skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aspose.Newsletter April 2017: Guaranteed PDF Processing Solutions and Other News
Seconding Save the Cat, my favorite book on Screenwriting (and I've read most of them). Terry Rossio's columns at Wordplayer[1] are also fantastic. Rossio is half the team that wrote Zorro, Shrek and Pirates of the Carribean.

[1] http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/welcome.html
This article really resonates with my experience.

The section on "performance" is so spot on. It is remarkable how rare it is that programmers think in these terms. There is no absolute truth to any particular performance optimization; optimizations only exist within the context of a complex topology of resource constraints that vary with time and application. It seems like a lot of work but this type of analysis becomes routine and automatic with experience. You really do have to evaluate your optimizations from first principles each time.

Props also for "Einsteinian" (I use the terms relativistic/Newtonian). I frequently say "all software systems are distributed systems". Programmers often resist the idea but it actually makes the design of systems much easier once you fully embrace the implications.
The incomplete Indian real estate startup story
Whispbar Roof Racks Perth
Have you heard of the Uber driver who's now $90k in debt because Uber lowered their rates after he leased a car via Uber? Would it be reasonable to attribute his misfortune to a lack of inborn intelligence or motivation? https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-...

Even your health is about 60-80% under your control, if epidemiological studies are to be believed.

Do you have a source on this?
>There's nothing wrong with college per se, IMO, as I think you'll agree.

Yep, I'd absolutely agree. I suppose my problem here is cultural, in a way. I didn't mean to say that I don't think young people (am I old? Maybe I am) shouldn't have to take history classes that are exogenous to whatever they end up doing later in life. I think what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of room to make specific skills that employers look for separate from the horribly expensive University system. This has to be possible, but maybe I'm wrong.
Microcinemas blend old and new for the online generation
The condition matters, though. PT boats were not designed to last.
The problem is that for some forums, shitposting is considered quality ;)
Project SMILE: Interface for European Telecommunications Interception
Why Isn’t OpenBSD in Google Summer of Code 2017?
Google Training Ad Placement Computers to Be Offended
Three out of four of these form the dark triad (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad). Sadism doesn't belong in that list.

Don't see the reason for the heavy down voting. The post refers to the often suggested relatively high percentage of aggressive, sociopathic managers at Uber.

EDIT: OTOH, after looking at his profile, this seems took be a template answer.
I misread, and for a moment expected Giant Ships, transporting energy via pumped empty baphyspheres from offshore solarfarms.
A modern hobby drone is much easier to use than a balloon on a tether. They really are pretty amazing as camera platforms.
It took you one sentence to refute your own claim about the quality of adtech ads -- you recommend them and then say don't use the most popular/successful/well-known ad systems.
Anecdotally, I've had several instances across multiple ISPs where I've suspected the connection of being throttled, open up speedtest.net, and then immediately my overall internet speeds improved to "normal" and I could browse freely again.
Biggest test for Google’s artificial intelligence: hunting down hate in YouTube
Most sports have a pretty good, high quality subreddit, /r/mma is hands down my most visited non news/programming subreddit.
Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/) in my opinion is an up and coming badass community.

Not much content on there, but the content thats there is nothing I have seen anywhere else
Visiting the doctor for the flu is a useless endeavor. Unless you get wheeled in, they are going to tell you that you have the flu and all that they can do is let it run it's course.

Of course a big dose of anti-oxidants would knock out the flu PDQ, just like the just discovered cure for Sepsis, intravenous Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C). Doctors were curing polio in the 40's with intravenous Vitamin C, and measles, and Chicken Pox.

Eventually Linus Pauling will be vindicated and when he is vindicated he should get another Nobel Prize.
Drink milk?

What are you... a baby cow?

This piece was likely inspired by the milk lobby... sales must be sagging.
How do you handle incremental reindexing?

Content creation has a high velocity and new multimedia is being generated every second. The methods in the paper assume that the dataset is static.
On that last point: the place I work actually hired copywriters and linguists to create more of a personality for our AI/bot.

You're right that the typical chat is quite bland and feels scripted, but I think companies are picking up on this and are trying to improve on this.
I like fast.com for friends and family since it's so unambiguous, and then https://speedof.me/ for anything requiring more detail.
People say horrible things in the public streets but billboard and shopwindow advertising is still tolerated there.
Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command "Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree.

These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree.

But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build.

If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program.

