skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Napkin math time.) A black hole with 1 billion solar masses would pull Earth with a force equal to the Sun from half a light year away. It does the same thing to Uranus from a distance of 9.6 light years. It would have enough influence to disturb those orbits from much further away.

So if something similar entered our galactic neighbourhood, we would notice changes in the proper motion of stars closer to it, discrepancies between the planets' predicted and actual positions, and (possibly before anything else) predictable errors in GPS timing (since this is probably the most commonly-encountered system depending on accurate knowledge of speed, time and gravity).
If we're being strict, an argument can only be "won" if it's both sound and valid in the logical sense. Being able to intimidate or otherwise coerce your enemy into agreeing is otherwise a false conclusion.

On the other hand, the practical value of logic in debates is subject to serious inquiry. If we readily accept that logic is the correct way to "win" an argument, then why are we so categorically bad at applying it?
I'm torn on whether this 'conventional wisdom' is any good. Founders are the most biased when it comes to customer discovery interviews.

I have listened in on quite a few customer discovery conversations where founders took the lead and been amazed at what they think they heard. Small signs of enthusiasm turn into 'they loved it!' while negative comments are often ignored (classic confirmation bias).

However, outsourcing it to a digital agency and waiting for a report is bad for different reasons (expensive, likelihood to ignore the findings, hindsight bias, etc.)

As an advisor to quite a few local startups, I still haven't found what the 'right' approach is...
I know what you mean. I stopped listening to the radio a couple of decades ago, and while I don't miss it, I did miss the occasional good new song in the mess. The thing is... I never lost touch. How many people really work hard to isolate themselves from advertising when it can confer so much convenience?

So I, lamprey-like, gain the benefit of their feeding on the airwaves and ads, and I get the good stuff. That said, if I had no friends to rely on, I'd rather be cut off from novelty than be inundated with advertising, the latter of which I find intolerable.
They kept worse records. Don't we expect some procedures that were impossible in the past to become mandatory in the future when enabled by new tech?
I've never found these lists particularly constructive. If someone makes an error in logic you should be able to take it apart from first principles. Memorizing dozens of vague "fallacies" seems more like a cheap way to try to "win" debates. It will not lead to better engagement with an opposing argument. Existential Comics had a pretty funny take on it: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9
>A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly

And we'd be better off. We'd be better off without Atom and VS Code.
Carrefour in France was using it already some 10 years ago.
More current photo: https://theworklife.com/graham-miln/files/2013/12/2013-09-ei...
GoTo based optimizations
> How do you justify that expense?

It makes it harder for your competitors to offer a better product.
The problem with list of logical fallacies is that people quote them in discussion without understanding what they exactly mean.

For example, slippery slope is only argumentative failure if the slope is implied without justification. If you can provide good argument that slippery slope exists, it's not a bad argument.

Good idea to name appeal to authority as appeal to irrelevant authority.

Appeal to relevant authority is often important shorthand. Some issues are too complex to or require too much domain knowledge to go trough. For example, I consider IPCC reports authoritative on the subject of climate change.
Two other ways of checking integer bound invariants:

1. Undefined behavior sanitizer, which checks integer overflows at run-time, like INT_MAX + 1. Can optionally check other invariants; see https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Instrumentation-Options.h... and https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer.html.

2. Abstract interpretation - using a lot of constraint solver cycles and enough math to choke a dinosaur, you can check some integer bounds at compile time "relationally", like knowing that x < y. See, for example, "Pentagons: A Weakly Relational Abstract Domain for the Efficient Validation of Array Accesses": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/pentago.... I'm not sure, but that code might be available in https://github.com/Microsoft/CodeContracts.
What's the story for interop between Ada and C on modern systems? That is, if I want to write a library that C programmers on Ubuntu or something can use in a straightforward manner, can I write it in Ada without too much difficulty?
I see this all the time in the US. Admittedly it's not as popular as a dishwasher or the sinkside rack but it's here.

The first time I saw it I couldn't believe the genius of it, and it's already been incorporated into my dream house.
http://www.theonion.com/article/apple-unveils-new-product-un...
> with some microwave oven guts duct taped to a satellite tv dish

The word you're looking for is "maser."
Hi, I have just joined The Baby Box Co. to use technology to help drive down infant mortality. If working on these kinds of problems interest you, we're hiring in Los Angeles. Please email me at jason (at) thebabyboxco.com.
> Yet would anyone seriously consider altering a monolithic HR application to add pet insurance management? Never.

Sure they might? I can't see a category of business features that would naturally lend themselves to being microservices rather than extended features of a monolith unless there was some real technical challenge that was otherwise more easily solved by being in a microservice.
Yep, that's exactly how I see them applied online. It chills the conversation and leaves both parties unsatisfied.

