skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We’re talking about possible representations of a rotation in the plane. The usual representation is “angle measure”, e.g. radians, degrees, or “binary radians”. This representation makes it easy to compose rotations (just add the angle measures), and the binary version is an efficient use of bits, but if you want to do anything else, e.g. rotate some arbitrary vector, then you need to do a bunch of transcendental function evaluations, which is computationally expensive.

I am recommending using the Cartesian (x, y) coordinate representation instead. This is often called a “complex number” x + iy on the “complex unit circle”, or you can think of it as (cosine, sine) if you prefer. Composition of rotations in this representation is still straight-forward: (a + ib)(c + id) = (ac – bd) + i(ad + bc).

If you need to compress this down to one number for transmission or storage, you can take the stereographic projection (“half-angle tangent”), (x, y) ↦ y / (x + 1), and optionally also reduce the precision. This saves you at least half the bits vs. storing the pair of coordinates, and is relatively inexpensive to compute (takes one division per point).

You are right that to normalize an arbitrary vector requires taking a square root. Fortunately, this doesn’t need to be done too often.

As an added bonus, this method generalizes much more easily than angle measure to representing higher-dimensional rotations and points on higher-dimensional spheres. For instance, I recommend using cartesian coordinates (or the stereographic projection for compression) instead of latitude and longitude for storing points on the 2-sphere such as geographical places. Many pieces of mapping software are constantly converting back and forth (implicitly or explicitly) between latitude/longitude vs. cartesian coordinates for computing distances, directions, and areas, finding intermediate points, applying 3-dimensional rotations, clipping shapes, and so on. This is slow and complicated vs. just using Cartesian coordinates as the internal representation.

It is usually unnecessary to compute the angle measure corresponding to a rotation unless communicating with a human. Angle measure is just one of several possible representations, and it’s only the most common because it gets taught to every child.
Yes! the little-known 710-NCS-GETS phone number. It's the only phone number in the 710 area code.

If you dial that number and then enter in your special 12 digit security code, you can make an outbound call to any other number.

All the telephone switches in the US are required to treat calls to the 710 area code as priority, at the expense of dropping any existing traffic that it needs to drop.

The end result is even overloaded exchanges can be used by first responders with the proper security codes. "GETS is designed to provide a 90% call completion rate when call volume is eight times normal capacity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommu...
Sigh, I know this is trollbait... but why not.

If you have any self-awareness of C as a programmer, you know that C is a simple, powerful, but poor language.

Much like the English language, the popularity and endurance of C is due to historical, political, and inertial reasons. English most certainly is not a perfect language. But it is the dominant economic language of our time and will be even with billions of Chinese and Hindu/etc speakers.

C might be technically portable with sufficient #defines, but I wouldn't call it inherently and magically portable... Now, because it has been used in most computing environments, there exists the knowledge and examples of coding conventions to enable cross-platform code. But the notion that C has portability features that are impossible to beat on a theoretical level is ignorance and fanboy culture.

Java alone, while not perfectly portable, hints of true portability with simplicity and power. LLVM also hints of purer portability capabilities, and to a lesser extent, dotNET.

“C is a great language for expressing common ideas in programming in a way that most people are comfortable with. Moreover, a lot of the principles used in C – for instance, argc and argv for command line parameters, as well as loop constructs and variable types – will show up in a lot of other languages you learn so you’ll be able to talk to people even if they don’t know C in a way that’s common to both of you.”

This is pretty much horseshit from any "ideal language" judgement. Simply because of historical and practical reasons, C is generally known by any developer of ability. C has no special magical power of communicating ideas when viewed from fundamental linguistics. That C constructs and conventions appear in other languages isn't a supreme validation of C conventions... it's just political and linguistic convenience.

I salute C for it's many fruits, it was the right language at the right time with just the right amount of freedom (and executive ignorance on the part of Bell Labs). It has earned its continued existence on those laurels.

But should a superior, portable, auto-memory-managed language appear with cross-compatibility in runtimes, and even a C -> Language perfect translator... I wouldn't see why people wouldn't use that. C++ was a failure in this regard. Rust... we shall see.
HN is not the town square. It's perfectly acceptable for there to be boundaries here on subject matter allowed.
Science an empirical endeavor. The world determines what is, not logic, or math. Logic and math are great tools for making sense of observations, but they do not determine what will be observed. Otherwise, there would have been no need to carry out experiments. People, armed with only logic, could have deduced any truths about the world from their arm chairs.

