skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nature is weird and cool. Sometimes features only reveal themselves at dimensions much larger than 4:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BorsuksConjecture.html

> Borsuk conjectured that it is possible to cut an n-dimensional shape of generalized diameter 1 into n+1 pieces each with diameter smaller than the original. It is true for n=2, 3 and when the boundary is "smooth." However, the minimum number of pieces required has been shown to increase as ∼1.1^(sqrt(n)). Since 1.1^(sqrt(n))>n+1 at n=9162, the conjecture becomes false at high dimensions.

> Kahn and Kalai (1993) found a counterexample in dimension 1326, Nilli (1994) a counterexample in dimension 946. Hinrichs and Richter (2003) showed that the conjecture is false for all n>297.
I'll only go with things you can read the source code of:

The Quake 1-3 engines. Truly groundbreaking for each one, and easily understandable by mere mortals. They were critical in the adoption of consumer GPUs and in network gaming. With modding and everything else, they basically created an entire industry.

PostgreSQL. Amazing RDBMS that has a long history and is also very approachable by the layman. It sets new records for technical writing as well, and is in widespread use.

Linux. Hugely important, full of smart and not-smart pieces, and the backbone of a lot of the computing world today.

Plan 9. Maybe the best version of Unix ever made, and very approachable in both its system design and implementation. It's a future that never came to pass, but is hugely interesting.

BLAS/LAPACK. Gigantic and scary piles of optimizations for numerical linear algebra, but of utterly unmatched importance (barring maybe the FFT). Everything behind control and data modeling today relies on this.

Erlang's BEAM. Another very approachable VM, and one that has an amazing track record. Combined with OTP, this powers a lot of very important telecom and other systems.

MUMPS. A dark wonder, but almost all healthcare interacts with a MUMPS runtime at one point or another. A sobering reminder that we as engineers can do horrible things that will stay in production for decades and maybe even kill people.
Historically, one of the key dangers with using unprefixed names has been that future system updates add new classes which collide. Testing at dev-time won't future-proof you very well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161005075537/http://www.alexra...
You could train an AI to rewrite manipulative psychology out of all content.

Has the added bonus of fixing a lot of news in the process.

(Okay, so it's slightly more complicated in practice -- you would have to reduce the manipulative content there, and then add back a certain chosen bias so the reduced manipulation is overpowered by the chosen one.)
Well, there are some examples of such loss leaders becoming successful but not in a market like this.

Tesla is a good example of a company that did this.
> I've heard that Australia and New Zealand share the same ISP

What? Hell no. The only Australian ISP that tried to set-up here (Telstra) ended up selling out to Vodafone and exiting the market. Our internet is far better than Australia's.
Right to remember in the public sphere, right to be forgotten in the private sphere.

Negating the first is Animal Farm. Negating the second is the Panopticon.
If this is the sort of thing you're worrying about as a "leader," you're going to have a bad time.
You're not thinking of Brandon Bryant who leaked details of Rammstein air base and that the illegal drone killing program is/was run from Europe?
And when they need to make profit they can easily fire about 90% of their workforce & keep the machine humming in place.
Seems to me that the main thing they could do that's cheap and easy is require a button press on the device to pair. Unfortunately that's not as simple as a firmware update.
Yeah, thanks Obama!

He is the one who made it so hard for republicans to both:
A) Disagree with Obama, and
B) Have a reasonable political position.

Sarcasm may occur... :)
I don't know OCaml but I asked you for Go code in thread about Go and you didn't deliver. You wrote that I am covering only special case in my C++ code but you are doing exactly the same.
What I see in your code are pointers to static part of memory as you are using string literals, show me code+asm of function that takes unknown values of strings at compile time and then it mutate (with third string supplied to function not known at compile time) and return those values later in the function.

> I'm honestly baffled why you think that there is a need to copy the variables or why you can't use them later or whatever you believe there.

What you wrote is SPECIAL case in SOME of the GC'd languages
that have immutable strings. If you have language with mutable strings then this will not work. I know it will not work in Go also and they have immutable strings (so even not all gc'd languages with immutable strings optimize this) that's why I've asked for Go code in Go thread.
In practice, offering more money is often going to be the right answer. (Unless the plane is full of multi-millionaires, offers in the low $Ks are going to find takers pretty quickly.) Of course, there does come a point where you say we're just going to sit at the gate until someone gets off and cancel the flight if no one does.
Apple receives permit in California to test self-driving cars
Ending overbooking would end leniency on missed flights. Many airlines allow zero or low cost rebooking for flights missed due to transportation delays "flat tire rules". I think we should just have some transparency on overbooking and limit it by some well known statistical measure.
It would be cynical in the case of lower profile companies just looking to get their way. In the case of at least two $400 billion+ companies - combined market cap of nearly $1 trillion and the bedrock our country's image of technology supremacy - the rules change. Members of Congress, senators, and many of their constituents directly or indirectly hold shares in one or both of these companies.

