skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You missed the point of my questions:

> How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed?

> How long do you believe that AU has had a stable, first-world government?

Federation was (to a rounding error) a century ago. Some would argue that it's been stable since then -- I'd argue it hasn't, but the boom/bust left/right vacillation so common in western ersatz democracies evidently is what counts as stable these days.

It's kind of besides the point, though, since it's a comparative exercise.

How long does nuclear fission waste need to be managed, and how does that compare to 'around a hundred years'?

You also make a less than compelling case that we have no choice but to have waste from nuclear fission -- we have plenty of options that don't involve nuclear fission.

Consider, for example, the fact that Australia has no nuclear fission plants generating electricity.
Second this. I have learnt about so many new technologies from HN, that 1) it pushed me to finally start my own venture, and 2) the technologies I have learnt about and use in my daily stack all came from HN posts over the years
Data is generally not "racist", it is what it is.
Some pretty highly regarded economists in the past century have backed up the idea of a land value tax. Does that alone make it a great idea? No, but I think it makes the parent comment seem pretty silly.

I certainly have an opinion, but (like I said) it's not a strong one. I don't understand all the moving pieces and all the incentives involved here, but I'd be interested in seeing some more knowledgeable people talk about the LVT.
Also, because curl is c89-portable, and alloca might fail on the portability standpoint.
Yeah, and good luck if you're not Google or similarly sized.
Some of the things in that list are being done already or provided in different ways.

Implementations have weak hash support; not all exactly the same. I haven't seen weak references; that would be an invention.

There are expand-all type functions; not all the same.

Could it be a library function? Not one that supports everything in every implementation. The code walker support would help.

What if an implementation has a &foobar keyword that is supported in its macro lambda lists? A portable expander that doesn't know about this won't properly handle macros that use it. (It will handle global macros because it just calls those, but expand-all has to itself implement macrolet).

Code walking is done, with ugly portability switching and whatnot.

Also w.r.t. that, add:

- useful accessors on macro environment objects!

You can't do anything with a macro &env now other than pass it to macroexpand or macroexpand-1. It holds useful information like "is X a lexical variable in this scope?"

Speaking of lambda lists:

- standard parser for lambda and macro lambda lists.
I suspect it has been tried. That there is an absence of obvious evidence that such bots exist might suggest something about the attitude of the Hacker News software toward such behaviors.
https://www.couchsurfing.com/

Was a big one for me. Along with Wikipedia, it's what I think of when I want to believe that maybe the internet wasn't such a bad idea after all.
Or just people on the media are pissed off. They have that leverage anyway over Google to spread their thoughts through media.

I personally think Google should be separated or made a dumb pipe, this would be the most American thing ever!
Yeah, this guy's history of how Google got to where it was ("it was just luck!") is truly baffling. I find the scope of Google's reach quite frightening, but I'll certainly acknowledge that it's because they so often have the best product. Do you remember when Google Instant came out in 2010? I remember being blown away by how fast it was, to the point of "how do they do that?" awe.
Plivo DNS issue
Anyone interested in this might also look into "term-rewriting" languages used similarly. Long line of research exists in that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXL_(programming_language)

http://strategoxt.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS_Software_Reengineering_Too...
critical in the sense of avoiding collisions between protocols. Imagine if redis and mysql had ended up with the same default port, and how much of a nightmare that would be.
Actually I think it hurts them to have a large number of inactive followers.

> While USA Today’s horde of fake followers did not appear to “like” or comment on posts at a significant clip, the presence of so many of them could serve to muddle the rate at which the audience was engaging with content.
in nearly all cases, you should always do "$var" instead of $var, this should be mandated on sh scripts.

you can even go further to do "${bar}", this is even safer I feel.
Maybe it's a subtle plug for CryptoAuditor and Universal Key Manager, products the author's company offers?

> CryptoAuditor is a product that can control tunneling at a firewall or at the entry point to a group of cloud servers. It works together with Universal SSH Key Manager to gain access to host keys and is able to use them to decrypt the SSH sessions at a firewall and block unauthorized forwarding.
What if common cosmological subjects of inquiry of bong-inspired geeky 18-year olds were to be published in major outlets?
> It is possible to explain what is happening without explaining how.

That's a description -- an account of what was observed. By definition, an explanation must add something to a description.

"The night sky is filled with points of light." -- a description.

"Those points are distant thermonuclear furnaces, powered by atomic fusion." -- an explanation.

"Similar bird species have differently shaped beaks." -- a description.

"Bird species evolve traits that confer a survival advantage in their distinct environments." -- an explanation.

> It is possible to know that A causes B without knowing why ..."