Thanks for sharing the comic; this looks like a fantastic weekly read.
Lots of people responding to the "get shit done" post seem to be talking about how they procrastinate or "think" but don't like to work hard. If you want to get to the top of your field, whatever it is, it's not enough to just be smart. You also need to love to work hard in your field.

If you don't love to work hard in your field and you do want to get to the top of the field, you're on a road to problems because everyone at the top of your field is as smart as you are AND they are driven by passion to work incredibly hard. You can't get into their league without both.

So, if you want to get to the top of your field and don't want to work hard in it, my advice is either (a) find the joy that makes you want to work hard or (b) find a different field that does bring you that joy and desire to work hard.

(Note there is no requirement that you want to get to the top of your field, this is just for those who do want to do so)
In the many years I've used the internet, I don't think I've ever seen an add where I've been like "I didn't know I wanted this", and the increasing invasion of privacy from advertisers is not worth the incredibly vague promise of "ads for things you didn't know you wanted".

Much like OP, if there's something I want, I go and research it, or use a community or activity related site (Reddit, BikeRadar/Polygon etc), where there's community discussion and conversation on what's good, bad, relative differences etc. For the most part, this means you get the actually better product, not the one with the biggest advertising spend.

No it's not a perfect system, but it's far better than being spammed with ads for things I "don't know I want", which is a spectacularly absurd concept.
Works for me. Sorry that this comment isn't very helpful. Do you still get the same problem on different network/region/country?
> A directory of mail files.
..which avoids (user level) locking.

(to answer the question fully)
Or price gouging. In capitalism if the price rises too high sellers should be motivated to bring more supply to the market.
It's probably worth somebody investigating a more short-hand notation for this kind of task. However, I feel compelled to say that I've never found the syntax which is commonly used to typeset equations with LaTeX to be all that complicated. When I was first learning it, I remember repeatedly thinking to myself, "This is it? This really isn't so bad!" Furthermore, the thing I like about LaTeX is that the syntax is very extensible. You can easily add more directives or macros and there are really only a few syntactic constructs that you can use to represent them. If I'm not mistaken, AsciiMath's approach requires that more specialized syntax would be needed when adding more features.
Stayzilla Saga: What’s the big deal about the CEO of Startup being arrested?
Accounting, and HR can easily be outsourced. and even some coding and marketing in the right situations.

But not sales and product. because without either of them you have no business.
Less on overwork generally, and more sleep specifically: the US Navy, and especially the submarine force, has a porblem with not sleeping enough, and​ in the case of submarines, sometimes crashing into things because of it.

Probably as a result of this, the navy's postgraduate school has a large sleep study niche for people getting their master's degrees. I haven't read the theses, but they might be worth a look. Here's the search portal:
http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/17

Searching 'sleep' yields a 106-page list of theses.
I'm curious why you seem to think that Rust makes new OS architectures possible. Rust is a language, and languages have nothing to do with OSes. Do you mean new kernel structures?
When UNIX started its commercial success, some mainframers sneered at the newcomer because it didn't even have mandatory locking.

Turns out, neither does MVS. The locking was done by the DB system, not the OS.
Capturing Packets with Scala Native and Libpcap
Or they kept the same records and had users log them into another system, which was about 2 seconds of work. AFAIK the only important stats for medical washers is the max temperature reached and how long it maintained a certain critical temperature. They also have redundant checks anyway, like a pad that put in that would change color at a certain temperature, much like those radiation pads you see in TV shows.
No, they aren't. () are brackets, [] are square brackets, {} are curly brackets. 'Brackets' always refers to () unless specifically you say 'square'.

Stop imposing your stupid American stuff on people.
Me too. A few years ago, I fell for it. Now--the tip goes down.
IMO part of the reason is that DRAM is cheap and you can get a lot of it. How many applications have a working set that is in that relatively small region between DRAM and SSD.

I close the lid of my laptop and my memory is saved to SSD, I open it and it comes back pretty much immediately, what more do I need from that perspective?

One thing that tends to happen with caches is that you tend to get smaller returns as they grow larger. You're saying my 64GB RAM can be another level of cache for my 500GB SSD but I'm not quite sure what we'd do with that and why we need more than what we can already do with this SSD at the application layer. I agree that SSD paging can probably be improved. Maybe support can be moved out of the OS into hardware to get better latency. I'd still think that if you're thrashing the SSD you're likely not getting good performance just like if you're thrashing DRAM you're not doing as good as you could be doing.
The value of a metal axe in that time was immense. It seems unlikely that such sentiments would be sufficient justification to just leave it there.
Even more cynical: the focus was on making a buck selling a security theater product to the paranoid and gadget-obsessed, not to produce a product focused on providing prosecution evidence.

