduce costs.

They feel valued more in co's where software is the main source of profit - this is the same reason a lot of software engineers aren't excited to work for the big companies in the (massive) retail industry, or infrastructure more generally, which also are "scaling problems".

Solar has some appeal in that it has large long-term impact, and nerdy problems - but I think it's still less appealing generally than space, or maybe medicine, let alone tech companies where the core product is software.
No, it's even worse than we thought back then. Recent research predicts even a regional nuclear exchange could create global famine conditions for years (not to mention the political and economic instability): http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html
Quite interesting! Any thoughts for an XMPP or IRC bridge (similar to what Slack provides)?
Sorry for the potato server everyone. Will fix asap.

Alternate download link:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2PaeRjVqAN7MngxTXFPQkpLVj...
I'm very sensitive to this issue as a long time HN user I don't want to get spammed. However, as I was brainstorming this I came to this conclusion: If you put your email address in your HN profile you are opting in to people being able to reach you. ClapChat will just be a client for doing that easily and we will do everything to make sure a bot can't abuse this. For starters, you have to be authenticated to send a message so we can tell if someone is abusing the system and spamming people. Secondly, you can unsubscribe from ClapChat emails so that it will never bother you.

This is something I feel we can strike a balance with, open to any feedback and ideas people have.
Ask HN: Beginner guide to  astronomy?
I'm absolute beginner with astronomy. So wanted to check whats your advice on how to get started? any thoughts on telescope models & types ? Just wanted to start a new hobby in 2017

thanks
Ahh, well that is a disappointing name. Thanks for the correction.
Do Teachers Need to Include the History of Mathematics in Their Teaching? (2003)
Yes to plans, though not before 2017.
If it's long and random enough to be very hard to remember, then it's MFA, in my opinion. A private key (e.g. the one used for TOTP) is nothing more than a quantity of random bits (with specific properties, grant you). I'll give you that the output is certainly reusable for a statically stored key, but you're still adding a second factor that, barring some alternate attack like keylogging, still adds security beyond a password.
One of the least informative articles I've read in a long time...
InfernoJS Boilerplate – early stages
The real reason grocery stores are running out of whipped cream this Christmas
Not sure it's the only one. Seems the Labour Party in the UK was more into appealing to elites than working people in recent years, and it's caused quite a bit of tension recently. There's definitely a divide between the Blairite Labour members (aka those who basically want Conservatism with slightly more left wing social policies than the Conservative Party) and the old school left wing types (which may or may not include Jeremy Corbyn).
His argument that Basecamp is a failure in part because they don't have as many features as the competitors makes we wonder if he has actually read anything Jason has written.

Basecamp makes quite a bit of money, employs a bunch of people, and (as far as I can tell) the people that work there are happy and productive. I hope I can fail as hard one day.
I'm waiting to refactor four of my services to use tokio + hyper + amqp as soon as possible. It'll be fun...
And like many other crafts, while anyone can bang out a shell script to print "hello world!", it's a fair bit different from something large, complex and finely crafted.
I've seen this argument before.

A: the solution to unwanted speech is more speech.
B: OK.
A: Also pg is a lizard from planet Nibiru.
B: That sounds like bullshi-
A: OMG CENSORSHIP

Nobody is silencing dissenting opinions, they're disagreeing with them and questioning their validity. Don't dish out criticism if you can't take it.
Deep, deep down everyone, who is not in it for the power alone, knows that there is a family he wants to go home too, and that the same goes for those on the other side. And even if the other side would take that from you- to take that, for forever- that is beyond insanity.

Humans will not use this weapons.
> It's the only language in the lisp family that allows you to write both, neither, or some combination in the same program.

Where did you get that from?

Almost all Lisp dialects allow you to write functional and/or imperative code.
The new WikiHouse website
This gets to the root of my problems with the game's development history.

The switch to Lumberyard makes a lot of sense. It's basically Cryengine. With Crytek shutting down, I'd want to switch to a still maintained but pretty much the same engine too.

When Star Citizen was originally announced on Kickstarter I was hyped as hell that Freelancer was going to get a spiritual successor. But I held off because it felt like they were already promising a really big scope at the time of the Kickstarter. Like the size of several games.

Destiny also had a huge vision, but even with an experienced studio and fewer promises, they still had issues delivering on the hype they marketed until many DLC's later.

The vision for the game still felt achievable until they added the FPS elements, at which point I more or less wrote off that the game would ever come out as a fully realized vision. It's just too goddamn big.
Totally this. I also apply a similar rule to phone calls - barring few exceptions (family, expected important communication), I pick up only when I feel like it (and most of the time, I don't). If something is important, one can text me instead (thus letting me decide whether or not I consider it important too).
35W is a great example (I live in the Twin Cities and was only a mile or two from the bridge when it collapsed). Our Republican Governor at the time (Pawlenty) had aspirations for Washington so signed a "No New Taxes" pledge primarily to appease rural Minnesotans (he also promised to "reprioritize" spending to benefit rural areas). It was a great example of how bridges that were known to urgently need repairs were neglected. After Dayton (take a guess which party) was elected the State raised taxes and has rebuilt many bridges.

