skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny thing is that one of the bigger problems with optimizing compilers is register allocation. Not only is it difficult to write a good algorithm for it, but compilers don't always know what variable is most important to keep in a register. Gcc even implemented a weaker allocator [0] as the older one was too complex to decipher problems with it.

Instruction scheduling is not a problem on modern cpu's. Not that it's hard either way, just reorder things around memory access and heavy instructions like division. Agner Fog made a nice table of instruction latencies and throughputs [1].

Instruction encoding length... do you use 16bit integers or do you just int everything ? The compiler has to do what you tell it to do. Sure there are plenty of tricks around that but those are not the ones that give the compiler a remarkable advantage over humans. Tricks like using bitwise operations instead of multiplication and such and shortening equations is the advantage that the compiler has. But even that is not that big of a deal. (again, do you use the restrict keyword ? or static/define for constants ? do you know that C treats every "compile unit"(.c file) as a separate program ?)

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cauldron2012?action=AttachFile&do=g...

[1] http://www.agner.org/optimize/
Jobs to be done – getting started
Feature request: [a] accept [b] trash.
Keeping your Ruby on Rails app easy to update
> And if you can't afford it? Does society pay? Do we let them die? I'm interested in your answer.

The same thing that happens with the people whose lives could be saved right now if we stopped funding roads, or basic research, or investing in the city's water system, or educating first-graders, or researching drugs, or enforcing the property rights of rich people, or a bunch of other things that aren't going to pay off for years and are not associated with one's political party. It's not that the parties being funded are all completely honest and trustworthy, but that the money still needs to be spent. Drug research is one of the small number of things society does that actually add to the public good forever. Every year amazing drugs that do amazing things go off-patent. It's an amazing system and our children should be awed by how much stuff they will have. "Hepatitis C" will be like "polio" for them.

There is no reason to think the years 2010-2025 are some magic perfect ground where the drugs from pre-2010 are completely unsuitable and all the drugs that will be invented in year 2025 and beyond are unimportant or will still be found if a bunch of people who understand neither biochemistry nor economics rebuilt the economic system around it.

Every generation has the option to quit investing in the future. There are always people who want to stop all the painful sacrifices that are required right now, and just live off of yesterday's accumulated sacrifices and then go to sleep.

There will always be some procedure that keeps people alive but that costs Too Much Money. It's how most countries have kept their health care costs under control without noticeably impacting QALYs. There should be no doubt that there are people who died sooner because of these decisions, but the system works and doesn't bankrupt them. If "but we can't let someone die for a reason as stupid as money" is your terminal argument, be thankful you weren't in charge, or else society would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. These are hard decisions but adults need to make them, and generally adults do make them and things work out.

> When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we leave the market alone

I think there's a lot that can be improved about the market. I have a lot to say about that, but you are trying so hard to be cute and using children's arguments that goodwill can no longer be assumed. Good night and good luck.
They specifically mention "hybrid-electric propulsion systems", which means electric propulsion powered from a fuel-burning generator.
Yeah, I'm the same age, and I had a really hard time even understanding this article.

What does this thing do? Why would someone use it? What expectations would a user have for how their data will be used given that context? Does this article claim those expectations are being violated? I have no idea.

Guess it's time to buy a porch and a rocking chair.
Nokia, Facebook break subsea fiber optic network records in field trials
> an investigation by the Tribune found that the company’s interactions with Chicago officials were actually corrupt.

Unsurprising given it's Chicago, but this is one of the hazards.
Doh. Thanks :)
Ask HN: What made you decide to have a mobile app built, how did it go?
I am reevaluating my freelance mobile development business and am hoping to gain some insight into what motivates potential clients. What were your experiences around hiring a developer and how did it go? Below are some prompt questions to get the ball rolling.

* Why did you decide to have a mobile app built?

* Where did you look for someone to build it?

* What made you choose a particular developer?

* What challenges did you encounter?

Any information you choose to share is helpful and appreciated!
The wikipedia article is also very informative. I recently had to learn about dBV (decibel volts) when trying to understand the spec sheet for a MEMS microphone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel
Oh trust me, I don't overlook that point. I've spent too much time cajoling optimizers into the query plan that I know will work when they think they know better. And I know from painful experience how much more work it is to cajole developers in the same way.

That said, there is little point discussing this subject people who clearly have no experience about how to do what a little bit of SQL does. If you're convinced that manipulating data is easy, you're not going to appreciate that manipulating data efficiently is even more tricky.
Spectrum is finite though. You can add more fixed clients by adding more hardware at the CO and running more fibre. Eventually, even if no one is even actively downloading, your cellular network will saturate just from the number of clients.

