skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a sad day. NaCL was excellent tech, and its a shame it didn't get incorporated into LLVM proper, and that it didn't take off. We should be using NaCL/pNaCL for all apps everywhere, and for components within apps... etc.

ZeroVM was a desktop/server sandboxing environment that just didn't get any attention and mindshare. Shame!

I want a ZeroVM-like system that makes all of the Debian user-space available on any other OS, each app in a little sandbox... It ought just be another compiler target and automated.

Oh to what could have been! :(
If spending any amount of resources to get any amount of utility counts as success, then there is no such thing as failure.
Superantibiotic is 25,000 times more potent than its predecessor
> Genetic algorithm running on 56-core machine

Wow, just... wow. I wonder why they didn't utilize (multiple) GPUs instead? I would guess it would be far more efficient in all aspects. Especially now that there is TensorFlow & co.
Directory tree? I had a cassette player. This is a computer that you upgrade the OS by going to a computer show and buying a new ROM. Dad watched just to make sure I didn't electrocute myself. He drove me 50 miles buy a debugger on another ROM chip for my 14th birthday. My parents thought these new fangled computers might be important someday, and bought me one to "play" with. I didn't have Google, but I had the instruction manual for the 6502. Life was good.
R is a very well supported language on Windows (since MS bought Revolution Analytics), very well integrated with SQL Server and Azure, and R Server solves a pain point that a lot of real-world users have. And of course it's open source.
In this context, purity means the contract between caller and callee.

You can write the same code, but you can't rely on the enforcement of the same contract unless it is built into the language.
I was fed up with rss readers and other althernatives, I wanted something to browse my silly pics in style where i could define which things to aggregate. It turned out quite cool - give it a try. Oh and you dont have to have FB or Twitter etc. to use it.
Impurity is a lack of constraints. You can, with impure code, write an interpreter for a language that constrains code to being pure, and implemented correctly, you can then depend on code written in that langauge to be pure.

His point is that there's no lost benefit in calling pure code from impure code - the code is already unconstrained. Calling impure code from pure code, though, means you've lost the purity constraint, which means you've lost the nice emergent properties you get from that constraint.

Even if you write 'pure' code in an impure environment, you can't depend on it being pure, because that constraint isn't actually enforced. No matter how pure I try to keep my Javascript, I can never depend on it being pure - there could be a bug, or someone could add impurity at the bottom of the callstack, breaking referential transparency.
Depending on whether they qualify as "software" (IMO, yes) my guess is the HDL[1] specifications for modern CPUs are tops in complexity, in lines of code if not man-hours (I imagine they're mostly procedurally-generated).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language
http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/ is the best I've used for a universal SQL (and nosql) client.
I wrote a blog a few years ago analyzing my inbox[1] (I've done much more since), I recommend you spend time doing the same. What hit me, was that I didn't need to cut down on email, or ignore stuff - I needed to maximize my time. With that, here is what I did:

1. Unsubscribe from useless or even useful information you don't have time to read

2. Prioritize email first. That's probably your primary way to communicate professionally, be tidy and respond quickly.

3. I noticed that I needed to cut down on vising RSS readers, instead I had what I want to follow sent to my inbox.

4. I wrote a series of apps trying to turn my inbox into my news feed (but better), it made it easier to me to go through. Similar, to the people (all of us here) probably visit HN or Reddit to cruise through and get informed, and interact. Originally, I wrote something to send me jokes[2], then interesting stories & investment information [3]

5. I laid out my inbox so I can quickly prioritize. For instance my gmail had different domains organized on the right (3 - 4) and the center was all email. This let me target the more important emails. Now, I have something similar on fastmail.com

6. Just to emphasize you have to check emails every morning and night and just constantly try to keep your count at zero. I actually leave my inbox full of hundreds of email, but spend about an hour cleaning up a month (back down to 20 or so - keeping the necessary threads).

7. Use your desktop. It's easy to use mobile for most things, but your desktop is a real work horse when it comes to quick replies, categorization, and deletion.

[1] http://austingwalters.com/analyzing-email-data/

[2] http://lettergram.net/

[3] https://projectpiglet.com/
The Lithium-ion battery market has already hit PCB manufacturers, by taking up copper foil used in printed circuit boards.

http://globalsmtseasia.com/industry_news/copper-crisis-looms...
That is the stuff of urban legends ...

http://www.fleeb.com/rant/pot.html
You have to distinguish between manufacturing costs and market price. The costs are going to be down as the volume is going to be raised massively, if a significant part of the car production is going to be electric. Which also implies that the free market prices are going to go up short term for all car manufacturers, who have not secured their own battery supply.