I mean seriously: cloud storage of the video may not be "secure", but it's undeniably cool and provides the visceral feedback that the marks want. It doesn't have to be actually useful to have value to its subscribers.

People who are actually worried about break-ins just buy safes and insurance policies. Or move. This is for the nuts.
I don't think the article is about hacking other people; it's about relating to them.
Calexit: The “Bad Boys of Brexit” throw their weight behind move to split state
> What evil things could a hacker do to your dishwasher? Make it start in the middle of the night? Ruin the delicate plastic stuff?

Waste a lot of water/electricity. Run cold water only so it doesn't disinfect. Use it as a platform to attack other household devices. Most hackers would only have a motivation for the latter.
One thing that stands out over almost every other similar article is that there are alternative calling conventions available. That is - awesome. Not sure if this is something easily defined in a crate, or if it is intrinsic, but it is very liberating to know that you don't need to craft exception entry / exit code unless you really want to. That makes OS-level tinkering much much more approachable.
Expertise losing ground to a kind of ‘secret knowledge’: James Poulos
Why neural nets though? It seems like total overkill compared to simpler statistics.
Ignoring that the article ends with a sales pitch . . .

Caveat: I'm a Zappos.com employee and former IBMer and Amazonian.

The point of the Zappos model is to capture and grow ideas from anywhere inside the organization. As the story goes, in a traditional organization, if you have a great idea for a new product, expansion of business, or whatnot, your manager or his manager can kill the idea. In a self-organized company (like Valve or Zappos) you can sell other people on the idea, form a team, and build it. The top-level circle in a Holacracy is there to allocate budget to the team, at least long enough to determine if it provides value.

The year-over-year continued growth of Valve and Zappos show that this can work, but only when control is granted to every team, circle, and employee, and if there's a strong business model in place to afford to experiment.
is this an effective tool for beginners?
So according to this article, most jobs aren't posted and most jobs are filled through referrals. Even if you somehow make it through the arbitrary automated tracking system gatekeeper you're still really unlikely to get the job from a random application. Any hiring managers here that can share if this matches their experience?
This post is an announcement to let people know that there is now a stable version of Emacs modified to run in the macOS App Sandbox. It is not labeled as "Emacs" per se due the restrictions the sandbox places on all application, limiting some of the power of the application, so it is being marketed as a "Programming Environment".
Wow, it's only 8000 lines of code.
To clarify, that's absolutely correct. Dumb kids joyriding and stealing cars does not happen.

But... for higher end cars, there's a brisk business, mostly around illegal exports. Those guys have devices that disable the newer security controls.
Ridiculously excited. Nothing in my life was better than BW+1.6. Rotated those games religiously and went pro, wasted about 5 years of my life but damn it was the most fun 5. Love that new life is being breathed into such a mechanically (but graphically lacking) engaging game.
See also dirq, a queuing system using similar principles, with implementations in Perl, Python and Go.
[0], from [1].

I can almost see the next scene in the village being the start of new religion, à la the opening to Star Trek: Into Darkness [3] :)

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Índios_I...

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

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxE2DLZ-tA
#1 doesn't get you very far since it can only catch cases that are locally detectable -- where the compiler can prove that some lines of code will always result in an overflow.

Consider the code:

int f(int x) {
return x + 1;
}

This code could overflow, but surely the compiler won't complain about it -- it would instead assume that you don't intend to pass a value for x that is too large. In order for the compiler to have enough information to complain, it would need you to specify explicitly what the range of x is -- so that it can detect violations both within the function definition and at call sites. There is no built-in way to specify this.

But, this is exactly what my template hacking adds -- a way to specify the actual range of each variable.

I haven't looked closely at your #2. Presumably it also requires some constraint annotations to be added to your code. But if they've provided tools that can process those annotations and detect violations, that's pretty cool.
That's... actually what I'm going for. I don't want to discover new wants that I previously didn't have, and which I don't need. I hope not to discover their stores, their endless stores with their endless attempts to sell some minute variation on something old, endless attempts to convince me of a need I don't have, and endless begging for feedback.

Fuck. That.
"It’s not how you apply, it’s who you know. And if you don’t know someone, don’t bother."
The book you're looking for is Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. (Act 3)
Dubleup's Credit Card Sized Power Bank
Probably right! Didn't Nest start out as a baby monitor type marketing message. Somebody figured out that peddling fear is more lucrative than babies!
Hey HN.