The same is true of wireless networks today. An 802.11n wifi network is also limited by the number of clients, even if none of them are consuming their share of bandwidth.
The problem with the "it's not a free market" argument is that ultimately almost nothing is a purely free market when you drill down. Not only that, but wether a market free or not has only tangential relation to the question of if the market is competitive - which is what most people are actually after when they start talking about free markets.
And when I file a warranty claim on this overrun product and the manufacturer sees that the serial is not on file and refuses to fulfil it what then?
> The thought of a Li fire on board an aircraft is something that would keep me awake nights.

Whereas you wouldn't think twice about jet fuel fires, because you're used to it rather than because fuel isn't a fire hazard :-)
Ex post facto adding, no. But if the usage of the function corresponds to a concept within your codebase, and if you were able to abstract the usage of that function away, it would obviously help you fix the problem.
"a dimensionless way to compare values that vary dramatically on a linear scale" ?

So many people totally omit the reference measure, which drives me abolutely batty, particularly when we're talking about sound.

In air, dB SPL is referenced to 20 micropascals. In water, it's 1 micropascal, so the medium matters.

Since loudness is a psychophysical percept, it's also dirty pool to speak of loudness in this way. Intensity can be quantified, loudness varies by listener.
Yes, substring matches prefer earlier claims.
To be clear, I wasn't talking about not maintaining existing infrastructure which seems to be what the wiki entry you linked is about. I was talking about a freeze in new infrastructure specifically to allow for existing infrastructure to be better maintained and better utilized.
Obsidian API Proposal from Mozilla – Vulkan/Metal/DX12 Style API for the Web
I will definitely cease using a useful rhetorical device in case a handful of people might misunderstand me.
I hope this is ok to post but I would love to buy a project that is hopefully making a little bit of money. My sweet spot is 2k-5k USD per month in profit. I do have some specific requirements in terms of the type of projects. My profile has details.
Hi, one of the devs here! If you want to see a cool example of Unpaywall in action, check out the Nature paper [1] published last month about TRAPPIST-1, the nearby solar system with seven earth-sized planets. Paywalled on Nature, but Unpaywall links you to a free copy on ArXiv. [2]

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7642/full/nature2...

[2] http://blog.impactstory.org/smash-interstellar-paywall/
Sharper rocks than a lot of Earth deserts - less wind and no water to smooth things down.

More broadly, though, there are some deserts on Earth that are pretty hair-raising. The NPS guidelines for driving deep in the Canyonlands (on roads, no less) warns that with a high-clearance 4WD pickup, you should still expect "considerable risk of vehicle damage". Curiosity is going a lot slower, but it doesn't have the luxury of roads or anyone to toss on a spare tire.
The console compilers (especially Nintendo's) do tend to be somewhat old & somewhat crappy. I haven't done game code in a couple of years, but for the decade that I did, the compilers on all platforms were 5-10 years behind current.

That said, there are reasons that compilers often make slower code than humans, reasons that may always exist. The primary reason to use a compiler isn't to get faster code, it's to use a programming language abstraction and get "fast enough" code. The abstractions are (generally speaking) what add layers that are hard for a compiler to optimize against a person who's not using abstractions. There's a long list of commonly used features that compilers have a hard time optimizing: virtual functions, the threat of aliasing, floating point pipelining, etc. etc.. Compilers are required to make difference choices than humans writing assembly would, because of the abstractions that we choose to use in higher level languages.

Lots of people agree that it's not hard to make assembly faster than an optimizing C compiler.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/577554/when-is-assembler-...
LBRY offers the same or better protections against infringement that HTTP does.
Would imagine there are people that will use this to spy on a spouse or a significant other who gets mail at the same address but is able to get it out of the mailbox before the paranoid party gets home.
Fair enough. But if I'm traveling and see I received mail from the IRS or whoever, it's not like there's much I can do about it until I get home. (Yes, I can call someone and ask them to get my mail and tell me what it is but if it's something serious I probably don't want a random neighbor reading it anyway.)
"Function style" can also be OOP, FP being imo orthogonal, although it is true that in practice, with FP, polymorphism is usually achieved with parametric polymorphism because they play well together.

Speaking of parametric polymorphism, the need to modify a type's behaviour by implementing a new type is alleviated if you go with higher-kinded polymorphism, where the implementation bits are abstracted by a generic F[_] type and using type classes to go along with that.

In the example I'm giving in that presentation, I'm implementing a type named Iterant, for which the plugged-in F[_] can dramatically modify its behaviour. So in practice you don't need to implement a new kind of Iterant, which wouldn't make much sense anyway, you only need to implement a new F[_], which is used to abstract away the details of how Iterant gets evaluated, which is the part that people want to change.

