skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is silly. You should (almost) never optimize low-level numerical building-block routines for code style at the expense of performance.

The proper thing to do is make a generic library function for evaluating Chebyshev polynomials, and then pass in the polynomial coefficients and the values to evaluate in arrays. That’s a much more “functional” approach than hard-coding the coefficients could ever be.

Then if you want it to go fast, you can vectorize the code and use FMA instructions, and run it on multiple CPU cores, as in https://github.com/alkashani/numcrunch/blob/master/src/clens... (this is code my wife wrote for me; I think there’s still a factor of 2 or 4 being left on the table getting data flowing efficiently through the CPU caches, but we didn’t really deeply profile it to figure out what the issue was). Of course you can do even better by running this type of highly parallelizable code on a GPU.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a numerical analyst or hardware expert.) I’m not sure if you can use a dot product unit like the one in your link to make as much of a difference when handling recurrences like “Clenshaw’s algorithm” for evaluating Chebyshev polynomials (the method used in the OP, an analog of Horner’s algorithm), as you can get for taking a big dot product or computing an FFT or whatever. What I expect you really want is to keep your temporary variables in higher precision all the way through the recurrence.

You can probably get some improvement vs. separate floating point addition and multiplication with FMA instructions on existing standard hardware (and also a slight speed boost). I haven’t ever carefully tested the accuracy improvement in practice though.

If you are willing to take a hit on performance, you can even save the lower order bits of higher-precision accumulated floating point numbers by using two floats (doubles) per variable, and get almost double the precision with the same hardware (keywords: “compensated arithmetic”, “Kahan summation”).

Or see http://www.chebfun.org/examples/cheb/Turbo.html https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2463 for a kind of mind-blowing, much mathier trick.
Probably not. It's unlikely either party will want this to go to trial so it'll probably end in a settlement where the company buys a license on top of damages.
Yup, an arena allocator that you drop at the end of an operation will always be faster than a GC.
These are not old-timey tourist-trap "streetcars" wobbling around at 15mph. Modern "trams" are fast, quite, provide better ammenities for wheelchairs and strollers and provide greater travel comfort. Like rolling stock in general, they're built to higher standards compared to buses and will last a lot longer with way smaller maintanace cost.

They also use a lot less energy per passenger-mile to move due to the minimal friction of steel wheels on rails compared to rubber wheel.
Using the Samsung Galaxy S8 to replace my work computer
I'd be interested to know how much ARM have an advantage here in terms of their ISA? Presumably if more resources were dedicated to it, ARM cpus could be quite a lot faster than x86?
Done now. Thanks.
I was the person who changed the title and it wasn't for cynical reasons; just because the subtitle was less baity.

In the hope of making you feel better, we shall take out the "for-profit" bit. That plus I can't fit "(2016)" in 80 chars otherwise :)
Yep. Utterly unusable on my Android tablet.
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The main issue with Tarsnap we had is it's very slow to restore if you have big backups. Very slow. Big in this case is in the order of a TB or so.

We had an incident were we needed to restore some data from backups recently, and it took literally days to get the files we needed back. We were not downloading the entire backup, we just wanted to restore a small subset of files.

We migrated away after that.
Hmm. Doesn't seem to work on iOS.
Microsoft does it. Every Linux distros does it.

Assuming they can maintain compatibility with existing drivers it should be fully possible for them to just update a few relevant OS components, especially for security updates. Feature updates may pose a bigger problem, but aren't really a major issue in my view. Leave that for manufacturers if need be.
I see it's already been mentioned, but allow me to second Backblaze. I use it for hundreds of clients, and they have consistently been the most reliable of the backup services I have tested*. Since they also have versioning, you can recover from CryptoLocker variants comparatively easily as well.

(Almost any cloud-based backup system can help detect Locker variants. If you notice your daily backup data set suddenly shooting up in size, time to start checking for background encryption.)

(°Backblaze, Carbonite, Crashplan, Mozy, Acronis)
I'm a bit skeptical of his implication that Xerox Parc created the computer industry in the sense that it wouldn't have happened otherwise. By investing millions in advanced systems they were able to invent the stuff a few years ahead of hackers with less resources but it seems to me most of it would have happened anyhow when the hardware got cheap enough.

Similarly with the modern rush towards AI, everyone pretty much can see it's going to happen but the likes of DeepMind with millions in funding and many of the brightest will probably get there first but progress there will happen with or without them.
Absolutely, but I think the "in most cases" of the original quote was meant to imply simple malloc/free style memory management rather than the use of tailored arena/region allocators.
Hmm. This site doesn't seem to work well on my iPad.
> after 200 years everybody and their grandchildren are dead

But their culture and the memory of genocide isn't.
So does the paint wash away with water? If so it makes it kind of pointless if you can't wash your clothes.