One cannot claim to know that A causes B without also knowing why, otherwise puddles cause rain. Science is not merely about knowing -- it's about knowing that we know. An observation asserts a fact without context. A scientific theory offers more than mere description, and its standing rests solely on the fact that it has resisted falsification.

> To give an example, we know that mass causes gravitational attraction even though we don't fully understand the mechanism that causes it.

Yes, but that's not a scientific theory, it's a description -- mass causes gravitational attraction, or equivalently, gravitational attraction causes mass (my point is the claim is wrong but without a theory, we can't know that it's wrong). As long as there's no testable theory, the two descriptions are equivalent.

The Greeks believed our sight resulted from our eyes shooting beams out into the environment. Until we had a testable theory, no one could reasonably dispute that idea.

A theory is not a description -- it offers more than an account of observed facts. The water rises across the beach over a period of hours: a description. The sun and moon apply tidal forces -- a spatial differential in gravitational force -- to the water, causing it to periodically rise and fall: an explanation, one that can be tested and potentially falsified.
FWIW it's still not in the UK either.
Viral, how far away are we from a deep learning framework in Julia ? It looks like there are many streams, from GSoC mentoring proposal for what seemed like a CuDNN layer, to a LLVM backend for CUDA/SPIR-V. I figure it'll take atleast 2 years for things to stabilize.
I'm not really sure what the point of this was. First of all, it's titular claim is incorrect - quantum cryptography is not "unbreakable" (and nor does that claim entirely make sense given how mature entire quantum cryptosystems are)[1]. Components like quantum key distribution are reasonably well-studied and do provide an information-theoretically secure solution for key exchange...but that is one component of successfully secured communication.

The article starts off pretty strong with a reasonably accurate exploration into how public-key crypto was invented in the 70s, and how quantum computers could eliminate the RSA problem. But then it veers into this weird territory about the government wanting to control crypto, and proceeds to talk about criminals and terrorists typically misusing otherwise strong crypto. I'm not sure how we ended up there...

It goes on like that, then just sort of ends with this vague point about human ingenuity. It seems like Aeon just wanted to write a headline with the words "quantum" and "cryptography." It's really short and didn't make any interesting point, in my opinion.

_____________

1. Scott Aaronson is a reasonable place to start reading about quantum information theory/computing, and its implications for quantum cryptography in general. Try http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2673 instead of breathless reporting.
24 Recommended Books – Paul Graham
AWS Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility: Preview now open to all
Here's a crazy though. A competitor hires someone to create a botnet to destroy them. You have the fake accounts start liking shitty content and ignoring good content. If the targeted company followed the desires of these fakes they would eventually go out of business.
> Until AI moves out of research at labs and bigco into the startup space

Sounds like what OpenAI (https://openai.com/about/) is trying to achieve.
this is the problem the BBC falls foul of. Their reporting is reasonably impartial but they're infamous for excluding reporting on topics that they are not politically aligned with and over-reporting stories that support certain narratives.
https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/re-a-rev...

> also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better.
While I understand the sympathy here for Google's accomplishments, and don't agree with many of the OP's points - just objectively, it's scary for us all to be dependent on one commercial company. Wether they earned to be in that position or not.

It's also hard to compare things: the scale of the current internet usage, the type of information that is available. (And what can be influenced by showing what).

This scale is much, much wider then what happened to AT&T back in the days. That said, since Apple and MS are also getting away with very similar things, I don't see a point in punishing Google. Especially, as them all being US companies.

The solution of breaking up Google and then putting weaker foreign company in the front-seat, by doing so -- also would not make any sense.
Aurora with PostgreSQL support looks really promising. Has anyone had any experience with it from the limited preview? Would love to hear how it went.
Yes, it's "${bar}" that should go into style guides and linters (for consistency).
The free list can be stored almost entirely within the free buckets, giving it a constant cost in memory you can't allocate.
Have something​ against [[ ]] ?
The way Patrick "patio11" Mackenzie validated his idea for Appointment Reminder was to make a mockup, make appointments with the relevant demographic at the professional's regular rate, and use that time to show the professional the mockup.

https://www.conversionaid.com/podcast/patrick-mckenzie-kalzu...
No one seems to explain how Uber could track user when the have deleted the app ?

It look more like an hack more than "a lack of boundaries" to me...
Are they actually though - in the immediate term? Sure they show ads on the search result, but there's a box with the answer to your query, why would you click an ad?

It seems like the reason it's good for Google is because it's the perfect response to the query and it cements Google as the search engine that can answer my questions.

Are they directly profiting from those queries or are they just making themselves a better search engine, and indirectly profiting from that? If the latter I find it hard to argue against them.
You still need to know how to write safe shell programs even if they're one-liners.

And once you do, shell is really, really useful and convenient.

