skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with systemd is not that it is "bad". There's a lot worse software out there. Systemd is relatively competently programmed. And it's even useful!

The problem with systemd has always been that it forces you to do everything the systemd way, and usually to use its tools. It goes against everything that has helped GNU/Linux become a great system: that it wasn't really one system. It was bits and pieces, and you could add them together however you wanted to get something you liked.

Systemd is the opposite. It is inflexible and clunky, monolithic and proprietary, binary and difficult. Everything has to be made to work with it, not vice versa. It doesn't follow any of the old conventions that made it simple to combine one tool with another. I can compare it to Windows, but I feel like that would be an insult to Windows' usability.

If this one single fact was different, everyone would love systemd, because it has plenty of useful features. But because it is designed specifically to please a single quirky user, people hate it.
Shell and bash are actually excellent at this, but people don't like writing shell scripts. This is just process chaining. Take a look at DJB's or the more modern runit for init toolkits that compose.

https://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

http://smarden.org/runit/

Here is a bash function that retries N times:

retry() {
local n=$1
shift
for i in $(seq $n); do
"$@"
done
}

retry 5 echo hi

Then you can compose with a timeout function, which already exists:

timeout-demo() {
timeout 0.1 $0 retry 5 echo hi
}

You can pass the names of other functions as pre and post hooks as well.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/time...

Shell has a very forth-like quality to it, and Forth is sort of like a backwards Lisp as well (postfix rather than prefix).
That's not an accurate TL;DR, the article talks about other approaches to reduce storage space.
One of the things I like about systemd is you can get a graph of the boot time along with critical path via the following: systemd-analyze plot >boot.svg
Why is tobacco demonized and marijuana commercialized?
Health Care’s Bipartisan Problem: The Sick Are Expensive and Someone Has to Pay
Like I said, there are some valid arguments on both sides. But a blanket "signals are garbage" is not useful or correct.
The New Rules for Becoming a Data Scientist
Also App.net charged money for use.
Mini discs actually do have a unique playback feature among physical recordings. A random shuffle setting can be played without any gaps. Aphex Twin released a recording that took advantage of this.

I love art and it's ability to interact with an audience on multiple levels.
I run into this a lot with other languages (c#). Google thinks older == better. It's terrible in any not so stable environment.
You missed the point completely, I'm afraid. The point was that it's a leaky abstraction composed of half implemented concepts that devs have to add to their brain. It does not replace the existing functionality or improve it.
That's the best mascot I think I've ever seen. Merits of the language notwithstanding, Go consistently outperforms on `d'awww` benchmarks.
"Fake news!" -Adobe
This TEDx talk by Heather van Dyck [0] will explain how they rebuilt the VA benefits sites to reduce the processing time from an average of 150+ days and over 1000 different website pages to a single site that could process claims in a few days.

[0] - https://www.ted.com/talks/haley_van_dyck_how_a_start_up_in_t...
Depending on how micro your microservice is and if it really is high volume (not sure what high volume means to you) then I would recommend just stick with the standard library to start and grabbing other libs as you need. I wrote a simple internal microservice handling ~400k req/s at peak with no framework and it works great. I can see the appeal of the framework in getting something up and running really fast with one command, but that amount of time in the beginning that it saves is insignificant compared to the long term lifecycle of the project.
Derek Parfit obituary
Civ 1 had two statistics: attack and defense, which were rolled in a simple way. This lead to lucky Roman legions defeating tanks occasionally. Civ 2 added two more statistics (health and "firepower") which more clearly divided units into eras.

For example, Musketeers will almost always lose to Riflemen even though their stats are very similar apart from the Riflemen unit having 100% more health.

There are some things I disliked about the game, for examples city walls turns any city into an almost impregnable fortress until the very end of the game, but the unit health system was satisfactory.
Consider the CPU as a pile of ALUs, FPUs, load & store units, internal buffers, and the like. Each "instruction" is a variable-size set of parallel instructions, directing which output goes into which input for various stages of that clock cycle.

The layer that humans and HLL compiler developers end up with at the lowest seems to resemble a dataflow graph, and the system-specific code converts that into the parallel binary code stream.

The notion of the "belt" helps arrange how long data sticks around in live outputs & buffers, but isn't a physical element in the chip.
It might have something to do with this...