But for those who have, or even have their own battery production (Tesla), costs are pretty much guaranteed to go down, as measured by scale, industrial production is just about to start.

It is also not as clear as you put it, that you have to get a new battery pack after "10 years". With batteries having 50 kWh and more, longer lifetimes are to be expected. And unlike car engines, batteries don't fail randomly, they have a clear observable capacity loss. You can either decide to just keep driving your car, if you can live with just 70% of its original range, or update your battery, but then the old battery has a resale value proportional to its remaining capacity.
Investigate the FCC’s Accounting Rule Scandal Before They Are Erased
We had a $5000 Novatel GPS. It didn't have INS integration, and required a subscription to a sat-based correction service. For the 2004 Grand Challenge, CMU had a unit which required 4U of rack space and air conditioning. There's been progress.
But they might be under an obligation to not build licensing infrastructure into their software that bound licenses to accounts in the first place, in a way that technically prevented users from transferring them. That could be seen as a form of DRM restricting users from reselling something they're legally able to re-sell, and the courts would Not Like That, for the same reason they don't like things like warranties not transferring on resale.
What Snapchat success story teaches both app owners and developers
Hi. I lead the Digital team at Threadless and we're shutting down the app because doing so allows us to spend developmental energy making the experience of our main app better for everyone. It served the purpose at the time, but as our focus shifted more into the Artist Shops platform over the last two years, maintaining and updating the native app proved to not be the best use of time or resources for the team. The web and phones have come a long way since we launched it, and we feel that pulling it now is better than letting customers use something that we're not giving our full attention to.
Yeah I'm very very pessimistic in that area. Effectively I think cleaning up bad/tangled OO code to be such a difficult problem that the level of AI required is beyond not just what we can achieve but beyond what we can imagine. For example I believe it's much harder than coding entirely new applications from text descriptions of its features. That would limit the usefulness of an AI that can untangle existing code...
I just use overleaf. gets work done, easy to work with collaborators, does the package install thing automatically, real time preview of what your write, has dumb-person "rich text" mode etc.

Only downside is its cloud based so I can't be productive on an airplane.

https://www.overleaf.com/
Not at all. A Tesla already can recharge significantly in 20-30 minutes, and the Hyundai Ionic takes even higher charge rates than a Tesla, compared to its capacity. If you add to that the ability to slowly charge at a cheap power outlet when you are parking, recharging is not a technical challenge. We just have to equip more and more parking places with power outlets, as demand increases.
Consumer Reports says the Samsung Powerbot robot vacuum is finally good enough to be useful. The Dyson robot vacuum is almost as good, they report. Previous robot vacuums were just too weak at vacuuming to do a good job.
Hotel aggregators are best places to find low prices not booking.com. It's possible that Expedia family of sites have better deals which you won't see on booking.com. So TripAdvisor and Trivago are better.

Disclosure: Used to work at TripAdvisor.
At senior levels you will be judged by what you've made and your reputation. If you're a new hire you won't have much of either
Russia’s Science Community Reboots
VR may be the next 3D TV. It's been around for a while, but it's a niche product. Hassle of using it outweighs the benefits.
The Banana Pi router is interesting. It has several ethernet ports, has debian available for it and a SATA interface so it can double as a simple NAS:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/144-3904771-9295165?...
> It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance.

Not necessarily; for one thing, if the masses of the two stones are not significantly different, the difference in the effects of air resistance would be unmeasurable given the instruments of the day.

For another, the shapes of the stones are important. One with a much greater sectional density, oriented correctly, could fall faster than the other, even if it were lighter.

But that's just nitpicking. If I remember correctly, Galileo used inclined planes because there were only imprecise water clocks available to measure the passage of time. His choice of apparatus was brilliant :)
Eve is a serious game about internet spaceships.
Instagram CEO on Stories: Don’t Call It a Copycat
It's fairly common practice with bleeding-edge vector instructions. The reasoning (assuming it is the case here) is that a theoretically-minor performance regression (the cost of converting 1x AVX512 to 2x AVX2 in microcode) is usually much preferred over a CPU exception when attempting to run a binary with AVX512 instructions on a server. It also means you don't need a $15000 chip to test your AVX512 code.
Thanks for the links. Yes, I would happily give away equity to a cofounder who can manage the tech side of things.

I can scale this thing up a few 100K dollars a year the way I am doing this now. But it is excel sheets and 3 computers side by side so I can see product info, customer info etc side by side. Its just ugly. lol. I need some elegance in my life now.

I have settled the "should I really bring-on a technical co-founder" question in my head and hence the post.
'Official' website here [0].

This looks great, although I do wonder to what degree the automated downloading of dependencies limits off-line work. I'm not sure how widespread this is, but one of my biggest productivity hacks is writing with the wifi turned off (I go for pencil and paper for first drafts if possible, but editing, figures and references all require the computer).