Some, like Aristotle, did try to do that. To be fair, it was a mix of observation and first principles, but it was lacking adequate experimentation, as humans later found out.
Here's a few: https://www.outsystems.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.appian.com/
The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture”
Palo Alto Tiny Basic was published a year (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Chen_Wang) after Microsoft's Altair BASIC was available.
Getting a million users is infinitely harder than scaling a system to handle a million users. Most systems could run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi.

I don't think the suggestion is to make sure your code is disposable. It's that you need to code for now and it's difficult to predict which code may become a candidate for disposal.
So if we could go back in time, could we create an interface that is less ridden with pitfalls?
Are you sure you totally disagree? The author seems to mostly agree with your first point -- don't spend too much effort or complexity on scalability until you actually need to scale:

If we focus on scale too early, we sacrifice a lot of the agility that we need early on. We need to think about our growth as getting more cargo on our journey. With each new customer we get a bit more valuable. We also get heavier and less agile. Our job as engineers is to patch the holes in the hull as we find them, and scale the size of the infrastructure at the right times.
When I'm being aggressive, I will be sure to let you know. I will underline it, if you'd like.

I would consider standing by while others threaten to harm people based on their ethnicity to be as immature, as un-adult, a thing as can be done. Giving the playground bullies--and their adult counterparts in the ranks of the literal-not-figurative fascists--room to instill fear and to threaten the oppressed into silence is not what adults do.

But it's interesting that you focus on adult rather than decent or just. Edifying, even.
Open source on github with a paid subscription. Is this something new?
If an AI winter is going to happen again it's not going to be from the AGI side, but from the over-hyped deep learning stuff failing to provide much business value at the enterprise level (where it's only starting to be exploited by the big players). At least compared to simple linear regression.

The AlphaGo situation is an interesting one. Did you have any predictions for when an AI would beat a top pro at Go? I didn't really learn to play until sometime in 2015 but I was amazed AIs still hadn't dominated, they weren't even close. Still I saw that with the single trick of MCTS AIs had improved a lot, and seemed to have some steady improvement year after year for a while. I don't think it would be unreasonable to have predicted that at some point with X amount of computing power an AI could be made to win. Then later that year I saw a paper that reported they were beating all the MCTS bots with a deep learning based one they were making. Immediately it seemed clear that the first person to create a fusion of deep learning + MCTS would create a very strong Go AI bot, but would it beat pros? Maybe with a year of effort by a big company using custom hardware like IBM's Deep Blue or more likely these days GPU clusters, but would it happen soon? Not for a year at least. Turns out it was already happening (AlphaGo guys started in 2014, and Facebook had a project going too) and the Fan Hui matches being announced took a lot of people by surprise. Some because their predictions were ignorant of advances in either or both of MCTS or deep learning and so still predicted many years before computers would win. I was more surprised it was done without anyone hearing about it sooner. Even so it wasn't clear it could beat Lee Sedol a few months later, since there's another big gap between lower pros and higher pros, but it did.

A couple lessons to take from AlphaGo: we don't necessarily know what's actively being worked on around the world nor how far along it is, and problems that seem insurmountable with current computer hardware can suddenly become solved with the right fusion of existing ideas that haven't yet been fused.

Black swans are hard to predict, disagreements over the predictions are totally normal and fine, I think the harder disagreement is just getting people to accept that should nothing specifically hinder it (like an extinction event from an asteroid/disease, or successfully enforced bans on AI research), AGI is inevitable at some point in humanity's future. There probably should be some research done into its safety, and since the prediction problem is so uncertain, there's no pressing reason not to start now or indeed 10 years ago. "You could have used that money for feeding Africans!" is a non-argument.
Testicles == zip your fly?
I spent all of yesterday making an extension for this, and now HN won't let me post it as an article: https://nilpass.com/
From http://docs.http-prompt.com/en/latest/contributor-guide.html:

> Fork is a term invented by GitHub.

No, it is not.

Also, do I get royalties for my contributions to this open source project? Since you're literally selling other people a gated license to the code I contribute, I'm wondering how this works from a legal perspective.
Morning paper also covered this nicely here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/09/mamadroid-detecting-andr...