If not it means you're being a jerk painting over stuff that at worst are historic or architecturally important pieces and at best just defacing our landscape.
Actually this is what I believe in life :) I believe, seed reference point of the random theory is stars and that's because most of the times astrology is accurate.
I might be willing to take a closer look at it, if this wasn't named "dude".

Dude, do you even?
What exactly does this NSA tool do? Every story I've seen glosses over how it works.
Test run of electric sled – Boring Company
Love the acknowledgement at the end to Donald Knuth. Those times must have been epic. Now if that sort of thing interest you, you can have a look at the "Bit twiddling hacks" on Google.
I doubt it. For one, 32-bit ARM is pretty complex too (though 64-bit ARM is a very nice simplification). More importantly, though, you can overcome the x86 complexity by simply throwing enormous manpower at the problem, and that is what Intel has done over the years.

(That doesn't mean the complexity is justified, just that it can be overcome. I think that people often assume that x86's dominance means that there's something inherently amazing about x86 from a microarchitectural point of view. That isn't true; rather it's simply that x86/Windows has historically earned Intel so much revenue that they've been able to fund the manpower needed to keep it alive and on top.)
I think the reason that the billing software's API hasn't been updated is right there in it's name: "billing". Billing is one of those things in an organization that can't suffer much downtime. Nobody wants to be that guy who who endangered revenue because there was no possible way that the security patch should have been able to break the billing software.

Does billing work? Yes? Then don't mess with it. Billing is only to be messed with when the cost of not messing with it is that it will never work again and all prior data will be lost forever. Nothing short of that risk is sufficient justification to touch anything related to billing.

I'm being hyperbolic there, but conservatism around systems that presently work shouldn't be terribly surprising, something like billing especially.
Well, yeah, but if you need some of the allocated data at the end of the operation, you'll end up copying it, which will have a runtime cost, might introduce bugs (because of pointer invalidation and the ease of forgetting to update some pointers) and then none of the two will get counted as "cost of manual memory management." C++ with its value semantics encourages unnecessary copying tremendously and it's never counted as "cost of memory allocation" or "producing garbage", on the contrary, Stroustrup says things like "C++ is my favorite GC language because it generates so little garbage to begin with."

This is not to say that it's fair to call OCaml "efficient" in the memory department based on a GC benchmark; TFA is full of examples where OCaml allocates things on the heap that TFA recommends to allocate elsewhere and shows you how to maul your code to get there.

My only point is that how well a programming system uses memory is a very hard question because (A) there are many different use cases and (B) you can't isolate "memory performance" into a few easily measurable things like time spent allocating, time spent in GC and peak memory use - there are other things like what your program has to do outside of the allocator to cope with its semantics and how the performance of code using the memory objects is affected by the layout encouraged by the allocator and these things cannot be measured in isolation from the rest of the program.
You obviously know a lot about history and your HN comments are usually fine, but there's a pattern where, when commenting on historical tragedies, you have become sarcastic and provocative. Could you please not do that on HN anymore? This is an international community striving for a civility that is constantly fragile. If you flame-throw straight into explosive material (which I'm sad to say you've done more than once), you do damage.

We always tell people that HN threads should be like good conversation, but there's one way in which that isn't true. When we're sitting around talking about intense stuff with friends or compatriots, there's a latitude for intense expression that we don't have here. That's because in a large internet community like HN, the bonds between members are much weaker, and there are many tribes and competing loyalties among us. Talking about, for example, how the British never really suffered, is the kind of thing that can stir up conflict all over again (albeit, fortunately, in a trivial teapot). In such a place, we all need to bring our diplomatic skills. I'm sure you can use those and still share your historical insights.
What gsg has been referring to is the flambda framework [1], which has been available for a while.

If you're using OPAM, install an flambda-enabled compiler with (e.g.)

opam switch install 4.04.1+flambda

[1] https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/flambda.html
I have a related question. I want to take backup of certain folders to a portable USB HDD every night. Can anyone recommend any simple solution for that?

I don't need encryption or any extraneous features. I just need the selected directories to get mirrored to a backup location.

Currently, I am using SyncToy by Microsoft, but I was looking for a cross platform solution.
If NSA made it, and failed to protect it - then NSA should be liable for law suits to pay for damages.
All 16 and 32 bit x86 code is valid on x64. It's an extension, not a new ISA.
Bribery, gay porn, and copyright trolls: The rise and fall of a lawyer (2015)
For someone that is considering Android, coming from iOS, this is a brilliant idea that should have been implemented long ago.

For example, a lot of Android phones are running 4.4 and 5.0 in this part of the world. Those versions are pretty bad and the people that bought Android 4.4 and 5.0 actually do not know what they are missing and how to actually update their OS since there is no way for them to do that for now.