So I wrote this in an effort to solve this problem. Let me know if you have any feedback on the design.
There was that one time I observed a peculiar quality about a certain CEO. No matter what he was talking about it somehow would always circle back to talking about whatever company he was currently at and the conversation would always end with a joke and hearty laugh for all involved. This happened consistently enough that I thought it was a pre-determined act on his part.

Once I realized he was always practicing I kinda stopped talking to the guy because there was never any genuine interaction. He was always on the job and he was always practicing selling. Every conversation was just another opportunity for him to practice his messaging. I dubbed this mode of interacting and talking ceoesque.
The statistic you are citing doesn't say CEOs don't make 300x their workers. It says they make 300x the average worker.

Between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period. Hmm.

Did all CEOs see this raise, or just the CEOs of the top corporations (who's workers also saw raises)?

None of the statistics you cite remotely contradict the claim that between-firm inequality is the primary driver of inequality.
Steven Pinker's assertions in TBAOON are nice and intellectually attractive but ultimately, difficult to prove or disprove. Naseem Taleb had quite a strong reaction to it.

"
"Pinker doesn’t have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample.
"

Further here: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

Since at least a bit of that seemed like a personal attack on Pinker, that was then followed by personal attacks on Taleb by Pinker. He even wrote a quora post on it describing it as "The paper by Taleb that I saw was a mess: sloppy, inaccurate, and incoherent."

https://www.quora.com/Is-Nassim-Talebs-criticism-of-Steven-P...

I think our recent history with Trump, and the increasing friction with China suggest that perhaps the celebration of Pinker's ideas was a bit premature. As Taleb has shown us, a long period of peace doesn't mean that violence is declining or that we can presume that it will never reoccur with the magnitude and intensity we saw during earlier periods.
I can understand your last point. The reason I urge people to use a cautious hand when using such a broad stroke of the brush (ad-blockers/calling for an ad-less world) is because I'm not sure they're considering the third-order, even fourth-order, effects of their actions.

Ads, in the broadest definition, are not going anywhere, no matter how much we push them into the shadows. As much as I hate being inundated with ads, at least I know that they're ads. Know what I hate even more? When you can't distinguish ads. So the more we tip the scale from explicit advertising, the more we welcome indistinguishable inline, sponsored, content advertising. Where you start asking yourself, are they being paid for this?

That's just one effect that we're already seeing.

I don't know whether we'll reach a steady-state for ad blocking or not. Regardless, it doesn't keep me up at night; I'm perfectly content watching others burn themselves. I just wish they'd do it quicker.

Why don't people use site-blockers instead of ad-blockers, i.e., they don't get the content if they don't want the ads. Problem solved, and we can accelerate faster to whatever point we're headed to.
earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13960409
? How so? I thought "event planners", planned shows and conferences, not product launches.
Cover Letters Are Dead (2016-02-16)
> it's equally important to realize that the presence of an informal fallacy in an argument does not imply that the argument is either invalid or that the conclusion is false.

We have a fallacy for it too, "Fallacy Fallacy".

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fallacy_fallacy
Give them an inch and they will take a mile
I'm just waiting for the day some hapless clerk clicks the wrong checkbox and accidentally reveals the Savage Land to the world.
One aspect of chess that's really interesting is UCI which stands for univeral chess interface. It's a simple protocol that all engines "speak" and almost all pieces of chess software support. Chess players tend to collect engines that are good at certain things and then use whatever UX they are most comfortable with. At least in the past before Stockfish became so dominant.

The chess community in general is pretty technical. lichess.org is an absolute marvel of a website. It's full of brilliance and it's all open source. Interestingly it's computer analysis feature went through a notable progressions of approaches:

First it was server sided stockfish. Later they compiled stockfish via emscripten to .js so that analysis could run locally. This recently became PNACL for speed and finally even more recently WebAssembly for portability. Pretty cutting edge for the community of such an old game!
Widescreen? Do I get to zoom out in multiplayer?

I'm very curious to see just how much they feel okay changing game-altering systems or behaviours. Ie. Even widescreen alters how the game will get played to some extent.

I think the hard part is knowing where to draw the line in order to keep it "authentic"
I thought Ada did only runtime checks? I am asking for (and my template hackery implements) compile-time checks. Runtime checks are slow and don't fully mitigate security bugs, though they probably downgrade the bugs to DoS attacks. But if these are actually checked by the compiler, that's pretty cool and I might actually have to play with Ada at some point!
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a bundled publication subscription service?
I imagine that you could see and manage all of your subscriptions in one place, and buy packages of subscriptions to smaller independent publications that normally wouldn't attract as large of a subscriber-base.
Thanks. I should be clear, we're having to rename our company...basically because a potential investor said our name sucks. And, it sorta does.