Love that blog!
Yeah ops method seems strangely elaborate. I do something similar but require far less to actually jolt my memory. Usually I just put a shoe upside down on my table, takes a couple of seconds and in the morning I think "Why did I do that? Oh yeah, thats right", has never failed me yet.
cowardlydragon, your comment is marked [dead], so most won't see it. That's unfortunate because it's pretty good.
Agreed. But as an exception, I was totally surprised to find how good the aws cloudformation doc's are. Hilariously they are now my starting point for understanding the other aws APIs.
Yes, that's the long term vision. We'd naturally expand into a calendar application.
This isnt that, for 6b dollars, you're unlikely to cover more than a handful of major metros, figure its 250k for a greenfield site, 100k for a co-located one, plus associated core network costs, for a national network you'd be looking at more like 100b+.

Beyond that, most communications between the field and dispatch is narrowband, not wideband, and this is unlikely to change in the near future - if you think the police agencies are relying on public internet access now to do mission critical dispatch, you'd be wrong.
And C++ is used in so many places on top of that. Every web browser is written in C++. Most GUI systems are written in C++ (or Objective C). All gaming engines are written in C++, etc.
The Bay Area doesn't have taller buildings ... because the people living there keep voting against it.

This is way too simplistic. The sordid truth is that the BA (and SoCal, and much of the rest of the U.S. outside the major 19th-century cities) has a legacy of sprawl is because, for several key decades (1950-1980) people just really, really loved sprawl (and the perception of freedom that went with it). And orchards and interconnectedness and community and all the other stuff that they bulldozed to make room for the sprawl -- not so much.

That's the "cognitive issue" the commenter above you was referring to.
All hail the new Wordpress of app development.
>E.g. Maintaining national culture/race/identity. A people should be allowed to want this without having every single talking-head of the media party assaulting them for wanting it.

To be fair, there are historically valid justifications for that negative reception. People who advocate cultural and racial identity politics in the modern day shouldn't be surprised at the criticism they receive, as they themselves denounce the "certain very left-leaning, anti-male, anti-traditional, anti-rich, anti-white, pro-immigration viewpoints" of the mainstream.
I totally agree with this however I actually found the original post to be quite reasonable. Unlike some, he was not advising that you build for scale from the beginning. Quite the opposite. For example, he makes sensible suggesting like optimizing queries & getting bigger servers instead of more servers.
That's probably because of coroutines.
What causes a [dead] mark? Is it like a shadowban?
Boeing Is Still Trying to Make the Advanced Super Hornet Happen
The Little-Known Aircraft That Wages War on ISIS' Communications
I disagree.

The section you are quoting is titled 'climate conundrum'.

The writer is saying that it is visually obvious that there was running water at some point, but climate models do not support this.

That is why it is a .....conundrum.
What oppression have you experienced under Trump?
>as the life of the sane language version (Python 2) is going to end at some point.

Don't hold your breath for that. There are tens (hundreds?) of millions of Python code in production that's nobody ever gonna port, and that people will still support well into 2040.
You could look at it from the other direction. Once you agree that outright fascism is not to be given a platform, fascism lite (and I think there's some evidence that 'alt-right' is a sort of rebranding of modern white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo Nazi types) should maybe also not be given a platform.

Death by a thousand cuts. Today, calls to institutionalize trans people, undo the civil rights act, or put gays through electroshock therapy. Tomorrow, expulsion of the Jews?
They didn't even look at their firewall tables before deploying a completely different OS to production? Wow.
Is there a Turing complete language suitable for writing a fast regex engine with a type system that can prevent all possible invalid states? And if so, how much overhead is associated with said process?
You can see pool lifeguards do the same visual scan with pointing. Their gaze sweeps over the pool in a pattern, following their pointing finger. It seems effective in making them look at individual swimmers instead of just looking at an area of the pool in general.
I've never seen unreadable code in Python.

Care to post a sample?

And even if it actually was unreadable, just consider how the equivalent would look in Perl, or C (or APL...).
See, what you just posted is a typical response which tries to justify Mongo, even though you yourself have little experience with it!

Fine, I'll bite:

> All access would be through one service that enforced [rules, integrity]

That's a very good idea; you just described what a database is. Now why take it upon yourself (and team) to reimplement that yourself when there exist quite a few that have had thousands of programmer years scrutinizing every detail to create the most robust and optimized systems... these are much better programmers than you or I for this job, these guys eat shit and live databases.

> App servers are a lot cheaper/easier to scale than database servers. By keeping all of the logic in the business tier, it's a lot easier to scale/load balance.

Ah there it is, the typical FUD, by moving everything out of the 'database', you can scale.

Nope, that's not true.

