skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to use threads for simple I/O cases, not as an optimization per se. For example, I have an image processing library thanks to which I can do a simple image.save(), but since I don't want to sit idle for milliseconds until it returns I have a thread pool run it. Same thing if I have an expensive operation and I want the GUI to keep responding.

Then again, I'll confess that I am not much of a Python user either and multiprocessing may be a sufficient answer.
I am not sure what arguments you're making. I think the point of the article is that it is not easy at some level to just use some new discoveries and then incorporate them into technologies because of the amount of expertise that is required.
Barely even a shell script; you could do it in a one-liner. Let's say you had 16000 images and 16 cores,

$ cat filelist.txt|xargs -n 1000 -P 16 ./myconvertprog

I do "batch" compression like this all the time.
What['s] to prevent billionaire from spending money on non...errr..profit research...

Nothing, of course. But I would rather not rely on the generosity of billionaires to cure the diseases that ravage Africa.
Btw, the interpretation of Socrates and the sacrifice to Asclepius is highly controversial. The interpretation you give is a popular one, but note that it was first offered by Nietzsche. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not a given. To my mind, "death as a cure for life" is more a product of Nietzsche's romanticism than Socrates' views, but I admit that the whole thing is very controversial.

If you're curious, the first page of the following article lists 21 interpretations of that bit from The Phaedo. (Naturally, the author then goes on to offer her own view of the matter. She is an academic, after all.)

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~peter009/debt.pdf
Tesla Motors CEO can’t handle the truth
I don't know if you would strictly call this a philosophy book, but one that is particularly relevant to engineers is Discussion of the Method by Billy Vaughn Koen.
Why Everyone Thinks The Economy Is Headed Into The Toilet Again
Do you have no feelings at all for your fellow man? :(
I always wait for the second/third version before buying.
320 Useless Facts. Which is the Most Intresting One?
I don't really understand what you mean because YourAM does automatically notify via both email and SMS. You can configure notification and reminder as you desire or send it through all available channels for redundancy purposes as you pointed out.

However, there times when some of your contacts might not want to receive any reminders and that is why YourAM provide the option to turn off reminders and notifications.
The real problem is that people are driving in densely populated cities (esp. one person per car).
Leveraging Game Mechanics to Spread Sustainability: Four Rules
This isn't a complete solution, but /r/TrueReddit is pretty good.
Irrational Man is a good introduction to existentialism and he has a very readable overview of philosophy from the Greeks until now.

This is will largely be ignored on this tread, but The Bible is a source of philosophical thought for millions of people. You can get a clear picture of the central theme by reading the book of John.
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters. Which he will be doing because his notion of "profit" is not measured in dollars but in votes. At least the billionaire's motives are transparent. Here in England we are cutting budgets left, right and centre after the last government nearly bankrupted us. The foreign aid budget is ringfenced. The LibCons have come under a lot of flak for this - but they would have if they'd cut it too - it's simple maths at the end of the day.

Remember - the money has to come from somewhere.
Apparently an article about the music industry isn't complete without complaining about pirates.
Do you make yourself to send money to cure diseases that ravage Africa? If it is so moral, than it's worth doing by itself, right?
>I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later" mantra.

I think you misunderstood the mantra. It really is "users first, flip it later". Let the next sap deal with it.

We've seen that play out time, and time, and time again. They got their payout, hang around for a while, and then split off.
The ongoing death of the family farm is a complex and challenging process. First, few other walks of life saw technology improve productivity by an order of magnitude or more in the space of a generation. During one stretch of personally observable time, between the time I was 3 and the time I was 13, the cost of a particular tractor went from 1300 bushels of wheat to 6500 bushels of wheat.

Farm subsidies have had interesting impacts on not only how farms have run, but shifts of political power and in fact the structure of that society.

And as another commentor says, other structures of ownership (corporations, LLC, trusts) can protect the family's ownership.

In any practical sense, inheritance tax doesn't really hasten the death of the family farm at all.
Sarah Palin Has Another Katie Couric Moment On Fox News
It depends if you want to be knowledgeable "about" philosophy and knowledge or if you want to apply it to you life.