For example, Linux distributions are full of shell scripts that would be frankly awful to write in any other language that I know of... like this, to take a random example:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...
> Alloca is not standard C

A similar option is a variable-length array, which is standard C. It does share the problem of not being available in some compilers, however.

That said, there are other problems with alloca/VLAs. For small enough sizes, like you said it's faster and simpler to statically allocate. For large enough sizes, you risk overflowing the stack, which might be more constrained than you'd expect (especially when using threads). There might be a sweet spot where it's better, but it's not worth the portability cost and the potential headaches.
And my all time fave -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system
I am no expert, but do people no longer use Feynman diagrams? Were all his theories on QED superceded by new work?
And what benefit would they receive from knowing the location of people who don't even use the service?
PRACTICE INTERVIEWS. What teams would like to do some practice interviewing together by phone? Each team interviews the other, and gives feedback, etc?
>I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like I'm being submarined.

By this logic, everything that appears more than 3-10 times in the press has possibly been "submarined".
Presentation Sharing for Marketers
Instead of crazy conspiracy theories, how about this: USA Today isn't actually that popular, but some botnet programmer with an imperfect understanding of American culture thought it was a brand ordinary Americans all love and read regularly. So they were all instructed to follow their page in an attempt to make the bots look legit.
About 20% of the Tory MPs wanted to leave the EU. So yes, that did play a part in the decision I'm sure. But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP. The Tory party was under threat because of the gains UKIP was making.
A recent result in the same vein is that also Romanian is weakly non-context-free: http://nslonge.scripts.mit.edu/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/...

Personally, I find Shieber's refutation of section 4.4 "Clauses are Bounded in Size" unsatisfactory. I have yet to see cross-serial clauses with more than two constituents outside such papers.
Data Science – Deep Learning in Python
Does anyone know if the animation of Travis at the beginning is actually hand-drawn or uses some kind of After Effects/Photoshop plugin?
Is anyone like me and just uses Perl as a Bash replacement? If I need to write more than a 2 line script, I just use Perl.
Thanks for this detailed write-up! Super informative.
Opinion isn't news, as another stated.

Nobody is objective. The Guardian is clear in how it differentiates news and opinion.

High clarity is what helps people most. Couple that with some diversity in sources, and one ends up reasonably well informed.
They could find them and convince them to reinstall.
CS department updates introductory courses
HDFS: Big data analytics' weakest link
Appears to be ogg if not Emscripten based on the sndName in game::init() https://github.com/XProger/OpenLara/blob/master/src/game.h

Yeah Emscripten and projects like this are pretty impressive

Edit: I apparently can't read
The free list can be stored inside the empty cells, meaning you put the pointer to the next empty cell inside the previous empty cell, and you need a single additional pointer to store the location of the first empty cell. When you free a cell you just make that the first empty cell.
Somewhat. As I see it, openAI is trying to build the tools (and research papers, IP, etc.) in a publicly facing venue that could power the frameworks that ultimately power the disruptive wave of startups.
They use location tracking even when you're not using the app to predict where the demand might be going and to get data for future products like the Uber Shuttle which runs fixed routes.
Demand mapping, driver supply allocation, more accurate surge pricing for the rest of us with the app...
If I remember the old article, it was not that they could track after the app was deleted, but after the user had exited the app... after they had finished their Uber ride and went on their way
It is a series of sketches looping together. Background movie, nothing special.
"Yeah, this guy's history of how Google got to where it was ("it was just luck!") is truly baffling."

It sort of was, though, given it started with a good, nearly-irreplaceable algorithm protected by a patent for 20 years. All kinds of people were looking for one. They lucked out. Whereas, I'd buy the hard work argument if they didn't have a patent on it, competition was allowed, and they still became Google of today.
…and, if true, exposes significant concerns about the OS. I'm less concerned about Uber exploiting this flaw than some far more malicious actor.
That's what I'm asking too. This is the first reporting of what sure sounds like an iOS security vulnerability exploited by the Uber app, and there's no technical content at all, it's just a description of a phone call between two executives. Come on, NYT!
Entanglement: an interesting on-line challenge/game/puzzle
Jan sounds like a very humble guy, really focused and passionate about doing good work. I especially like the comment about sitting with a smart face, I wonder where that expression came from.
Which potentially could give them the feedback of answering the question "how close to their actual destination did their uber driver drop them off?"
Yes, you got the pun, bravo, 2 geek-points for you.

However, you lose 20 geek-points because FLAC and wav are not bit-to-bit identical. They are both lossless encodings and correct implementations will preserve the input material bit-to-bit.
kottke.org is just a collection of interesting links with short description. But I like it :)
Best iOS Apps of 2017
I don't know about that. The concepts of Nix answer significant deficiencies in the tools you mention. Those tools all assume that you need to build and operate systems, which seems like a lot of effort and overly complex, when the trend is to make all systems throwaway.