Unfortunately most statically typed mainstream languages are not capable of expressing such abstractions due to lack of higher kinded types, or ways to encode / express type-classes, although this part is less problematic than lack of HKTs.
There's direct quotes from Outbox that confirm your opinion, here: https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/

"After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model."
Google Street View Cars Are Mapping Methane Leaks in US Cities
The retrieval has to be user-initiated, but there's no reason that the user can't automate it, especially for senders on a whitelist.
You're like the auto mechanic I talked to that was bemoaning this generation and how automotive tech has basically "stayed the same" since the 50s... "MacPherson struts, you ever heard of those boy!? Yeah - invented in the 50s!" Nothing wrong with a fresh take on an old topic.
>I might agree with you about showing ads, but regarding tracking and collecting data there's substantial difference. By collecting and storing users' data, you put people at real risk, even if you collect with consent. The risk is data being stolen or sold and then used for malicious purposes.

I don't think that this type of fingerprinting is necessarily any more insidious/risky than any other ordinary activity one can undertake online. That's not to say that data is not valuable to someone with malice, but I don't think it's so especially dangerous that it's inherently inappropriate to collect it. Ultimately, it's the user's responsibility to find a browser that has strong identity protection features and use them properly if it's a major concern for them.

Things like storing a Flash cookie obviously contradict a user's intention, but I don't see that as automatically unethical just because the user would prefer if it didn't happen. At least not any more unethical than contradicting the publisher's intention of displaying ads.
How to Build a Product Loved by Millions and Get Acquired by Google
How YC is helping the ACLU get more tech-savvy
Readers weigh in on California's farmworker shortage
They're the clear market winner but some companies might need an internal youtube clone or might need to adapt a similar system that they would find his useful for. But hey if it has enough bells and whistles it could be the facebook to myspace.
I get page not found?
They say they plan to package batteries are packaged as standard freight containers.

Since current turnarounds include freight container swaps, I don't see why a battery swap wouldn't fit in it.
I do the same between Paris and Essen in Germany. There is a direct Thalys train connection. Door to door, it takes me the exact same time to reach Paris La Défense with the train as with flying from Düsseldorf. In the Thalys I have a good meal and place to work productively on my code or simply relax and read a good book.
These clickbaity articles have become way more common on the web. There's rarely anyone writing quality content for the sake of the content anymore. It's all just glorified hyperlink farming and ad impressions.
12 Risks with infinite impact [pdf] (2015)
So now lots of JSON parsers have extensions to ignore comment extensions to the format...
Ossmann's 'Software Defined Radio with HackRF' lesson 3 - Decibel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1FbhBqBYLM
moron... cloning youtube and cloning youtube's business model are not the same thing. everyone can have their own youtube clone in their house. software can be free.

you're all idiots.
> Microsoft and 6 years at Google respectively

Aren't these the end-goal companies anyway? Next is potential start-up?
PySpark cheat sheet
Packaging and Deploying Go Applications to AWS Using Semaphore
Yeah, but in this case you have to weigh it against the penalty for being proven guilty.

Maybe indefinite detention, and a chance at public attention is better than life in prison as a convicted child molester.
How likely are the right to repair laws to pass? I'm not familiar with the GOP's stance on this issue
ASK HN: How can an okay developer become a great developer?
Hi,
I used to be a developer until a few years ago when I moved into a DevOps role.
This new role required me to learn multiple technologies, cloud platforms, automation, etc. Slowly it led me to an engineering manager role.

Though I have been doing very well as a lead/manager and as the devops guy who wears many hats, I realize that I was never a great developer. I can get things done but the solutions I build are not very elegant.

This was fine until now. Due to the monotonous nature of the work and some issues at the workplace, I decided to look for a change. I interviewed at two places and both gave me a take-home challenge. I did both and also did some troubleshooting stuff pretty quickly.
However, I got rejected. I feel that this was due to the lack of elegance in my solution.

I would like to be a developer again and I want to be very good at it. With all my DevOps, cloud platforms, DBs like Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB etc., I believe I can be a very good addition to a team if only I could code better.

Can you suggest how I can bring my programming skills to the next level? I can look at code and understand things. I have the basics in line. I understand OOM and functional programming. I can code small assignments in multiple languages. What I need is to be able to write awesome code myself. How should I go about it? How can I work on it in a way that it comes naturally to me?