[0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
> GNU's an increasingly irrelevant portion of Unix

Say what? Do you know what GNU means or what it includes? Here's a link so you can learn more:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html
Can you open a socket or write to the file system with WASM ?
TripAdvisor/Trivago - compare the rates there. Mentally apply the loyalty discounts and pick whichever is the cheapest. Also, I may be biased here as I used to work at TripAdvisor but I personally prefer their UI to booking/priceline. Expedia is okay too and I have heard good things about Trivago.
Despite what you learned as a kid, you can get caught in a lie when you tell the truth. Part of the "game" of adversarial court is trying to get as many legally admissible statements from opposing witnesses as possible. Once enough statements have been entered into evidence, lawyers find contradictions - it doesn't matter how small. Humans don't say the exact same thing every time - it's not too hard to create the appearance of a contradiction where none exists - and sometimes prosecutors get it wrong and think they hear a contradiction where none exists. Good defense lawyers keep their clients (innocent or guilty) out of the witness box as much as possible.
Uber fires self-driving car engineer amid legal fight with Google
Transactions in Postgres
Thanks to Google now we know which states really can't spell
NHST ? What's that ?
The more RAM devices have, the more widespread web apps will be. A lot of niches, originally covered only by native apps, lost their luster for native development. Web does it all nowadays. See things like Basecamp, Tidal - their apps are web based and they work just fine on recent devices. By a pure coincidence, those apps have an outstanding quality. So web stack is a thing nowadays.
Hi HN! I noticed a lot of folks are adding these long shadows to different UI elements, so I put together a collection of these long text shadows as a reference! Hope it's helpful and would love to hear your feedback.
I'd love to see something akin to "Weebly for LaTeX". Maybe I'm just too much of a theoretical noob, but I don't quite enjoy feeling like I'm writing code when trying to write english.
Great idea with the speech synthesis! Of course there are many more creative uses to explore. The tracking engine I made for this[0] is flexible, it can essentially track and use every measurable interaction across all connected networks and assign different weights to them. For example, I can also connect the weather, and if it's a nice day in my location, every metric can count for more.

[0] https://songsling.io
The Essential phone will have its own smart assistant
But why not? This is not some complex exploit, just standard JavaScript.

I saw the same attitude after the xcode backdoor. "There is no reason to believe any personal data has been affected", well if apple didn't even knew this thing existed how could they possibly know if it was activly used??

Edit: according to reddit apple just pulled all apps made by these guys. Not a proof of anything but still something to consider
Per Rent-A-Center:

> There are two types of validity challenges under § 2: "One type challenges specifically the validity of the agreement to arbitrate," and "[t]he other challenges the contract as a whole, either on a ground that directly affects the entire agreement (e.g., the agreement was fraudulently induced), or on the ground that the illegality of one of the contract's provisions renders the whole contract invalid." Buckeye, 546 U.S., at 444, 126 S.Ct. 1204. In a line of cases neither party has asked us to overrule, we held that only the first type of challenge is relevant to a court's determination whether the arbitration agreement at issue is enforceable. [...] But that agreements to arbitrate are severable does not mean that they are unassailable. If a party challenges the validity under § 2 of the precise agreement to arbitrate at issue, the federal court must consider the challenge before ordering compliance with that agreement under § 4.

Could one not attack the agreement to arbitrate on the grounds that no binding agreement could ever have been reached in the circumstances? Even severing the arbitration clause from the remaining of the contract, it seems it could be argued that there was no agreement to arbitration, as there was never any intention to enter into an agreement of any kind (I'm assuming the claimant would argue that they knew the EULA was not valid as a contract and thus ignored the terms). This seems especially so as the FAA specifies "[a] written provision in [...] a contract" - there was never any intention to create a contract by at least one of the parties.

Even if the argument does not hold, framing in such a way would require the courts to consider it (the validity of the agreement to arbitrate) rather than it just passing it directly to the arbitrator.

Perhaps that's just a hopeful reading of the case; it just seems absurd to me as an English lawyer (degree, non-practising) that the arbitration clause can be plucked out and enforced when the contract itself is a farce.
You are correct! My apologies = I misremembered how that works >_<

Yes, once you have a promise you have to deal with it as such through the whole chain.
It sounds like something out of the song "In the Year 2525".
In some ways, you're saving yourself from not doing it that one time you find yourself on (very) old hardware that still needs it. Some may laugh, but I'm sure there're more than a few legacy installs out there - just waiting to die because somebody forgot an old trick.
MX Player Pro 1.8.20 Patched Apk (AC3/DTS) Free Download
App of the Month: Go Crazy with Pandora Music
Isn't Overleaf [1] or ShareLaTeX [2] kind of already like that?