It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".
No, but it did have a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani, as highlighted by Yevtushenko in his poem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar_memorials#Commemorati...
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018765
I'd like an invite, too. Please send it to peter@catonmat.net. Thanks!
I'd like to point out that the less general the subreddit, and the fewer visitors it has, the better the content (both submissions and comments) is.

There are some exceptions, and technical subs are generally better than more mainstream ones.
AMI for seamless Drupal configuration on AWS
I have a space alien.

Frasier is like a westworld robot that ignores any reality it was not programmewd for.

Can you imagine a westworld robot that juts kind short circuits awkwardly.

I have been living for ten years with Frasier who simple has a few circuits fried. He doesn't know what a random number is.

I cannot deal with a chimpanzee. I quit talking to the chimpanzee. Obviously you cannot explain anything to a fucken stupid chimpanzee.
Probably meaningless. If Comcast is un-throttling speedtest.net there's no reason why they'd need to un-throttle your entire connection just because you're talking to speedtest.net, since they can just un-throttle any connection talking to speedtest.net's IPs.

More generally, if your response to suspected bad network is to open speedtest.net, and given that a lot of bad network issues are transient, it's not at all surprising that you'll have cases where you suspect throttling, open speedtest.net, and the connection problem just happens to go away at that point. So this just becomes confirmation bias.
> HN is probably better on politics because there is real diversity of opinion.

Uh.. it's a little lean to left and then there are random hard right comments though. To be perfectly honest, I think the hard right see anything that isn't hard right is left tbh, that include moderates. And the demographic for HN especially programmers are liberal iirc. There were articles on how big tech companies employee voted and also the fact that silicon valley is situated in the most liberal of California.

The threads that have some sort of discord seems to disappear in an hour. Like the recent basic income one. Politics are kept to a minimum or hardly any at all.
Hi, guys! I just want to be clear. I have a little mistake in my tweet because I mixed a function invocation and a code execution in one place, so please forgive me. But it's fun anyway ;)
I think it would be more interesting to take ports found on many computers that aren't being used and turn them into GPIO.

There are Ethernet to Serial adapters [1] [2], I wonder if it could go further. There is also dvi, hdmi, displayport with lots of wires and a chip behind them. Displayport even has " A bi-directional, half-duplex auxiliary channel" [3] , though I'd want to look at the spec to see how that could be used, or if it could be contorted to a GPIO purpose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHY_%28chip%29

[2] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/24588/is-the...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort
>We also have this fun problem where nobody's actually been verifying that TV ads actually run when they're supposed to

Have you considered hiring Kantar to check if the ads are running? They do this.
yeah, thanks. the unique email-address is a number-code-service-provider@mydomain.com and can't be guessed really.

I thought that my system may have leaked such email-addresses, e.g. my own mail-server (horde), or apps uploaded my address book or browser add-ons or LastPass-hack to login with that email into the service provider.
Intellectual humility is a key trait of great hackers and coworkers, in my experience.

Google's Laszlo Bock described hiring for intellectual humility like this...

"What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time."
I see an incredible weakpoint: Your email account becomes your only defense, meaning the password on it must be strong and you still need to remember it. And you need 2FA.

Not that this is not the case already, email accounts are already important.
That's what I immediately thought of as well. Fascinating episode, I highly recommend listening to it.
Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that, which is why I hate that SR-IOV gets so tied up in this :/

When they say "virtio-net" there they mean virtio-net inside qemu with vhost servicing the queues on the host side (note, we don't use vhost in GCE -- our device models live in a proprietary hypervisor that's designed to play nicely with Google's production infrastructure). One could just as easily expose what looked like an Intel VF to the guest and service it in the same manner (although there are good reasons not to).

One could also build a physical NIC that exposed virtual functions offering register layouts equivalent to VIRTIOs PCI BARs and used the VIRTIO queue format. If you assigned those into a guest, you'd be doing SR-IOV, but with a virtio-net NIC as seen by the guest. It also likely wouldn't perform as well as a software implementation (in its current form VIRTIO has a lot of serializing dependent loads which make it inefficient to implement over PCIe). There's some ongoing work upstream aimed at a more efficient queue format.