Thanks for your inputs.
LOL energy density is much much lower, but volumetric density is several times higher. Meaning, they take less space for same weight -> airframe can have smaller profile and have less air resistance.
Sort of related -- anyone know if there's anything to "happy lights" that have natural spectrum light or whatever?
dang, I think koolba had a good point and was not trolling. It's an open secret that the US government tracks mail, though I think the details are not well understood. USPS has probably been taking pictures of the outside of everyone's mail for a long time and somebody recently had the bright idea to monetize it.
This is called the expression problem.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/expression/expre...

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2079678 is a great SO answer on this topic.
The problem as i see it is twofold.

a) Google got into a platform civil war. Just as Android was getting serious about tablets, ChromeOS happened.

b) Intel tried to ram ATOM down everyone's throat.
Founder of a different deep learning chip startup here. They're talking about deep learning's computational graphs. The only differences between that and a general purpose program graph is that a) the (general) absence of control flow and b)the operations are all arithmetic and generally predictably so.

So basically yeah, it's marketing.
How Rockefeller Parlayed Pipelines into Billions
Feynman did nothing wrong. The guy built a bomb to cover up his fraud. He probably intended to set it off regardless of what Feynman did, according to your link. Regardless, Feynman had no way of knowing there was a bomb there.

It's completely appalling that he got away with it, despite killing a person and seriously injuring 2 more. He even successfully sued Feynman.
Nothing about wireless inherently causes more than a millisecond of latency. It's all about system design.
How to Manage JavaScript Fatigue
The nice thing (at least from my admittedly-fairly-ad-hoc experience) about video processing is that it scales fairly linearly, at least for the basic features.

Things like building a scalable transcoding cluster can be made fairly simple ("just add more boxes") using a decent message-queue service. From there, everything is pretty simple HTTP.

Of course, this is only the very barebones stuff, and covering all of Youtube's features exhaustively would be quite difficult, and requires some good Machine Learning work.
The Top 25 Y Combinator Winter 2017 Demo Day Startups
Putting a Cost on Debt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause
The Dalai Lama’s Ski Trip
The USPS already scans all of its mail (link somewhere else). They have to do it to sort it: their machines automatically read the address and sort it.

Any address that can't be machine-read (which is, like, 5%?) is sent via teh internet to some people sitting in a "cheap labor" place like WV where it is keyed in by a person.

Later, the typed results go back to the origin and a barcode is slapped on the letter. How do they find the right letter, you ask? Look for the florescent barcode at the back: that uniquely identifies the letter. So unreadable mail is scanned twice to get barcoded. After it's barcoded, the only human who looks at it is your delivery person.
Baidu's Andrew Ng Leaves to explore a new chapter in artificial intelligence
> >And for most new drugs, patents expire approximately 12 years after market introduction.

The length of a drug patent is 20 years, 8 of which by your statement are spent in development. So yes, almost half the patent duration is spent with the drug off the market. This is burden almost no other industry has to deal with. My original statement is completely valid.

> Hence why I also consider opening up the drug market to other countries. If drugmakers need to make all their profit front-loaded then they can at least spread it geographically so Americans don't have to suffer under these prices.

Other countries place more stringent price ceilings on the cost of pharmaceuticals, which is why there is such a disparity between what we are paying and what others are paying. If we want to spread the cost burden geographically, countries benefiting from these products should be pressured to remove their price ceilings, which would lower costs in the US. Opening up the markets to other countries is just regulatory arbitrage, not spreading of cost burden.

Also, if I'm interpreting this correctly, nothing you posted suggests that the government is the primary backer of pharmaceutical research. We can argue over whether the research costs are 50 billion or 30 billion or whatever, but your original claim is still incorrect unless the numbers are off by literally an order of magnitude.
General purpose always won because a) the demands wasn't great enough b) the steamroller of moore's law helped general purpose better and c) previous special purpose chips were maybe 10x better, not 100-250X.
The author also seems to be loose with specifying "context switches" where there is a difference between a context switch between two threads which shares everything except a stack and a context switch between two processes that have separate address spaces. Did anyone else find that odd?
Interpolated Physics Rendering (2013)
Probably thinking of my brother, Rich?

usecs are a thousand times better than a ms of course. And a ns is a thousand times better than that!
>I'm of the opinion that we would see a major slow down in drug innovation without patents.

My observation is we've seen a major slowdown already. $600 epi-pens, Turing Pharmaceuticals, my cousin's psoriasis medication that went from $10 a tube last year to $700 a tube this year. There's no innovation left. It's on to price gouging now. Pulling their patents might not solve their lack of ability to innovate, but it should be of some help with the price gouging.
"Baidu’s chief scientist, Andrew Ng, said he was leaving the company to explore a new chapter in artificial intelligence. His departure comes two months after the firm hired a new president."
The person who makes money in a gold rush is the one selling picks and shovels.
Social Media Guru aka hype monkey