skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Very few problems that we are working on are "difficult" from the technical side of things.

I'd say these problems are technically difficult, just not deep. To clarify the difference:

(0) A difficult problem requires a lot of effort to solve. Example: Finding and fixing use-after-free errors in a buggy C program.

(1) A deep problem requires creativity and insight to solve. Example: Inventing and formalizing Rust's borrow checker rules.

Programmers are naturally attracted to deep problems, but not difficult ones. In fact, reducing difficult problems to deep ones is often considered progress, for good reason. After you come up with the right insight, solving a deep problem can be very easy. But solving a difficult problem will always be hard.
ripgrep is your proof. Go read the blog post Steve linked. If you still don't believe it, read the code. There's not that much of it.

Then compare it with similar tools written in Go, like sift and the platinum searcher.

The problem is, searching a file quickly is not as simple as you want to believe. If you show me a naive line by line approah, I'll show you an approach that is much faster but more complex. Top speed requires work, sometimes algorithmic work, regardless of the language you choose.
I don't think many people have even argued that the traffic situation is 'working okay'.

That isn't what I said. I implied that someone riding in a train probably doesn't care much about road congestion.
There are going to be haters that come on here and try to down play this video..

But there is something to be said about a car that can gauge the movement of others around it, and a car company that is willing to push for a better type of vehicle. The largest automakers in the world have had the power, finances, and means to progress vehicles for quite some time and have not. Tesla's are not perfect, but it terms of what they are doing I give them a big hats off.
Exactly.

Per game room (each room is a process). I end up just using boxes that have 1 CPU core and run just that game room in there. Except for some dedicated servers that have 40+ cores, in which we run 40+ processes.

On Agar.io doing all the collision checking and encoding the packets is the biggest bottleneck. Similarly for Diep.io. Number of players of course increases those two factors almost linearly. For example, Diep.io doesn't process shapes that aren't being transmitted to anyone.
Yeah, get in line behind Steve Ballmer.
I'm betting this is it. My packages that heavy/dense enough to potentially pop air cushions if dropped seem to all use crumpled paper.
Getting CrocodileJS going, I learned ES6/ES7/Babel/Async/Await and so much about React and React Native too (building some RN apps at the moment). I still need to ship V1, but I am looking for help. https://crocodilejs.com
I'm guessing the LIDAR saw the second car up rapidly slowing. You could catch a peek of it over the smaller car.
I found Leia really hit the uncanny valley, for me. Shudder.

P.S. I'm commenting on this with specificity, here, because the thread is already a spoiler in this regard.
Except unless you own a copy of the VHS release before 1997 you are stuck with bad CGI in the original three.

Which is certainly sad. Anyone born since around 1995 has probably only seen the awful song scene in Episode 6 version.
> Y'all are blind as bats

i don't remember tarkin from the first film, i didn't know he was CGI'd, and I didn't notice anything while i was watching the show.

i thought he was just another campy actor acting in the spirit of the original film, which was super campy. the x-wing battle at the end of the film convinced me that some of these actors were likely intentionally hamming it up, like a command and conquer cutscene.
That's awesome! Keep it up :)
This is awesome! Can I use this repost link tomorrow? Or does it expire tonight?
If you were able to be rid of FAT32, 98SE was just fine.
Which the iPhone has no problem with. “Hey Siri” works even when you have no Internet connection.
Back to your original article, I think several scientific notions of yours are misguided. I presume that by entropy you refer to information entropy, not thermodynamic entropy, and I think you have conflated these two different notions that are called entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is concerned with how easily energy can be transferred from one thermodynamic system to another, while information entropy is concerned with how many bits we require to select a string from a group of possible strings.

> The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that.

On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision, since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of space.

I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos, let alone one person's attempt.

Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.
The air bags where each cell was independently inflated and sealed[1] were recently invented (2002) and there are a lot of patents for it.[2][3][4]

It took several iterations of ingenuity to figure it out because the previous sheet of air bags had one inlet to inflate all the airtubes. All the tubes were connected to each other like the tubes of a waterbed.