>Regarding the link between marijuana and cancer, the committee found evidence that suggests smoking cannabis does not increase the risk for cancers often associated with tobacco use – such as lung and head and neck cancers. The committee also found limited evidence that cannabis use is associated with one sub-type of testicular cancer and insufficient evidence that cannabis use by a mother or father during pregnancy leads to a greater risk of cancers in the child.
Doubtful it would be theft of service since I'd assume you are entitled to use the power available from your car for accessories. This leaves us with maybe a terms of service violation?
Kubernetes cluster install with Kops
Burns it down to the ground to get out of the rain.
That life expectancy equation is a bunch of malarky. It means average time a person is expected to live based on death rates. So if you have a high infant mortality rate, it will affect the numbers. For example, in Sri Lanka during my grandparents time the life expectancy was abysmal but both they and most of the people around them lived healthy into old age, probably much healthier than the average elderly person now. The language is misleading because "life expectancy" is a statistic used to measure how likely you are to die not how long you are expected to live.
Nintendo Switch Presentation 2017
My understanding is that Everett claims that Chomsky claims that not only do humans have the capacity to use recursion but that it is an essential feature of all our languages and for us to have languages (whether this is an accurate representation of Chomsky's views, I do not know; Pinker has stated that Chomsky is hard to pin down.) Everett further states that only Piraha children who have learned a recursive language as their first language are able to speak it recursively; adults, it seems, may learn another vocabulary, but will not use it recursively. Therefore, according to Everett, we have a human population (those who have not learned another language in childhood) with a functioning language, who display no capacity for recursion, even when exposed to it.

This seems to me to leave a sliver of hope for what is alleged to be Chomsky's theory, but I would prefer to see more data than more argument over the current data.
However, the Saudis will soon raise the price of fuel to exorbitant levels (again), while electricity prices will remain stably regulated by each state's power commission.
"Network effects" on the WWW are artificial. We need to update our laws so that neither users nor developers can be punished for using any non-disruptive browsing device. A browsing device is anything that consumes data and shows it to users later.

Little guys like App.net won't stand much of a chance against the behemoths until the U.S. legalizes competition against the tech cartels.

Once that happens, sites like App.net and Twitter can compete on an even footing, and consumers will be free to choose services based on merit rather than lock-in.
DVDFab Blu-ray Toolkit
You'll find that there's pretty much nothing you can't outright disable, except for journald. journald needs to be running, but you can turn off the binary logging and redirect everything to syslog.
systemd itself is a collection of system daemons, as well as small programs to interact with those daemons, and almost all of them are disabled by default. That's my experience on Arch, and they adhere strictly to upstream defaults.
If that weren't enough you could simply leave out the daemons you don't like at compile time.
> I can name plenty of women that I know that are put off from participating in such communities because everyone just assumes that they are male.

Is that a bad thing? That's the ultimate in equality.
That's a strawman argument so I'll put it this way: I have never interviewed someone with an online degree and walked out of that interview with a positive experience. Online education needs to improve if it's going to be on par with traditional degrees.
I've told this before but I haven't used pandora since they wouldn't stop playing me ashley madison ads even after I complained to support about it. They said they only played ads that network tv would run. Every other ad for 6 months was asking me to cheat on my wife.

We all know how that went.
Lye itself is pretty low-tech -- but being able to safely and repeatedly hydrate and dehydrate it while controlling the heat transfer, that itself may require some finesse.
> [...] you meant (on _RHEL_ xyz is the case) [...]
>

Totally on me. We fight against it, but it's hard not to have the implicit context of RHEL/Fed be omnipresent on the Red Hat bugzilla. In fact, when I wrote the comment in question I had just finished lighting my incense to the sīla of `systemd`... :)

Did not realize you were in Sydney. AU truly has the best hackers.
New Techniques Identify Users Across Different Browsers on the Same PC
The way I read your second post was that analog computing is more efficient in general; it sounds like you don't actually believe that. Fair enough.

However, I still take issue with your overall point.

> Efficient, large scale neural nets will require fundamentally different hardware, like the programmable mixed signal Samsung boards used by Synapse.

I think it's at least plausible that we'll see gains from fundamentally different architectures (namely combining memory and computation) but where's the evidence that we need to switch from digital to analog? Where's the evidence that analog is even better for an architecture like that? Again, the DARPA project you linked actually gave evidence of the opposite.

> The next generation boards are likely to contain memristors and self organizing memory, with a structure somewhere between the organization level of FPGA LUT blocks and biological nervous systems.

You keep talking as if there's some obvious reason that analog is more efficient/faster/better for the types of architectures you're talking about. I'm not seeing that reason.
Because mass produced tobacco products are conclusively correlated with an increased risk of developing cancers and cannabis is not.
US Release date: March 3rd. Price: $299. Region free!
One of the reasons it seems.

It would, but by the look of it, C++ evolves faster these days.
All kinds of integration, sales, licensing deals across a bazillion markets, etc.
Abhinav:+BTech+Student+Suicide+in+Noida+Breaking+Latest+News+Updates
No, we don't even have a full Neanderthal genome.
>Prime is (currently) a clearly inferior offering for music and video

Yes, but for a very casual streaming music listener like myself who also has a pretty big music library on iTunes, free (with Prime) + Echo makes paying for any other music streaming service just not worth it. I'll take my free streaming and buy a song or album every now and then with the savings.