I hope that with this Treble, there will be a lot more Android phones(from Chinese makers) that can update base Android OS to the latest one much more frequently.
That's rather extreme, I think but Haiku or Windows 98 with IE4 could possibly be quite safe from viruses nowadays, even if not exactly "secure".
Should that apply only to NSA or also to the writers of e.g. Metasploit exploits?
They're already being held hostage by 1000s of companies who won't update their crappy software so it runs properly, allowing them to install OS updates rapidly.

As I said, like ChromeOS, it's perfectly possible to run your own servers, don't need to pay Google or Microsoft.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/enterprise/runni...
For a modern generational GC, the minor heap works just like an arena allocator (at least for the data that can be thrown away), so this shouldn't result in any performance difference (assuming the minor heap is large enough).
This definitely feels like cheating. There's so much one could do rather than just use the ` operator to quote the program. Given a program f, one can create a program g which prints out g and then does f, and one does not require any special operators to do this. There's some cool computability stuff in this area, and I don't know (off the top of my head) of a readable introduction.
There's a common rule called the 3-2-1 rule, it states that you should:

- Have at least three copies of your data.

- Store the copies on two different media.

- Keep one backup copy offsite.

Personally, I'd recommend:

Copy 1: Your Mac.

Copy 2: A local NAS (my personal choice) or hard disk.

Copy 3: A remote backup, stored on a hard drive in a desk drawer at work, Backblaze, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive or whatever other solution suits your needs.

In terms of software, I personally use rsync + ZFS/BTRFS snapshots (NAS - local, NAS2 - remote) and rclone (cloud). I haven't really used fancy solutions like Attic and Borg due to their need to write dead (i.e. not mountable without a performance penalty) data to local disk or SSH. No affordable storage that I've found offers this (rsync.net offers it but is too expensive).

It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering buying an LTO6/7 tape drive though...

I'll also add because I haven't seen it elsewhere: verify your backups. A backup is pointless unless you know you can restore it. The best way to test this is by doing it. It should get to the point where you don't fear a restore. It shouldn't be painful. There should be no worry. It should be no more than an inconvenience. When something goes wrong, you don't want there to be even the smallest hint of doubt that there's something wrong with your process.

As such, I strongly recommend having an easily accessible backup. I'd go for a spare HDD sitting in a desk drawer at home before going for cloud backups just so that you can test it frequently.
Let me summarize: academic language, it's easy for the GC that way, and "if you though that Float boxing would kill performance you wouldn't have started down this path"
Third option (ignoring your disputable conclusions of vandalism): it does wash away and you just don't 'get it'.
And anything using this technique would be a perfect illustration of the fact that code is harder to debug than to write, so if you write the cleverest code you can write, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it.
Yes, I know. I just hugely preferred his earlier work.
You've been using HN primarily to pursue political and ideological battles. Would you please stop doing that? It isn't what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.
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Ransomware is crippling hospitals. People's lives are on the line. And the tech community is in a frenzy of excuses, whining, and hypothetical bullshit about shipping labels. Sagely pointing out to each other that hospitals aren't tech companies, like only tech companies know how to use computers.

Sometimes this industry disgusts me. "X is hard" -- what the fuck is your profession? Easy shit? Fine, step aside.

We have let our civilization down. Whining that X is hard is not going to fix anything. Take the week off and put in some pro bono consulting time with any nearby organization that got hit. Make things better. Fuck your blog posts.
That's the real issue. But you're not supposed to say that.
HTTP/2 for web apps
That takes it to an even higher level of fairness. So in comparison, slack is only billing for actual users AND only if those users are using slack. Asana bills for users that don't exist AND actual users whether they use it or not.
Ask HN: How are we going to face increasing electronic waste?
Every day a new gadget is introduced in the market with superior abilities and every time we buy a new electronic product we are also adding something to the junk we already have.
What solutions do we have? Are any companies working to solve this problem?
In my town, you'd build houses on it. The vacancy rate is under 0% and small, dingy houses sell for about $600,000.
Ask HN: Is this game work safe? Do you know its origin?
I knew this game from years ago, we played it at a company event recently and everyone had tons of fun.
I published the game under creative commons.

However I'm worried if this could be taken as offensive, or just not suitable for work events.

https://www.thegameofholes.com/

Am I worrying for no reason?

Also if you know anything from its origins please let me know.
We asked you many times to stop breaking the Hacker News guidelines with uncivil and unsubstantive comments. Since you've ignored us, continued, and gotten worse, we've banned your account. Insinuations of astroturfing and shillage without evidence are not allowed here [1], and bad enough, but national rants and slurs are completely unwelcome.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...
> You can do a little better with a minimax polynomial that you can derive with the Remez algorithm.