The only thing that doesn't scale easily with a database server is joins - In all other cases it's possible to (even with an rdbms) scale infinitely via sharding. In fact there are many implementations that do so, and they are usually faster than Mongo.

Now onto joins, these get implemented in the "app server" by the inexperienced developer in 2 ways:

A. Real joins using normalized data

1. generates a ton of network congestion from getting the data

2. ton of cpu because because json decoding/encoding

3. ton of cpu because scripting languages vs optimized C

4. the use of O(shit) algorithms to make the joins

5. inconsistencies when things fail like network or disk or shutdown

B. Redundant data

1. use a ton of memory/disk

2. create deferred overheads in order to keep things sync

3. despite that, end up with inconsistent data all over the place

4. wont actually be faster or scalable(!!!)

In both cases they end up creating a bottleneck once you start caring about concurrent access not messing up your data.

Watching Mongo evolve is like watching the past 30 years of rdbms - which started out as flat text files which were 'fast and simple' - gaining indexes, efficient datastructures, foreign keys, disaster recovery etc.

But it's all good, and I can't complain, I make a killing putting out fires caused by badly architected systems.
Don't be afraid to dive into any of these papers. He's one of the most accessible of the computing greats.
Web Platform Incubator Community Group
Or the solution to an incoming Seldon crisis in the EU...
I agree with you up to a point, but:

Forgetting the Nazis; is it okay to drop someone from a board for aligning with a politican you disagree with?

Yes, if politics is not within the scope of the board's charter/mission/reason for existing

Or to remove someone from a project for having a sexual kink outside the mainstream?

It might depend on the project and what it's trying to promote/achieve.

I think it's not ok, and it's very shortsighted to think that accepting suppression like this while you agree with the current target isnt helping to progress a dangerous trend which any one of us cound find ourselves on the wrong side of someday.

Nobody should be obligated to provide a forum at their expense to promote ideas that they disagree with. There are places where this is allowed (the proverbial "town square") and we've also as a society defined some rules about antidiscrimination in public accomodations but that doesn't in any way confer an unlimited obligation to host and disseminate propaganda.
And I've been thinking about moving my email to fastmail...And then Google tries to tempt me with this! Dang it, they know how to lure me back! :-(
$2k per month for a 1+1 in a 'luxury' condo building right in the core of the city isn't high by basically any standard. There are a lot of options in the city still that are a lot cheaper.

I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let them all live there and keep it affordable?
Thank you.

I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that.

Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch.

> There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much.

This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.
I didn't realize you were recommending to use sel4, I assumed you meant they should have proven theirs using similar methods.
Ringo Is a Beatle, Hawaii Is a State – Why Isn't Pluto a Planet?
Why You Should Allow Winners to Run
Depends on the power they push signal through vs. the noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...
Exactly.

All the rampant stupidity on here and elsewhere about how well tech employees are supposedly paid is simple to vanquish: divide by the median home price within a 30 minute commute of the office.
Oh how I wish every math article on Wikipedia had this feature.
The best part is how they tied All Along the Watchtower into the core plot of the show.
Speaking of, do you know of any tools for doing grammar-based fuzzing?
They take the most direct way of explaining things too, instead of always going in a roundabout way. Their design decisions do not leave anything to be desired and you're never left scratching your head as to why anyone would ever build something this way especially when there are dozens, dozens of people asking for it to work the way any sane human being would think it should work. Great for kids!
I've not seen one of these type of applications yet that allowed the flexibility needed to handle many (perhaps the majority?) of use cases gracefully.

What I have seen is non-programmers getting enough power to get overconfident only to wind up with a mess.

These type of applications make it super easy to do 85% of the work. Unfortunately the remaining 15% often turns out to be impossible. Additionally when requirements change (and when don't they?) there often isn't the flexibility needed to make the changes.

The last thing I've observed is when something goes wrong if the person can't drill down into the internals and make adjustments they are just plain out of luck. I've seen this with both Access and Lotus Notes. Companies struggle with bugs for years. I've had a fair share of work re-writing these type of applications into web applications which finally do what is really needed without issue and can be changed when required.

In short I'm not concerned. Seen it before. Works for very simple apps, blows up spectacularly when something non-standard is needed. And this makes work for me.

Maybe this time it will be different but I really don't think so.
>There's a reason procurement decisions like this are delegated to career civil servants - they have much fewer valid excuses to be socializing with vendors.

This is simply false. Regular Capture and the revolving door are rampant at telecommunications companies