Since I've been seeing those inflatable air bags for more than 5 years in shipments from Amazon, Newegg, etc., it looks like industry adoption has taken less than 10 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_air_cushion

[2] https://www.google.com/patents/US7150136

[3] https://www.google.com/patents/US20050103676

[4] https://www.google.com/patents/US6565946
used in this $1500 machine: http://minipakr.com/the-mini-pakr/
A guide to Stoicism for neurotic millennials
That's my concern too. In LA and DC there are plenty of people who have 90 minutes commute each way. With autonomous cars this is much less painful so people may move even further away from work.
I'm surprised at how little DHH says here. He could have stopped writing after the fifth paragraph. Or just added the phrase "Don't blame your tools" to the headline. Like bad code, this post is verbose and most of its verbiage redundant. Good writing, like good code, is a long apprenticeship.
Recent ones you can, but those came about during the ascent of packaged air. Old ones were just plastic.

New ones you can even eat. They're made of corn.
univocity-parsers can handle this sort of problem without a hitch:

https://github.com/uniVocity/univocity-parsers

You should be able to process any sort of record with unescaped quotes.
> What are pointers in the hardware?

Under current "flat address space" architectures, a pointer in the hardware is nothing more than a memory address, represented as an integer. That is, a pointer with value 0x12345678 is the address of the memory 0x12345678 bytes above the start of the virtual address space.

In the C language, pointers are more abstract: they have to point to either within an object, or one past the end of an object. This is because there are architectures like segmented architectures, where a pointer has two parts (segment and offset) and cannot be treated just like an integer, and the same C program should in theory be able to also run in these architectures without change.
It's also in the title of the link on HN?
Don't you mean "Embleer Frith"?
Posted this on an Uber tread the other day:

I live in New York, frequently travel to suburbs around the country and world, and have not missed for a second the driver's license I gave up almost 5 years ago.

It's not always seamless, but neither is driving. A shockingly good trade, already, and one that will only get better as cars drive themselves.
It seems silly to use something with finite supply for something so simple to substitute.
Curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in
That's an amazingly unique project that now has my wheels spinning for 2017!
What is Google waiting to make official the support of Android apps on ChromeOS?
With the web getting all sort of improvements at a very fast pace, and wasm to set the stable version in Q1 2017, are they hesitating on the Android compatibility idea and plan to keep only web apps?
Teslas aren't equipped with LIDAR. I think they're the only self driving capable vehicle not to use it.
Excel enthusiastically and automatically types oh-so-many things. It'll take dates and assume they are in american MM/DD/YYYY in some fields and then treat dates in the same column like 13/01/1986 as strings.

That exact problem I had when working with a company who had a stocked item with the code "060E2". When people don't know scientific notation the result is bewildering!!!
You asked "What percentage of the population drives in Vancouver?", and another commenter replied that it is about 65%, which means it is unlikely that most people see massive congestion as 'okay'.
It’s only Sublevel
I had to package and tape boxes at an Amazon fulfillment center over peak season one day.

One of the "problems" I found with the process is the system tells you the size of box to use. You're not allowed to use a smaller size, even if it would work, only that size or larger. It also tends to overestimate the size of the item, so many boxes wind up with a lot more empty space than would be necessary, and more packing.

I'm sure this bias is intentional, but I found it odd at the time.
When I'm working in my basement office, here are sounds which are reduced well-enough:

- People talking.

- The clothes washer and dryer one room over.

- Someone walking on the hardwood floor above me, wearing hard-soled shoes.

I can't think of any noise which gets through and distracts me, shy of someone walking up to me and intentionally talking to me.

When I'm on an airplane, the headphones significantly reduce engine noise.

Sudden, transient noises don't seem to be a problem.

If I had to make an uneducated guess, I'd say that the quality of "transient" basically implies a high-frequency component to the sound's power spectrum, which these headphones handle just fine.

I can't promise that you'd consider the $300 to be well-spent, but from how you describe your environment, I suspect you'd be pretty happy with these.
In all honesty, I think we're saying the same thing.
We order a from Amazon Prime Now occasionally and that stuff always just comes in a paper bag. No huge boxes, no packing material at all. Just a bag.

I imagine that's because its time in transit is far lower and it's handled by only one currier. In the end, probably less efficient but at least on the packing materials side it's more efficient.
Living Strong with Low-Grade Depression
I don't remember the source, but I remember reading somewhere that using only standardized boxes was an innovation that results in cheaper shipping of the same products than if they were packaged in irregular boxes instead.
Great CG playing against good cg (not all characters/env are created equal) makes the great CG stand out as realistic. Great CG playing against real life makes the great CG look off and less realistic. I think your example is a matter of contrast more than technology.
They're a nightmare if you have babies/pets and don't clear out your packing materials quickly - I keep my boxes and materials until I validate the item's functional.