So, yeah, "it depends" is about the best you can do. SR-IOV really just says you're taking advantage of some features of PCI that allow differentiated address spaces in the IOMMU for a single device and (on modern CPUs) interrupt routing to actively running VCPUs without requiring a hop through the host kernel. The former is handy if you want the NIC to be able to cheaply use guest physical addresses (although the IOMMU isn't free either); the latter doesn't matter if the guest is running a poll-mode driver that masks interrupts, nor does it matter if the target VCPU isn't actively running.
Typewriting the future in Yangon: A dying art in a changing city
The point is that it is impossible for a computer to reliably determine if your access to a copyrighted material is lawful or infringing.
You can try to fake it and pretend the computer has a way of knowing but you will unavoidably err either on the side of permitting infringing access or on the side of restricting lawful access or both.
DRM errs on both sides by at the same time being ineffective at preventing unlawful duplication (it can bypassed and if it can't, then blocking the analog hole is physically impossible) and over-restricting lawful use (fair-use, different user hardware, etc.). Streaming services are the same.

There is no way for software to encode the multitude of ever changing details of the abomination that is copyright law.
The "Color" analogy is apt because, copyright law is to a computer like color is to a colorblind person. S/he can pretend to recognize colors based on context, brightness, contrast, etc. but s/he can not actually see color. (Yes, I know there are various degrees of color blindness. For the sake of the argument take an extreme case of colorblindness.)

And to be fair, the law is so murky it is similarly hard for humans too.
تور مشهد در هتل آپارتمان نگین
I quickly looked through your links. The first article you link seems to lack any control group (which we need to assess the proportion of pre-existing mutant cells), the second is primary research but does not mention CRISPR-Cas9, and the other two are review articles that don't contain any quantitative data.

As mentioned, I only looked quickly, but I do not think any will be helpful on the point I am bringing up. Let me know if I missed it.
No change then :)
UBI does not work mathematically. I posted this a while back, so I'm just copying and pasting from an older response:

Simple back of the napkin math is that based on the 2013 census, we have 242,470,820 adults living in the US. If we pay each of them $12,000 per year, that's $2,909,649,840,000 in additional mandatory spending every single year. That's more than Medicare and Social security combined, and that has no cost of living adjustments built in. The basic math shows that this idea is simply unrealistic as far as I can tell.

UBI in the amount that could be considered a basic living income is infeasible with the current state of the world even if you were to double the tax rates as I would imagine most people in the US can't live on 12K and still be able to have the day to day basics required for living.
It actually turns out that some non-technical people are more capable of navigating a conversation with a chatbot than the average website. Basically it solves the problem of finding your own information vs the chatbot finding the information for you.

For example: we had a bot that could take care of HR, expense, and IT issues. So instead of having to look in one of the systems or the documents on SharePoint, you could just ask: "how many days of PTO do I have left?" Or "when will my last expense report be paid?" or "can I get email on my corporate phone?", and the bot would be able to handle it. Especially in larger companies with lots of systems finding that can be difficult.

HN is probably not the intended audience for chatbots :)

edit: typos
A very interesting answer. I could very much identify with what your saying.

> Designs don't ever match up with real world requirements (they match up very well to stated requirements).

Perhaps the most important discipline in computing isn't anything related to technology, but is instead "requirements analysis". What does your company generally use to communicate and record requirements - use cases/stories/other? Are we just still struggling with the same old problem - data can be modeled easily, but not complex behavior?

> More product managers to collect better requirements from people who don't know their own requirements. And of course, none of them ever see any need whatsoever to understand the problem they're solving.

Do you think these people don't know their own requirements because: aspects of the complex underlying real-world problem or system are difficult or unknown to them; they are trying to describe something new in their imagination; the mechanism for writing the requirement is vague meaning it inevitably needs to be further decomposed; something else?

> The scary part is, rewriting database engines starting from a basic key-value store ("nosql") does in fact seem to be the norm now, even on hacker news. App-specific query languages are everywhere. People are I'm not kidding proud of doing this. Nobody seems to realize that this just isn't worth it.

How do proponents of these "custom" database engines justify them if they are not really needed? Is management clueless?
There's tons of those things. Adafruit has one.[1] They're useful, but if you're doing something with critical timing, you usually don't want a Windows machine on the other end.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
Ask HN: What to learn over the summer?
Continuing to look for ideas on what to advise my university-bound kid (going for CS) to focus on learning over the summer. The idea is to provide him with a way to have access to work above minimum wage by investing the summer coding.

In the context of a young person starting out, which of the various full stack technologies would provide the most opportunities and earning potential (part time/gig type work)?

I use Python/Django but not sure this would be the best given the stated goals. From a CS perspective it would probably be best for him to get really good at Python. Maybe that's reason enough to take that path?