It is unfathomable to me that once brought to their attention (through lobbying and donations) that these kinds of threats to companies like Google and Facebook would not be legislatively blocked.
Actually, I'm on your side here, which I why I wrote the FYI so you could understand why this would (likely) not get much love.
There are no emu here, you're thinking of Australia. And Kiwi are both endangered and nocturnal. We have, really, nothing exotic at all apart from Tui's (that are awesome), Kereru (a huge wood pigeon) and Kea's (that are bastards).
Things like this exist in Sweden, and they aren't a problem.

When you sign on to the government tax website (or mobile app, or whatever) you are presented with all the numbers they have for you, which means whatever your employer(s) and bank(s) have reported on you. (Same as in the US, the IRS knows these things already, they just don't tell you what they know).

If you are fine with that, you sign it, and it's done. Denmark has their system setup so that if you do nothing, it's the same as accepting.

But if you have more information, if you have deductions to make, and there's plenty of those in Sweden as well, you just fill in the information in the very nice government tax app, and you're done.
It seems like walmarts strategy to under secure its business and instead use local police is used by airlines too, to avoid cost and liability of hiring their own security at the expense of the public.
Toxic Business Culture, Corporate Scandals, Business Ethics
i was really excited when i found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCuGpiR7FRY

(don't think it's too OT... we could imagine this being a delay/echo sequencer...)

strangely, the name of the app is not in the title or the description of the video. took me a while to find this demo. (can't remember the name).

on one hand i feel like there are endless possibilities. on the other hand, why can't i think of one? not that i am the most creative but... i don't see anyone making any either. most VR audio apps are contrived- they don't make any more sense in VR than they do on a desktop.

i'm excited either way. i think even contrived instruments have potential if you add remote multiplayer.
Hackers release files indicating NSA monitored global bank transfers
One of the really annoying things about libertarianism is the way it takes words that other people already use, redefine it to mean something else, and then tells those people they're wrong for using the original word.

An 'isolationist' is someone who wants their country to withdraw from the world politically. It's not someone who wants to live 'off the grid'. It's not someone who is frightened by a 30% marginal tax bracket. It's not another term for 'libertarian'. Someone who wants to live off by themselves with little interaction with others is called a hermit, not an isolationist.
The LaTeX source for the book is on Github: https://github.com/pllk/cphb
not sure what area they're in where a $50k/year family pays $12k in taxes. NY? CA?
> The disadvantage to NZ healthcare, and dental care, is that their practices are sometimes really backwards. Especially with the latter. Dentists are far more likely to just yank out a tooth than try to save one.

Thanks for overgeneralising my entire country :/ Dentists typically only pull teeth if you can't afford the fix - that is the one downside to our medical system, medicine is subsidised, dentistry is not, and offering dental insurance as part of an employment contract is very unusual here.
> Technological progress seems to be slowing.

Comedy gold. Really?

How long ago since you thought 'mail' was something a guy carried for you?

How long ago since you thought a phone should be wired to a wall?

How long before that when you thought a computer was something that banks used?
>> Uber's bet is Uber controlling the autonomous car market

> I think most reasonable people would be able to impute some sort of first mover or early mover advantage into what I was saying.

I think most reasonable people are deeply sceptical that Uber is going to win first-mover advantage against the likes of Google (who's been working on the autonomy tech for what, a decade, now?), traditional automakers (who have deep experience actually building vehicles), and Tesla (who've been working on the autonomy for at least as long, while also developing manufacturing experience, and have many more vehicles on the road gathering data). Let's not even bother quibbling about that nasty lawsuit.
It doesn't matter. Don't you have better things to be doing?
>I'd at least want to use a form-fillable PDF

I used to do those, but honestly, it's just easier to do it with pen and paper. Either there is automath in the form that screws up if you fill in a field out of order, or they make the form so it cannot be saved. PDF editing software sucks too. It's very unfriendly on Linux. I would suffer through it when I used OS X, because I worried about legibility in the small boxes. I'd never go back to that now. It's a huge pain. The pen is mightier than the keyboard with tax forms.
in what way, except for the grammatical structure of the phrase, is the war on ads similar to the war on drugs?
You're right, it isn't hard to think up situations where passengers would have to be deboarded such as weather change, another plane crashing into them etc as you noted. However all of those items you mentioned are noted in the United Contract of Carriage which mentions force majure including weather, and damage to the airplane, running out of fuel, strikes etc. However, none of those reasons applied to Dr. Dao, and his being boot from the plane which why he would have a very good chance of getting far more than a refund. You can also be sure, eventually United and other airlines will quietly update there contracts to allow them to legally boot a customer under any circumstances at their sole discretion.
Very good point. I addressed our reasoning behind choosing Objective-C to some extent in the previous blog post[1].