Disposable peanuts are made from corn/rice so humans/pets can eat them, but it's unknown if they're easily digestible in large quantities and anecdotes about pets hurling them up are out there.

I prefer the air-packs, yes it's plastic (my recycler accepts them if they're collapsed and not loose), but a small amount given the size of the packages.
When I read Gödel, Escher, Bach I wished the book came with a CD...
I didn't mean to imply that the data wouldn't be useful, I was more asking to see if you had any specific questions in mind that this data could shed some light on. Relating download rates to citation is the first thing that comes to mind for me, though honestly I'd be much more interested in analyzing the full citation graph for my field, which generally doesn't post papers to the ArXiv.

It's not that I am personally concerned with misinterpreting the data. I just think there could be some downsides to releasing the data without limiting access in some way. For one, I think there are already issues with the citation metrics are used and interpreted, for example in tenure evaluations. I don't think it would be a step in the right direction if this data were used towards the same end...
Probably the book The Box although that was about shipping in general.
You should always host your own blog and then post a summary on the MSDN blogs -- always have control over content
Tarkin was excellently made. I'm pretty sure most people not knowing of the trick didn't suspect anything.
OTOH I've found Leia, for the few seconds she's visible at the end, quite poorly done; in particular her lips moved in a very unrealistic and artificial way.
Die hard fans cringed. I thought the Leia part at the end really hurt the film. Instead of focusing on the story, I immediately started wondering how they achieved it.
In my opinion the biggest reason why writing software is hard is that the requirements are often not clear from the beginning. Changing requirements can kill a software project. What makes it even harder is when data has to be migrated during the process.

Analogy for clueless manager types: in many cases, software is 99% plumbing. But imagine the cost of changing the plumbing after the house has been built :) Also consider the problem of changing the plumbing while people are actually living in the house.
Typical audio compression rates can be 10:1, especially for voice. So if the LED rings are lit for 30 seconds, is there 30 seconds of network activity, or 3 seconds? If it's 30 seconds, either Amazon is grossly wasting internet bandwidth by streaming uncompressed audio, or it is sending 10x as much data as the query it is supposed to be sending.

You do understand that it is trivial to operate the LED lights and microphone independently, right? The hardware /could/ be designed so that the microphone can't be activated without also turning on the LEDs, but I'm guessing they're independently controlled by a microcontroller, and that it's the hidden software which is responsible for turning the LEDs on when the microphone is in use.

Yes, this is a concern for smartphones as well. The capability, even if it is not currently in use, is a concern.
I took me out of the moment, in other words.
It's interesting that of among these promotional articles and videos about the Tarkin and Leia CGI reconstructions, there's not a single frame grab or video clip. There's absolutely nothing on YouTube. With all the gushing about how they managed to bring a dead actor to life, you'd think Disney would release some clips.

(FWIW, I was among those who thought the CGI characters were awful, in an otherwise brilliant film.)
> This is a complicated question because the (rich) population in the city center

This is a MYTH that must be ended someday. No, not only people living in most city centres are not rich, but they are even poorer than people living in the suburbs.

In my country, this the case for every single city except the capital.

I don't know Vancouver, but a 5 minute search of maps of densities and maps of income seem to confirm this again: centre, dense areas are the poorest.

And yet, on every thread (same in US forums or at my place) about transportation, transit, housing, bicycle(!), urbanisation, whatever that relates to cities, someone (or many) will come and say that people from the centre are rich and privileged and that the suburban people are poor and that they had no other choice than to move there to survive.

Truth is, except for a few slum-like suburbs, other suburbs are mostly populated by people who chose to move there to have a bit of a garden or to have bigger houses or to park their cars or to have dogs or to have a swimming pool, etc. and these people have a higher living standard.
I work for the company behind go-raml `feel free to ask any question` (we currently make extensive use of python/go generators)
'Profitable' Washington Post adding more than five dozen journalists
AcronymFinder.com works pretty well when you encounter an acronym you don't understand. In this case, you'd have to hit the 'Information Technology' section, as will frequently be the case on Hacker News.
Maybe I read it differently, but it seems to me that GP us more concerned with the institutional bias and the attitude rather than anything relating to legal liability... the programmer is allowed to get away with believing that they are taking responsibility for the security of their code, but never feels any consequences for failure, and thus believes they are doing a good job when they are not.
It could also store compressed voice waveforms in such a way that any reproduction from the compressed data would sound horrible but would be at least somewhat intelligible to human listeners.