[1]: https://www.overleaf.com/

[2]: https://www.sharelatex.com/
That's completely reasonable when it is an employee that isn't in a position where there is the possibility of criminal charges, but when there is, it's important that we give full gravity to the position we are putting the employee in. The lawyers really put it well by describing it as being between “the rock and the whirlpool".

Personally, one of criteria I would use to determine whether or not to take the 5th would depend on the general position of the public towards me. If the public generally thinks I am guilty before I've testified and they are generally taking in evidence and arriving at the conclusion that I'm guilty without truly considering the existing evidence, it'd would be stupid for me to testify.

I don't think there is a soul here that hasn't at least once had experiences where every one of their actions were viewed as having malicious intent by the peanut gallery. Once you experience such injustices firsthand as the accused, you learn empathy for others in similar circumstances quite quickly.
Lithium ion battery recycling techniques [pdf]
You misunderstand what I'm talking about. What dang criticized me for is a correct summary of your position. Let me elaborate:

> "We proposed [...] that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity [...] This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. [...] We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe."
( Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose; Consciousness in the universe; Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2014, Pages 39-78 )

and

> "If gravity plays a role in wave function collapse that will pose serious questions for the Church-Turing hypothesis. It might very well make it impossible for non-Quantum computers to accurately model quantum gravity. Penrose does not argue for "something computationally more powerful than objective collapse" rather, he argues that the physical Church-Turing thesis is false due to quantum gravity. Something he is an expert on, btw."
( manyoso, Hacker News, discussion id 14444443 )

None of these statements, while they are using the language of science, bears any discernable relationship to physical reality in a scientific sense. The postulate that any consciousness-related activity of neurons happens in structural elements like microtubules is a collection of unproven hypotheses divorced from both empirical and theoretical experience. The same goes for this preposterous claim about quantum gravity: there is currently no workable theoretical framework for quantum gravity, but this doesn't stop Penrose from confabulating properties onto the term so it can become a new go-to locus for his ideas on quantum consciousness.

An observer will notice a pattern here: mystical truth claims about a hypothesis with no basis in either experimentation nor theory are being "supported" by hiding their supposed mechanisms of action inside yet-unexplored regions of the map. It's a god of the gaps argument.

Now, you know this, as does Penrose. Both of you are trying to preempt this criticism by professing quantum consciousness is a fundamental part of the laws of nature, and hence it should not be categorized as woo. You are essentially rejecting the accusation of mysticism by asserting that magic is not metaphysical. Which was the observation dang chided (and apparently penalized) me for.

For what it's worth: you decisively won the argument, both by popular opinion and the support of the site's admin. Accept a victory when it presents itself.
I'm starting to wonder whether it wouldn't be a better design to forget about classes for most use cases, instead only use namedtuples and have a bunch of functions defined that take one type of namedtuple in their first argument. You can easily bind this by doing my_applied_func = functools.partial(my_func, my_named_tuple). This design IMO has a few advantages compared to classes:

* __repr__ comes for free.

* converting all members to a list or dict comes for free.

* converting a list or dict TO a namedtuple comes for free.

* more restrictive in what you can do with data structures inside the namedtuple - may lead to a cleaner design where you think about pulling apart the data into multiple tuples at an earlier point in the prototype phase.

* You by design won't make functions into instance methods that depend on multiple data tuples.

* Need to extend a function to deal with different types of tuples? You now don't need to refactor an instance method into a first class function, instead just dispatch and be done.

* Inheritance can be solved with the above method as well. This may actually be more maintainable than class based inheritance, since you see all the logic for a specific function explicitely (or explicitely dispatched) in one place.

The only reason I can think of to still use a class: If you can heavily profit from inheritance or if you need to program against an "interface" like dict- or listlike behavior or comparison operators.
I disagree with the dishonorable mention as you've only considered the naive case which you can build upon to avoid the issues mentioned. Consider a design where everything is AES-256 encrypted in the application and the database just receives an encrypted binary. You can build an in-memory cache for situations where you need to search sensitive information (first name, last name, ssn) by using a tokenizer and using a technology like Erlang term storage. It will be eventually consistent which should be fine for our use case since that type of information does not change that often and the cache recompute can be done asynchronously.

From a security standpoint you don't change the threat model for the application. If someone gets unauthorized access to the server you are already screwed since your application can get access to the plain text data in order to serve requests.

If you threw away that computation for every request I would agree that it is wasteful but we don't need to do that if we rethink the role of the database in our application.
It's an abuse of HN to use it primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of the politics or ideology you favor.

Since we asked you to stop and you didn't, we've banned this account.