Yup! This was something I meant to mention in a footnote. If I could get equivalent [infinite precision] error bounds using a minimax polynomial of a lower degree, I think this would make a difference. Otherwise, even if the theoretical error bounds are lower for a minimax polynomial of the same degree, it wouldn't do anything to combat the noise introduced by rounding errors, assuming you keep everything else the same - and that noise seems to be by far the limiting factor. But that's just conjecture - no way to know for certain without trying it.

I do still like the Chebyshev polynomial approach because it's the only non-iterative approach I know of. It's something that I could implement without the aid of a CAS program pretty trivially, if I wanted to.

> The best approximation I could find calculated sin(x) and cos(x) for [-pi/4,pi/4] and then combined these to cover all other inputs.

Yes, that also seems to be the way to go (at least for precision). I didn't mention it in the article, but even though the code I showed was rust, the actual implementation is in the form of an AST for a plugin system that only supports f32 addition, multiplication, division, and modulo as operations (no branching, f32<->int conversions, etc). My entire motivation was to create a sine function for this system. It's known that the inputs to the function will be in (-pi, pi), so I don't have to perform reduction over any larger range. I don't see a practical way to reduce down to (-pi/4, pi/4) using the operations available to me, but I could be overlooking something.
Wealthy socialites don't have roommates. This reads like the author is in college or fresh out, where school friends + roommates + roommates' friends + parties + nights out = interacting with a lot of people.
> some people won't receive medical care they otherwise would.

which is what happens when your whole computing network is remote-killed
You'd want to increase the level of income slowly over time so you can deal with problems like this as they arise. I don't think anyone's proposing an immediate $40k-per-year no-questions-asked grant to all residents.
It's about having a proper sense of risk. It's more risky to drive to the pharmacy than talk about buying drugs from the dark net online or have your tumbled coins traced back to your identity.
> securely sharing data

> security incidents
This is also one of the main reasons why Mainframes still exist.

Backwards compatibility straight back to 1964 is a big deal, there's lots of 50+ year old code still in production at banks, insurers, and the like.
This.

Talk to some locals and you'll quickly learn the atmospheres of various locations, times to go, where to avoid, etc. As long as their preferences are fairly similar to your own the suggestions will always trump what a generic review site will offer. This also sidesteps the problem of paid reviews and the like.

That dive down the road may not be as terrible as it seems. Provided you're looking for a specific type of experience. Avoid the food, stay for the local brew, sweaty 20 somethings and stumbling down alleys with some new friends.

>Worked in the restaurant industry for a few years
Most people never get either of the two situations you describe.
This statement:
"Or in other words: the model, its size, hyperparameters, and the optimiser cannot explain the generalisation performance of state-of-the-art neural networks."
is not true and very misleading. Careful selection of hyperparameters and the model can clearly improve generalization - the article is making a mistake in assuming that getting to zero training error is a good thing or a desirable thing. In fact a large part of hyperparameter optimization are choices that ensure generalization, and some of the fundamental choices such as early stopping and many others do determine how well the model generalizes. If your model has zero training error you have likely made poor choices.
the society is all the friends of friends of someone. So someone in that circle of friends has several. The rest of the world has 0.
Detroit had one of the most successful street car lines of any city in the nation. My father took me to ride on it as a young boy the last week that it was running.

People polled were 3 to 1 against it closing. My father was called a crackpot for believing that General Motors was behind the closing and it took fifty years but he was essentially proven correct.

The original plan was for the QLine to go out to the edge of the suburbs where it would end at the former State Fairgrounds where Magic Johnson and partners were going to build a shopping center along with apartments and condos.

While it would be much more successful if it could connect with the suburbs that doesn't mean it won't be a success. Believe it or not rents in the downtown area have doubled or tripled in the past eight years pricing some of my engineer friends out.

The QLine is going to drive development of apartments out Woodward where prices are much lower. The new home for the Red Wings and the Pistons is in Midtown where a large entertainment district is planned along with apartments, easy access to the QLine to go downtown will fill them.

Hopefully eventually the city will convince the feds and the state to extend the QLine out to at least eight mile. The city also imho badly needs a second line running from the airport to the downtown hotels.
NSA made a weapon with the purpose of harming someone. In court, intent matters.
Show HN: Conway's Game of Life Synthethized into Music
I'm pragmatic. We've been actively trying to change things for the past many years. Thanks to new EU security directive we're getting there.

Progress is slow though, and it's not like we couldn't do better if the politicians wanted it.

That's the thing about public administration though, citizens genuinely don't care about IT, and bottom up management simply doesn't produce fast changes in organizational culture.
Sure, but it's a good indicator of startup-ish tech in a city.
Wasn't this the plot of Eyes Wide Shut?