A big reason behind this was to minimize the binary size, which means a much faster download.

Because we used Objective-C and didn't use any third party code, our todo-list app Accomplish[2] is only 289 KB, whereas the most similar competing app (MinimaList) is 8.8 MB and almost all the other competing apps are between 60 and 80 MB each.

It may seem like an unnecessary optimization, but we're hoping a faster download/install experience, along with close attention to detail in other ways, will give our app a competitive edge.

[1] http://penandpapersoftware.com/blog/2017-04-13-using-objc-fo...

[2] http://penandpapersoftware.com/accomplish/
I suspect your comment may actually cause people to downvote the OP.
Some of us down here are plenty happy to pay for our share and would vote to increase what's taken to improve services. We don't need more immigration, we need infrastructure and need to pay for it. Taxes help pay for university here (and I wish it covered more of the cost) so if you were studying here, your partly covered.
Why do you think we're isolationist? No part of NZ foreign policy is intended to be like that.
On a related note: http://www.pushturnmove.com
Ask HN: Best resources for running a successful Kickstarter campaign?
What are some good ebooks / actual books / websites out there for running a successful online fundraising campaign?
The 8088 CPU requires that its reset vector be placed at the top of its 1MB address space [1]. So even if the IBM engineers had wanted to put all the reserved space at the bottom, there still would have been a tiny "reserved" hole right at the 1MB barrier due to the design of the chip.

So with the requirement of the physical CPU hardware for a small reserved space at the top of the (at the time) maximum addressable range resulting in a non-linear memory map anyway, putting other reserved stuff (ROM, I/O memory, etc.) up there was not so much of a bad idea at the time. They clustered the "ROM stuff" up there along with the required reset vector.

Also, remember, hindsight is 20/20. The IBM engineer's in Boca Raton, in 1979 to 1981 [2], designing what became the IBM-PC likely had no idea just how big of an industry wide impact their choices were going to eventually have.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer (released Aug. 12, 1981, so the design was created some length before that date, 1979-1981 is a guesstimate)
As I've gotten older, I keep thinking about that; How will I look upon new advancement and things my kids are excited about. Will I be an "old fucker", attempting to slow down progress because it doesn't make sense?

Certainly, my generation will have a different view growing up in the "internet age" but how different will we look from present day conservatives?

I hope I stay open minded for a long time and never disregard anything because it's new but only time will tell.
Really? I just see it getting faster and faster.
Wouldn't that fall under freedom of the press?
Introducing Verily Study Watch
I agree, it's a limitation of the perceptual blocker, as it needs to `see` the ads to detect them. However, combined with a regular ad blocker to catch the ads that the regular ad blocker missed, it seems like a reasonable solution.
But some do. So the reply to the GGG...P stands.
Amazon was definitely not the first ecommerce site either.
> We didn't looked at Christchurch

South Island is best island buddy ;)

> For food, it seems like for the food problem it's also caused by the lack of 'culinary education' as we may call it in France.

Obesity directly correlates to poverty here.

> One thing bothering me a bit is the lack of history / culture, at least as I know it. This is again very biased by my education, but in Europe, you have castles, small villages with rich history literally everywhere

Yep, we're a young nation, I routinely drink in pubs in Munich that are older than my country - but New Zealand's history is older than NZ, Maori have been here since the 1100s at least. Also, our natural history is very compelling .
Is Trump at Mar-a-Lago?
You could feed back the visually blocked ads to a system that profiles their HTML/etc and then generates new rules for the first line blocking (which is usually itself a combination of not loading and not rendering).
Mark bought Instagram for 1 billion and now it's probably worth maybe 25. That was a pretty genius move by him.
> The Sphinx was used for target practice.

This was the first I've heard that assertion, so it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Turns out it's a common story that Napoleon used the Sphinx for target practice, hence the lost nose. It also turns out that that is most certainly not true. Napoleon, being wholeheartedly in favor of the enlightenment, would never have destroyed antiquities (only plundered them for his own profit -- lets not forget that the Rosetta Stone was discovered during a Napoleonic campaign).

Further, a 15th century Arab historian notes that the nose was missing in his era and "attributes the loss of the nose to iconoclasm by Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr—a Sufi Muslim from the khanqah of Sa'id al-Su'ada—in AD 1378, upon finding the local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest. Enraged, he destroyed the nose, and was later hanged for vandalism."[0]

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza#Missing_n...

P.S. thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole - I haven't idly done some armchair egyptology since I was a teenager
Our Internet is great. We're mostly fibre now and the cheapest plans are 20 up and 100 down.
I don't believe I mischaracterized anything; you did throw a gratuitous provocation in that comment (more than one in fact). Obviously, though, I'm not describing one comment but a longstanding pattern. If you want to continue commenting on HN, this needs to stop.