Amazon is somewhat inferior to Netflix in streaming. I have both in this case. But there are Amazon exclusives as well plus again, for many people, what's available with Prime is good enough to not make it worth paying for Netflix.
The first Jak game I played was Jak II. It blew my God-damned mind. Completely smooth world transitions, completely smooth character and facial animations... and AUTO-SAVE. I used to tell my buddies "they could do auto-save because they wrote a custom threading system using coroutines -- in Lisp! -- that interleaved memory card I/O with the main engine in a way that C++ just couldn't do at the time!" They didn't understand, but oh well. Lisp had saved me from putting up with the game grinding gameplay to a halt while it was "Saving. Do not remove the MEMORY CARD (8MB) (for PlayStation® 2) or turn off the power."
My thought exactly! Always loved the domain. :)
Change your user agent to Firefox and it should load the HTML5 version
A friend of mine who used to work for a hedge fund on the short book had an adage... Good plays when CEOs suddenly do a lot of press.
Funny how most people go for ! as the default special character :)
Russ Allbery's investigation [1] into alternative init systems, in the Debian's project to select the best one, also viewed this systemd property in a similar way -- a surprising and unexpected benefit.

Systemd's native understanding of cgroups, process hierarchy, and logging makes this view possible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387989
Firebase: the great, the meh, and the ugly
Autocorrect got me there and I could not figure out how to edit the comment. I forgot what I meant to write there if anything but the point stays the same.
>"if I can properly estimate your tax liability, I can create a partnership vehicle where instead of your tax liability going to the US federal government,"

So that Federal Government was OK when it came to you getting a student loan for an education but it's somehow not OK when it comes to paying your fair share to fund it?

I don't like paying taxes as much as the next guy but I do it and I understand why I need to.
Why Netflix is losing out in the world's most important market
How much RAM do you need for a Petabyte ZFS cluster?

I investigated ZFS for my home server and it was recommended to have 1Gb RAM for every Tb, and much more if you enabled deduplication/compression (I forget which).
I guess it's a bit like advanced perl5, you need to be taught the "right way" otherwise you pile up overlapping imperative code.
Snabb: simple and fast packet networking toolkit
Neon is fast compared to Chrome.
I do agree, although I think the 4k will take longer than it may seem. For instance 99% videos uploaded to YouTube are smaller than 4k.

And the trend is not improving much (or at all). By comparing video uploads to YouTube from last two years, the trend is roughly the same: only 1.1% of videos are in 4k [620M videos, 7M in 4k for 2016; 322M videos, 3.6M in 4k].
> Some people don't need to and shouldn't go to college.

Who are these people? Who decides? Have you asked them? What if they want to go to college? Is college only valuable for work skills? What about understanding the world?

I wonder if people said the same about high school, and basic literacy.

EDIT: I'll add to people reading this: Did you go to college? Do you expect your kids to? What about Senators, CEOs, etc - will their kids go to college? Much of this is the elite telling everyone else that their families don't need to go to college.
The Coke touchscreen fountain machines. There should be zero animation. Just let me pour my drink.
And climate scientists are responsible for Donald Trump getting elected how exactly?

"He who controls the weather, will control the world. He who controls gravity, will control the universe. He who controls time, will never be around." -Thomas Frey

http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/mitt-romney-blames-election-l...
Ask HN: What a 2nd tier college student must do to be at par with the best?
I'm a student of VIT University, India. Everyone in our country, from academia to industry, looks at us as second class undergrads.

I'm passionate about solving problems and making things, especially AI and game development. But due to some bad decisions I ended up dropping two years after high school and could not get into the IITs i.e. the top colleges in India. Ever since I started college and found the sub-par level of CS education here, I have tried to take my education into my own hands. I'm an autodidact by choice and here is the strategy that I have followed for the past one and half years at college:

- MOOC :
I have studied all the important CS courses from popular MOOCs like CS50, MIT OCW, etc. I have earned a certification in an AI MOOC taught by the IITs and completed the Machine Learning course from Coursera too.

- Projects :
I have done some good projects and open sourced them at https://github.com/AmanDaVinci

- Others :
I have worked as a two man team to publish a game on Play Store and we also sell our plugins, tools and assets on Unity3D asset store. I have organized and instructed successful game development workshops as I plan to start a Game Dev club in our college.

Considering the experience and expertise of the HN crowd in the engineering field, what more could I do to be at par with the top students of the world?

1) Should I invest in AI / ML nano degree certificates?

2) Should I work more on real software projects like open source AI and games?

3) Can I do anything else to improve myself?
Binary logs, hex logs, there's enough stupidity to go around!
The sarcastic answer: You have to pirate papers. There is a popular Russian hub for science papers that contains almost every paper ever published in the last couple of years. It is used by many academics.