I've been following Nix for a while, and don't yet have an arena where I can play with it, but the concept is exactly what I think the industry needs. The biggest challenge that I see with nix is that it is basically a new OS and will require a while before many people are comfortable adopting it.

Also, it's not Haskell, it's got it's own minimal functional language, Nix, right?
Pardon my naivety but I am curious why in use cases like this the same water can't be reused? My car uses the same coolant over and over. While that is an apples to oranges comparison couldn't the water be allowed to naturally cool after use in a covered retention pond and then be recycled into the cooling system? Is the water from the aquifer particularly cold to begin with?
Excellent! Couldn't agree with you more
There are two sides to the problem. Some choices are better than others but a person at the start of their career lacks the experience to make a highly informed decision by definition. For example, using pay stats even if accurate does not measure job satisfaction or skill development and a third party's data is likely to be inaccurate.

To put it another way, the people who go to work at one of the "Big 5" companies and stay for a few years are more likely to be happy working for another one of them in a few years than someone who as a new graduate decides that the "Big 5" are not what they want.
Or "Any sufficiently understood tech buzzword becomes distinguishable as an incremental improvement on preexisting tech"
The world’s required reading list
> 'after burning through 120 million dollars of capital'

Wow. Remarkable a start up could be so successful at raising and so bad at developing anything approaching a product.
> That drew attention from regulators. In October 2010, the company shortened its name to Uber after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from San Francisco officials for marketing itself as a taxi company without the proper licenses and permits.

That's kind of surprising.
If that's what you prefer, change the settings. Saying that the majority of Americans (to use your example) should be defaulted to British spelling because of edge cases like yourself is stupid, to use your language.

And that's all my original post talks about — defaults. I never said you shouldn't be allowed to change them.
Of course I have. [[ ]] is shell-specific, which for scripts almost always
means bash-specific, and bash has a history of subtly changing semantics of
such constructs. I've seen scripts suddenly stop working for no apparent
reason, only to discover later that bash upgrade changed how [[ == ]] treated
unanchored patterns (or something of similar caliber). And now go figure where
the bug is.

Most of the time, whatever is in [[ ]] can be easily emulated with
POSIX/SUS-compatible tools and most of the time it doesn't matter that the
tool is not a shell built-in.
In case anyone is interested in learning more about PICO-8 and it's "clones", I started one of those 'awesome lists' for that last year.

https://github.com/felipebueno/awesome-PICO-8/
YC S17 Connector / Interviews
Let's create a thread that we can all connect and share on.

First topic... PRACTICE INTERVIEWS. Who wants to do some together (each team interviews other, gives feedback, etc.)?
Currently, and until they re-allow in-app location only as an option, I block Uber with no location access and only enable it while I'm requesting a ride, then block it again after it's started. A little tedious but it's better than giving them full background location — it's also resulted in me using Lift more.
A bigger question would be how did FTP get 21 and Telnet 23 leaving a gap for SSH?
It's too bad that attribute grammars require a preprocessor.
RAM is cheap.

What's not cheap is requesting RAM from the OS piecemeal.

In this particular case the curl maintainer ended up saving a bit of RAM as a side-effect, but it's actually much more common for programs that benefit from this class of optimization to waste RAM as a side-effect, and yet be much faster.

For example a common optimization in high-level programming languages is to overallocate memory for strings. E.g. if the user requests "x" you allocate 16 bytes, if you need 17 bytes you allocate 32 etc.

This wastes RAM, a 513 byte string will malloc 1024 bytes, but ends up being much faster on overage exactly because RAM is cheap, but allocations are expensive.
صور+للملك+سلمان+2017+أحذث+الملك+سلمان+بن+عبد+العزيز+جديدة
Fake news. First the NYT, now The Week, and tomorrow perhaps the Wash Post. Correspondent's dinner is around the corner and much pain is being felt by traditional media.

This is Google's competitors crying, whining and hoping to influence public opinion. If you don't like Google's search dominance then build a better engine. Users are happy to migrate for more privacy (DDG), a rich UI (Bing), computational power (Wolphram) ... if the search results great. Google's been hammered by FB in social, by AWS in cloud computing, by Office360 in apps, etc., etc. They're not a monolith.
yeah you are probably right, I should add that ..
"${bar}" is irritating to write. It only makes sense when you need to append
a word character ([a-zA-Z0-9_]) to the content of $bar, like in "${bar}qq".
You missed the part where I wrote:

> I don't think we should break up companies either...

Here's my point: I too am hesitant to break up monopolies for most circumstances, but compared to the rampant regulatory capture that's happening all around us every day, it's almost a non-issue.

We should focus on the policies that are actively undermining free economy principles before we shoot for lofty standards.