I've made many attempts to explain, don't believe anyone could accuse us of being impatient with you, and do believe you're more than smart enough to understand. If your account consistently produces troll effects on HN, which it does, then at some point it's you who are responsible—not people who can't handle the truth, don't want 'man' to know things, don't know math, or however else you blame others. At some point enough is enough.

If you really need a further explanation I'd be happy to try, but would need some indication that you're asking in good faith.
that exec is still using the internet directly. That's like saying you don't drive your car directly, because you are only using the steering wheel and the pedals. He just has a really inconvenient and expensive browser extension.
> Fine, I'll delete the post then.

Why? Screw the downvotes, thanks for writing that.

It beats the crap out of all those so called 'success stories' that if you look at them closely merely amount to a half-assed hobby project that accidentally made some money.

FWIW: My partner Michael in 1999 suggested that besides live content we should find a way to easily host videos. I nixed the idea.

For an encore, a couple of years later when confronted with gamers using our service to live-stream their games I wrote a bot to block them.

Youtube and Twitch happened anyway :)
Flights get canceled entirely for much more mundane reasons, such as storms or maintenance issues. If you truly need to be somewhere tomorrow, you need to plan for those cases, which are quite a bit more frequent than this one.

As for your scenario, ask for a volunteer to get bumped instead, and incentivize them as necessary.
This may be the most intelligent paragraph ever written with the word "Butt-Head" in it.
I suspect we are better educated overall, but people are not "smarter".

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/are-you-smarter...
Same. I’ve wasted several minutes whitelisting various ad networks for the maniacs at Forbes and Wired, but when they say “we rely on ads, stop being a dick” and I try to comply; it turns out they’re not talking about ads at all.
I can do well enough on programming challenges at a place like HackerRank. However, I very rarely actually get to the technical interview in a job application; most commonly, I apply and don't hear back from the company. So as far as I'm concerned, I need better something but that something isn't better skills.
> Your employer does, as one of the (many!) ways in which they exercise paternalistic control of your life.

That's an odd characterization. Most people would think getting the equivalent of pre-filled 1040EZ as controlling.
Yeah, the rebuild is very slow, which frustrates the locals no end, but it's happening. CBD (aka "downtown") area aside, we've never stopped being like Auckland or Wellington - we have overpriced houses and congested motorways too!
I'd love to see the whole list, do you have it written down?
How Brickseek is able to do Walmart inventory check?
https://developer.walmartlabs.com/forum/read/191075

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39844345/walmart-retrieve-stock-quantity-and-local-store-by-providing-zip-code-and-id

Does anyone have any idea?
Great timing considering Google Code Jam Round 1 starts tonight too
There's something special when a certain density of talented people live together. Moving toward an isolated environment is never a good idea. I'm sure the title is a little misleading.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against New Zealand and I am no fan of San Francisco
I mean, yeah, you're correct that there are many more potential technical employers in San Francisco. However, this doesn't necessarily correlate with those jobs being more accessible or desirable than the jobs available in other places.

For one, you have a lot more competition from other applicants, because every brogrammer thinks that he needs to move to SV to be part of the scene (and I really dislike that SV is becoming Hollywood-for-nerds; flooded with tons of fledgling wannabes who worship at the feet of an elite few).

For two, you have a lot more snobbery and people expecting specific pedigrees. They want Ivy League, they want other startup or big-name tech experience, etc. There are a lot more people who think talking to a candidate coming from a job in Nebraska where he wrote software for a company that runs a machinery rental business (for example) is below them. That type of experience is severely undervalued, and if SF needs anything it's more people with an appreciation for a stable production ethos.

For three, SF is appreciably worse along most axes and the extreme cost of living means the "extra" money go down the drain very quickly, seriously diluting the real value of the salary. This is compounded when you consider that taxes are also very high in CA and SF, especially compared with states without income taxes like TX or FL.

Four, we're talking about "the Midwest" as a unit here, but the fact is there are a lot of cities in the Midwest and some of them have a lot more bustle than others. There are not many companies that are strictly tech companies, but there are hundreds of potential employers in every metro area, and again, some are much more active than others.

Also, when discussing job markets in the "Midwest", I'm really referring to everything that's not a tech hub, because the distinction is really tech hub v. non-tech hub. Houston and Dallas/Ft. Worth are in the top 5 biggest metros in the US and I'm sure there's plenty of tech work there. Florida is one of the most populous states in the US and the availability will depend on the metro, but they have a good share of tech work. The Mountain West has much to offer (especially Utah).

The point is that there is plenty of opportunity for someone who wants to look outside of NYC, SF, SEA, and LA. No one should feel like they're trapped there as long as they're willing to work for some companies that aren't household names.

Lastly, you never run out of opportunities if you're willing to work remote, and this can be a good way to maximize the benefit of low COL areas.