Almost no organization can afford to pay for all the stores, so even universities have limited access in the sense that they can only offer their students and staff a limited selection of what is available. Subscription fees are too high, single journals are often only available in bundles with other journals/topics, increasing the price further. Publishers act as gatekeepers to (often publicly funded!) knowledge.
Curious they don't catch more coverage on this fact as it seems to directly contradict the narrative of a "super-charger". What prevents them from being able to charge all ports at full power?

This seems like another notch on the long list of hidden caveats with a Tesla. Other examples being constant surveillance/telemetry and the thermal battery throttling (0-60 in 2.xx seconds but good luck maintaining that!)
I'm definitely intrigued by the simple kinect-like sensor and HD rumble in the joy-cons. I just hope game developers leverage these unique controls.
this article refers to sharing between US federal intelligence agencies, not international sharing agreements -- though there is some evidence that what you described is the case, for instance: https://cryptome.org/2015/09/gchq-illegal-spying-us.htm
Showing a demo of a fighting game where a male character repeatedly punches and ultimately knocks out a female character just felt like a missed opportunity to me. How hard would it be to flip that for the demo?

(Already regretting posting this comment)

Edit: And here come the downvotes. You can always count on HN.
Don't let the stoners hear you say that. I've never met a crowd of people more insistent that their vice was virtue.
On Dogma: Belief Without Proof
You have to use it for user authentication which Emby does locally.
I concede that. But your initial use of "nobody" is also overly absolute.
For anyone interested in the paper outlining the ML methodology used to create the visualization:

(pdf) http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2016/report/ShenWilson-WhereCa...
Please see the history behind 'SFINAE' for what I am talking about.
WordPress Show Post Update Time
2 Monitors are great
Conferences, Standards, and Sponsorships: Selenium’s Work in 2016
In a managed platform like .NET or Java there's no reason in principle why any code should be able to tell whether it's in an OS or a green thread - the decision of how to actually accomplish having multiple simultaneously active callstacks with pre-emptive scheduling is made by the runtime. Early versions of Java used green threads within the JVM rather than relying on native threads, presumably as part of an attempt to provide consistent write-once-run-anywhere behaviors, so this is not just theoretical.

I think the async/await model arrives as a reasonable compromise in terms of supporting an alternative to OS threads in that it allows you to get the benefits of green threads (i.e. that you can process a lot of different stack contexts simultaneously without needing to spin up a huge amount of OS threads) without getting into the messy situation of having a user-space scheduler pre-emptively switching green-thread stacks (which probably needs the scheduler itself to run on another OS thread and definitely needs to be done at a 'runtime' level) - instead, you just rely on co-operative scheduling, which can be done at a 'library' level.
I've thought this many times, and I suspect it's somewhat complicated, engineering-wise — but solvable.

For one, detergent comes in at least three forms: Powder, liquid and those little plastic pouches. Powder would be pretty easy (but the dosage would be brand-specific) and liquid would be messy (flow rate would be a challenge).

The easiest way would be if all machines could accept a "standard pellet" which gets loaded in some kind of completely fool-proof way so the machine cannot mechanically choke on them, ever, or accidentally add too few/many to a load.

Same thing with dishwashers.

As for why you can't just close the door and walk away: Setting the program is an important step in washing clothes. Modern machines do have a single "start" button.
Yes, but I would like to see this against their metrics. Were they growing or shrinking in terms of activity at the same time? And by how much?

I suspect that Flickr's past the explosive growth stage so an optimization like this is timely.
The work-rest fractal, by Dustin Moskovitz
I can't imagine the fun you could get into in such a system where there are both green thread and OS thread locking primitives available...
Switzerland Agrees to Its Own New Data Sharing Pact with the US
The nerd in me is curious about the USB-C charger. Presumably this isn’t USB-C Power Delivery? Assuming 5V, how many MAh do I need in my external battery to run for an hour? How much power does this thing need?

Also, do the JoyCon run out of batteries at a much slower rate like a regular console controller? Presumably they charge when connected to the screen?
A well designed website shouldn't require a user agent change to get added functionality. If I have to mess with my user agent, install resource heavy plugins or change my browser of choice to use your service, then you just lost me as a customer.
I thought the writing was excellent and the content insightful.
> If you want a picture of the future, imagine...

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the brand of phone in your pocket. There will be no love, except the love of celebrities #0000A through #9999F. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of pity over a defeated reality TV show contestant.
According to the US State Department

> Gibraltar is adjacent to known drug trafficking and human smuggling routes, but the territory is heavily policed on land and at sea due to the risk of these activities occurring within its borders or territorial waters

https://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2014/supplemental/227...
Tips for cleaning your Dyson Vacuum
Show HN: An awesome back end for Matplotlib; plot directly in your terminal