* K.Popper (in both cases;): _Open society and its ennemies_ http://www.archive.org/stream/opensocietyandit033120mbp#page...

for "Ars Vitae" (applicable to one's life)

* Plato: _Gorgias_

* Marc Aurélius: _Meditations_

* Friedrich Nietzsche: _Beyond good & evil_

I agree with others on Hume, Russell, Husserl.
Another great thinker while he does not pretend to be a philosopher is Dan Sperber, I think of 2 books

* Dan Sperber (with Deirdre Wilson) _Relevance. Communication and Cognition_ (Blackwell, 1986)

* Sperber, Dan (1996) Explaining culture: _A naturalistic approach._ (Oxford: Blackwell)

Finally philosophical literature:
* Doistoievski: _The Brothers Karamazov_ (question of God is asked)
It only picks up around the middle of the book.
she is a one woman comedy show
You can't access the science of others unless you're part of the game. It is only the molecular biologist who is publishing his own papers, getting invited to the conferences, having the discrete conversations with other fellow molecular biologists, who can capture the work of others.

The problems of access to journals are real. My PhD supervisor and other researchers I knew were making a real effort to work around them by publishing a lot of papers on public online "e-print journals" like arxiv.org

The problems of access to conferences on the other hand, I never saw. If fact, at every conference I went to while I was doing my PhD, there was always a handful of uninvited people who tagged along. Often they were nuts who believed they were close to a proof of something actually improvable and wanted to find a professor to show their work to. Occasionally they were just highly motivated amateur mathematicians. Either way, they were always at least tolerated from what I saw.
i read some of this book (analytic combinatorics). it's quite nice in that if you can write down something akin to a grammar that constructs objects you want to count, it provides a set of rewrite rules to actually count them. unfortunately it doesn't provide a way to count anything more complex recursively than a tree that i could see.

for understanding the tree results, the key thing to understand appears to be lagrange's inversion theorem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_inversion_theorem
(i think it's also in an appendix in the book)

an interesting connection between probability/ai and this: the probability generating function is a normalized form of these generating functions that allows you to specify a probability distribution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_generating_function

in particular, you can use this to work out the average size of a tree picked at random :-)
Has Facebook reached a tipping point?
n.b. Works in the United States too (my brother used to be the Spanish-speaking constituent services guy for a Republican congressman).
Liberal Arts or Big University
I want to become a person earning money in the field of computer by working in Google, Yahoo, Apple or Microsoft after 4 years. So, should I go for small computer major at Liberal Arts or Computer Engineering at Big University.
What exactly are you looking for, and on which development platform?
"The point of contention here is that you think cheating will always catch up to you."

so taking away grades will get rid of cheating? People that have the cheating mindset will just find some other way to shortcut success.

"I'm saying that the world is not so liquid and ideal. Someone cheating, assuming they do it right (and don't over do it), will probably get more than they deserve (in an idea world) before they die, if they did everything 100% by the book. Simple karmic forces (the cause-effect force) dictate that if you cheat constantly, you will increase your chances of being caught and punished. However people don't live forever, so it's highly possible they will get more than they deserve in their lifetime if they cheat."

This is true, but there is usually more effort (or just as much) with cheating than doing it right. It's also not a long-term solution. As an example, I go to the blackhatseo forum from time to time. The people there do anything they possibly can to cheat people out of money and game as many systems as they can. What I've noticed is that most people get caught (and kicked out of wherever they were trying to make money) or their reputation gets tarnished every couple of months and they need to start over.

If they just put that same effort into a legitimate business, they could slowly build a client base over time and if it's successful (which has just as much of a chance as the illegitimate methods), they won't have to hide or move every few months.

Cheaters, like these people are only focusing on short-term gains..which is foolish. Will they get ahead or make money? To some degree, yes, but it will almost always catch up with them.

"I think if you look at it from afar, you may not notice the inequity caused by cheating. I really can't really say how much cheating impacts society, but I definitely disagree with you on your claim that cheating is always (or at least to a point of insignificancy) caught/punished accordingly."

It seems like this is a personal issue for you. Is there someone ahead of you at work that you feel shouldn't be there because they cheated?

I'm looking at it closely, and I still really don't see all of these cheaters you are talking about. Do you have some examples?
I can definitely see it working in "help the little guy" situations, but I'm much less skeptical that people will open their wallets when the little guy is backed by a mega-corporation.
On the plus side, I used something similar to use my caching store back when it was MemcachedDB, and switching to Redis required a one-line change in a config file rather than refactoring. (Learn from my mistake, everyone: skip MemcachedDB, go straight to Redis, collect $200.)
The above books are great, but unless you are really into philosophy I don't think you'd gain much from reading primary sources. (With the exception of Hume, he's brief and brilliant.)
I think someone casually interested in philosophy would be better off reading articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu); and if a subject is particularly interesting then they can always go read some related primary sources.