Is there a nice (and reasonably lucrative) Wordpress-centric work ecosystem out there? Would that be a good thing to focus on rather than traditional full stack development? Or is WP development dominated by offshore programmers?
You can still miss things -- you can only have so many interrupts fire at once. if all the pins change at the same time, you'll miss a few of em, especially if you're sending a serial message in the interrupt.

you're also more likely to get more than you want, and have to debounce on the processor side.

I'd go for a small fpga->ftdi usb controller. do a low pass filter on each pin, and when it goes above your threshold, throw it in a fifo that feeds the USB chip. your latency goes up with the number of changes that happen at once, but you're still using raw USB and not miss events that you're interested in.
I left there for SoylentNews a few years ago. Both of them seem to dip deeper into toxicity than I like. HackerNews is refreshing in that respect; things stay very civil here.

Slashdot's a classic, but I don't think I can really recommend it as "another community like HN". Maybe I could've, some years ago.
Right, kind of disappointing that the author relied on Wifi. To draw any conclusions about the provided bandwidth I'd only trust measurements made using a wired ethernet connection. Wifi depends on too many variables.
I had Hotmail/Live/Outlook, Gmail and iCloud accounts at the time I started gravitating to iCloud (mostly because there I had gotten the exact address that I wanted, and convenient aliases), and at that time, the level of spam I got was the same on Gmail and iCloud: next to none.

In 7 years that I've been using it exclusively I must've seen barely 5-10 junk emails on the 2 iCloud accounts (6 addresses in all) that I use.

Poor Outlook on the other hand.. I check my old accounts for sentimental reasons once every few months, and they're still beleaguered by spam.
for the operating systems version of real time, i'd consider it polling to be real time. you ensure that part of your code will always take the same amount of time.
In open source vhost is a pretty good option that abstracts hardware away from VMs and generally performs well.

That said, SR-IOV isn't a BAD option if you don't care about live migration of VMs over a lifespan potentially longer than the underlying hardware platform. It's a good option if you can live with host-hardware-specific drivers in your guests, you're willing to standardize on a specific NIC as host hardware for the fleet where you'll be running VMs, and you're willing to deal with the resource commitment it requires to deliver on its performance promises.
The word hacker needs to be adopted in broader context. Hacking is essentially a creative process and not always a malicious activity. I would suggest software developers and makers to change their titles to 'hackers' of various types.
Seems like an interesting place to add to my RSS reader...
This is link-farming at its best.
The first time I ever heard about the ice trade [0] and the iceman occupation was from the movie "Frozen". One of the main characters in the movie is an ice harvester by trade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
IRC bots still exist and are _relatively_ easy to write. Very useful things.
Seems only fair if the system is rigged against you.
I think this is something that needs to be more deeply explored, especially if we're going to start using software to do things like "acquire targets." Now, lots of "deployments" for folks that fly Drones aren't deployments in the traditional sense of the word (they aren't in the combat zone). But...how will this work when you're part of a team that runs a semi-autonomous killing machine?
Agreed. Power up sequencing on dumb low-level interfaces has to be thought through carefully. You may turn on something you don't want to turn on.

I have a device which controls an antique Teletype machine from a USB port. It uses the request to send signal on a USB-simulated serial port to start the Teletype motor. This works fine on Linux. On Windows, the motor starts and stops several times when the USB device is plugged in or Windows starts up. That's because an old Windows feature is probing the serial port for a serial mouse. Annoying.
Yeah my rather old ConnectX-3 Pro 40Gbe is crushing all these numbers for the given sizes of 16 to 1024.

ib_send_lat is 0.77, 0.77, 0.80, 0.86, 1.17, 1.31, 1.58

ib_write_lat is 0.73, 0.75, 0.76, 0.85, 1.12, 1.29, 1.57

ib_read_lat is 1.38, 1.38, 1.39, 1.42, 1.50, 1.65, 1.91

However it's really difficult to judge these things without a detailed description of the test setup. This is over physical loopback on a single machine and even things like cable length can skew things at this level.
Surely, but that's beside the point. After decades of experience working in its cognitive neighborhood, the author finally got to know that idea well enough that Helland's point resonated with him. It's no simple matter to go from being aware of a concept to weaving the concept and all its implications fluently into ones thoughts. I'm familiar with all the main ideas presented in this piece, but I still found a lot to think about and took a lot of notes while reading it.
For (online)poker there's forumserver.twoplustwo.com
> I think Messenger bots are a fantastic way to achieve that.

And a fantastic way of building your bot on top of the platform of a 3rd party, which, at any time and for no reasons, can cut you off.