1200 bits per second is almost enough for toll-quality speech -- and I'm referring to the state of the art a few years ago. Speech codecs are probably better now. But let's stick with 1200 bps. That's enough to store continuous speech in the vicinity of the device for a year, using only about 5 GB.

My guess is that if you cared only about intelligibility and not fidelity, you could do the job with 10%-20% of that space.

So yes: Alexa could easily be collecting and storing a vast amount of data that isn't immediately transmitted or used.
Did you bother to look at the list of countries they work in before you made that comment?
Exactly, the appeal of P2P is you don't need to run servers. And it seems like a reasonable feature to allow browsers to reliably host multiplayer games.
Thinking about doing the same myself. I've realized I am just not happy in this job with my current company.

Was it difficult to work on the side products without a set schedule like a full time job provides?
AutoGitHub (Automatically follow a lot of GitHub users)
Can't see any reason it wouldn't work with HTTP2. And HTTP1.1 will still be supported for a long time anyway.
UPS wants 2 inches of space between the product and the outer box... keeps real damage from happening if the outer box is slightly punctured by something.

https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/g...
if you listen to the podcast, you'll realize that you don't need to do that.
Obama moves to split cyberwarfare command from the NSA
I would bet pretty good money that automated theorem proving is better than the best humans within 10 years.

There's still not a lot of good research in combining machine learning and theorem proving, and intuitively it seems feasible. It's clearly somewhere between beating Go and general AI, and probably closer to Go since it's basically just a tree search with heuristics.

If this happens, it would radically change the software industry. High level application development might not change that much since the problems are usually poorly specified. But it might dramatically reduce the cost of writing system software. We'd see innovation in that space we haven't seen since the 70s. Unix and its abstractions that dominate the whole market might look as antiquated as punch cards.

Additionally, professional mathematicians might become more like philosophers, guiding the procession of mathematics and deciding what is interesting to prove.
How world this compare to using inline-C?
Well, you CAN do simplified C++. Apple even had their own version of it called 'Embedded C++' (the drivers in OSX are like that) -- basically, remove RTTI, exceptions, templating and a few other bits and you get a C with namespacing, objects, nice context-based stack based objects and a few other nice things, without the bloat.

So, yes technically you CAN write nice lightweight C++; but you won't be able to enforce it in a team, as everyone will need 'their' pet feature of doom to bring back the bloat.

How do I know? Well, I tried for years to do it like that; and eventually I had to give up. Now I do plain C, because it can't be corrupted in the same way.

"But, but, I just #included <vector>!!"

"... What, for a 5 byte constant array?"

"Yeah I know, but the compiler will just inline it!"
By eyeballing an Emma Maersk diagram, I think you could get three more stacks of containers, for ~5% more capacity.
Covert persistence in Express.js applications
J. K. Rowling comes to mind. Scholastic wasn't a "big publisher" in the traditional sense, more of a niche marketer.

Tom Clancy would also qualify, I think.
I loathe styrofoam, it's messy and hard to get rid of. The air bags are a huge improvement. Just stab them with a knife, and they take up no space in the garbage.
He should look the same age because it literally takes place days before the original movie. His footage was take from the original movie.
> human labor has done -- training, more than 1 person who knows how to do a given job, etc

Except we're not talking about standard human labor. The guy isn't building bricks, he's maintaining a damn through "feel". That's not something that can just be easily trained.

By your logic, explain why we can't buy a new Stradivarius today. Obviously we dealt with the problem of just training someone else to do the same job throughout history by your own admission. It surely isn't lack of demand so I must not be looking in the right places. Where can I buy one?
The Bible describes that salesman as a liar and a thief. Remember that. He's a liar! Don't buy what he's selling, because it's a lie.

And he's a thief. He wants to steal everything your future could be, will be, and replace it with nothing.

As a Christian, I can look at those moments of shame and regret, and say "Yes, that was wrong. I failed. I hurt people. But it's forgiven. Paid for. Totally, completely, willingly paid for." And then I can remember, once again, to forgive myself.

But I don't wrestle with the salesman like you do, so I can't claim that it will help you. I think it will, but I can't really say.

Stay alive, friend. Stay alive (and well).
OMG this, especially in dry climates. I HATE packing peanuts with a passion.
It's not that simple. We can turn corn into petrochemicals if the relative prices change enough.