If you do start reading primary sources, particularly the early modern philosophers, I recommend visiting www.earlymoderntexts.com. Jonathan Bennett has done a great job "translating" the works of Hume, Kant, Locke, Berkley, etc. from old-English (or German, French...) into modern-English so that their philosophical arguments can be understood without being obfuscated by language quirks.
It's solely, not soley. At least spell-check word in bold that lie in the first sentence of your website.
This reminds me of two other well-established area where government spending was assumed to the be the only way, but is/was preventing progress. Namely, those are aid to Africa, and NASA.

In both cases, public monies realigned the efforts of those associated to seek and maintain the public monies first, which are not necessarily related to progress whatsoever. That is, building a army of bureaucrats for any space launch, in the case of NASA, and pulling would-be African entrepreneurs away from productive efforts and toward positions in the bureaucracies best-positioned to receive and distribute the aid within Africa.

If African aid money can devastate Africa by pulling the best and brightest into unproductive bureaucratic positions, then it's certainly plausible that research aid can pull the best and brightest away from the most productive pursuits and toward whatever the distributors of public money happen to demand, productive or not.
Hate to be the Monday morning quarterback but hey, it's Saturday morning and I'm stuck in a Starbucks in Benicia. So, this is a nice walk through the optimization process but it is a fundamentally unscalable system. When the workload triples next year, does it make sense to scale up the hardware? (No)

This system doesn't scale out without ad-hoc partitioning. I think Etsy's approach here should have been informed by the New York Times' project a few years ago. They converted 4 TB of scanned tiffs (their article archive) into PDFs on a hadoop cluster running on ec2 and s3. Parallelizing the process across hardware nodes is the scale free way to do this, exactly what hadoop was intended for.

All that said, I know there are smart folks at Etsy. I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt; there may be a good reason not to go that route but this write up didn't make that clear.
> Reading a non-fiction book is an investment of time and energy.

No doubt.

> 25 pages in to the book and the author didn't even begin to address the point of the book

It's biographical philosophy. 25 pages of setting the stage for the author's philosophical epiphany in the midst of a pivotal motorcycle trip in his life is addressing the point of the book.

I think perhaps you weren't expecting it to be a biographical book. Perhaps when you give it another go, you should take a quick look at the afterword (regarding the author's son) to get a better grasp of the author's perspective.
A sidenote, but I like Bernard Williams' version of this idea even better than the original. It's the first sentence of his survey article "The Legacy of Greek Philosophy":

The legacy of Greece to Western Philosophy is Western Philosophy.
PyPy and Jython may lag behind, but that's not a huge problem. I would love to use dict comprehensions and {} sets like I can in CPython 2.7, but I know I can't always deploy against the latest version. And, more than that, I know I can work around those features. The code may look uglier, but it's usually as fast as it would be with the newest features.

And you are right - CPython is the canonical implementation of the language. The fact we can use a reference implementation in production environments is great.

You probably wouldn't be able to write something like Cassandra in Python 2.7 and expect it to run unmodified under Jython or IronPython, but you could write it in Python 2.5 and run it under both 2.7 CPython (with the expected multi-core annoyances) or under current Jython.

And you can't have painless C modules in Java either.
And that's (part of the reason) why we have degrees - to teach people how to understand research so they can turn it into reality. Yes - it's not easy and yes, it might be easier if someone has already done it - but a lot of the time that isn't true (or they aren't willing to share how they've done it with you).

Obviously, in an optimal world, everyone would have equal access to all such knowledge - but there will always be barriers on both sides.
I respectfully disagree. In many cases, reading secondary sources is pointless without also reading the originals. (It's a bit like reading a review of a meal, rather than eating any of it.)

That said, the quality of secondary works varies a lot. Some things, like Mackie's Problems from Locke, are now primary sources in their own right, albeit in a secondary way.
Redis API access logger
Sorry, I'm not Mike Rohde. I kept the story submission the same as his post title on his blog and didn't realize that it would be confusing considering my username here is similar to this guy's name.

Personally, my understanding is that these in-app purchases require you to enter your iTunes username/password. Is that not correct? His 7 year old didn't have the username/password and the app purchases went through without authorization.
Yikes. There are a lot of people asking a lot of questions concerning the future of Tesla. Although I love seeing the technology making an entrance into the marketplace, the direction of the company has a lot of people concerned, myself included.
Those of us who lived through the first .com boom of the 90s have seen this too many times to count ;)
http://bit.ly/bbzeYP

and

http://bit.ly/bB1sVG

You could use those.
Ok, but your $5 aren't going to make the difference, and are a donation, rather than a payment for some particular service, so the optimal individual strategy is to free ride, no? At that point, why donate to Conde Naste rather than some charity.