The Twin Cities also has some other good examples - Republicans actively fight against metro transit projects (both light rail lines, the proposed SW Light Rail, BRT lines in place of LRT for at least 3 other corridors, and even regular city buses) but proudly tell their rural/exurban constituents about "successes" like replacing the Stillwater lift bridge (an old 2 lane bridge) with a massive four lane bridge very similar to the I-90 bridge just south of the area. How do you justify $500M for a bridge that benefits ~ 10,000 rural commuters/rural industry but ignore the daily congestion that tens of thousands of commuters face (coming in from Woodbury, Oakdale, Lake Elmo, Hudson etc). The gateway corridor had a similar price tag to the Stillwater bridge but became a partisan issue.

It doesn't have to be an either or situation - we could fund both but it gets turned into a partisan issue by Republicans in the name of "wasteful spending by urban liberals". Democrats don't oppose rural bridges or highways but many Republicans actively oppose public transport on principle.
In many jobs that's totally worth it—chances are very low a stranger will need something high priority from you, and people who work with you will know how to communicate.

Email is good for a lot of things, but not for expecting processing quickly.
I see. So you'd rather have something that says, "You are now chatting with everyone in 192.168.1.*". That's good feedback. Thank you!
Out of curiosity, do you actually have your backup codes somewhere? I know I did at some point, but the things you don't use, you lose...
Lyons' book is more thorough and complete, each chapter builds on the foundation of the prior ones. He aimed for a hands-on approach, not theoretical. It is very suitable for someone who isn't intimidated by math (of which there is ample), but would prefer to see examples of it worked out (especially visually). His list of tips and tricks at the end come in handy for specific applications (some of which I didn't know I need until I later came across them).
Smith's book, on the other hand, is cursory and a bit more brief. It might leave you feeling that there is more depth there which you do not understand. Perhaps I feel this way because I read it online whereas I read Lyons' as a physical copy. Smith treats similar subjects but with less detail and fewer of the expert topics. On the other hand, it is a faster read and free. Both are good for beginners who want to understand DSP better!
Very cool. I wish university professors use this article as a precursor to the computer architecture course material. Its much more interesting to study something when you have a historical perspective that you can relate to later on in the course.
The primary focus is to get something that works well as a browser extension but since we plan to open source it there isn't any reason why the community couldn't add that. If there is demand for it then I'll be happy to work on it as well.
I reiterate your parent: please don't do this. Scraping a resource for email addresses and sending unsolicited email would be understood by a lot of people as spam. This would be different if they put something like the following in their profile:

clap.chat: myemail@example.com

Edit: spelling
I use this as well on DigitalOcean. It's easy to create new certs and put them on my various devices so I can disable if I need to. I'll have to check out some of the other ones listed here but I've been using it for a few years now without any issues.
True, however since the distributed energy resource (DER) IoT (inverters, thermostats, etc.) is more critical to grid infrastructure than your WiFi router, there's a bit more incentive to start doing more security testing on these deployed devices. Consumers won't pay for the better security, but grids likely will.

Maybe it will take a huge hack to push the industry into requiring better DER security, or maybe an ambitious security firm could hop on this early and control the market. Either way, eventually we're going to end up with a set of security requirements for DERs that need to be tested and certified.

Seems like a good opportunity for some ambitious tech cybersecurity startups. DERs are a really new sector of the energy industry, so there aren't any entrenched security firms (like there are in the wholesale grid). It's an open field for ambitious entrepreneurs.
If you want a VPN in a script, I recommend Algo:

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

Algo is IPSEC, not OpenVPN (I'm ambivalent about which one is better, but IPSEC has OS-level support on Macs) and carefully chosen parameters.
Wow, I never realized operators couldn't push fixes to their routers without permission. The internet is indeed a tragedy of the commons: trivial to ruin, but a Sisyphean task to fix.
One of my bosses had a good way of dealing with emails. He would only write one single short replies.

No "Dear/Hello Blah", no sign off, just one single terse sentence that was straight to the point.

He detested my wordy, time laboured and well formatted emails that looked like letters. He had a point.

He treated email like a messenger application, whereas many of us still see it as an electronic replacement for the physical letter. Once you see the difference the time savings are huge.
That same reasoning would have prevented Arafat and Obama's Peace Prizes. I don't think it's an insuperable argument.

Mostly the problem was that nobody know about the secret Russian military records until decades later.