I'm sure someone like Hernando de Soto has the sort of charity that works on things like political infrustracture.

They say:

"The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest."

Sorry, but I'm not picking up Conde's slack without anything in return.
As the maintainer of multiprocessing, I can say I've never really been bothered by the GIL. I know about it - I know that if I have CPU bound tasks, I'm going to better off using processes, ergo, multiprocessing. I spin up some processes, pop in a queue and I'm off the the races.

That said - the majority of my code uses plain old python threads. Web load testing tools, subprocess execution, etc, etc - anything with I/O works fine for me contained in threads and since thats where I spend most of my time (in I/O) they work fine for me.

In my last "multiprocessing heavy" chunk of code, I wasn't using it for local processes and work-sharing. I was using it to spread work over a network of hosts using managers and the other tools within it.

The one gotcha with jumping in between the two is serialization. When you deal with multiprocessing, your objects which are passed in between the pools/queues/processes much be pickle-able - this means for tasks which contain lots of unpickle-able, shared state multiprocessing is not a good answer.

Essentially, having free threading in cPython would mean that you could have your cake (concurrency on multiple cores) and eat it (without incurring serialization, mutable shared state) too.
I wouldn't call Zen overrated, at least insofar as it's a relatively easy read which makes some good points.

Those points, IMO, are not the author's main philosophical contention, but his presentation of philosophical introspection intertwined with everyday life. Would that more Americans realized they could contemplate metaphysics even while going about their everyday lives.
In the case of NASA at least, I think things are a little more nuanced.

I don't believe we would have made it to the moon if only private enterprise had been involved, nor sent probes to the planets and the outer edges of the solar system. Those are very worthwhile accomplishments.

But, yes, I do believe NASA's time is coming to an end. We do seem to be reaching a point where private concerns are ready to push space exploration to the next level, and that's very exciting!

I think in general the way we fund things shouldn't necessarily be an either/or question. I can think of other examples where something needed to be publicly funded up to a certain point in its development, and then equally needed to be wrestled away from a public-funding model so that private businesses to keep it moving forward.
Oh, I agree with you! But I think we both know that while we all end up growing thick skins (or quitting) it can still get under your nails and make you sad sometimes.

Especially when you've been at it awhile. Guido must have skin like a bloody rhinoceros.
Yes, this is why I gave a long caveat, and tried to picked only the most accessible primary sources. If there's some work in particular in the list that you think is inappropriate, I could try to defend it.

I think that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very mixed. Often (not always) the articles spend a lot of time making distinctions among many views, without adequately explaining any of them at an introductory level, and at the expense of any sort of broad view of the issues. So like most philosophy reading it's most useful if you're already in a philosophy course or something like that.
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters. Which he will be doing because his notion of "profit" is not measured in dollars but in votes.

In other words, the politician invests taxes where "we" want them to. So the proper question is not whether some politician wants to help poor nations, but whether we want to help them.

And that's quite a fair question, which is of a much higher quality than the question whether some individual (billionaire) wants to help them.

(After all, taxes are our money and politicians are "just" managing it for us.)
The trick to writing a good interpreter is not in the writing of it; it's in the part wherein you manage to completely avoid making any decisions you might regret in 10 years.
Being in Africa Makes You Untrustworthy
That's a really general question, so here's a general answer: many small liberal arts colleges don't have significant offerings in computer science/engineering, so being a "small computer major" won't even be an option.

Seriously, though: talk to some college counselors at your high school, and discuss your aspirations. They can look at your transcript and give you some suggestions.
What's the use case at work that's making it unworkable - just curious.
I've had the same experience at CS conferences, as one of the tolerated amateurs myself. Most of my idols in the field turned out to be pretty approachable.
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters.

Well, theoretically with a democratic government, the decision to do things for the public good comes ultimately from the "will of the people" rather than the largess of billionaire. Now whether it actually works out that way is another question.

Still, American publicly funded research has produced a huge number of public benefits while involving a rather small percentage of public expenditure.
Eeesh. You can't say the Internet won't tell you when you're wrong. My ignorance of SQL really shows.

While I still think that post has some valid points and I stand by the idea of benchmarking DBs around hitting a webserver that's actually doing something, the numbers for PostgreSQL are completely wrong. With connection pooling I see > 1500 req/s. I couldn't find out how to setup connection pooling for MySQL so I'm still looking into that (there is an advantage to being concurrent by default but I suppose that's the bias of the older dbs). Also it's seems my CouchDB example might be flawed in that the connections (single HttpClient doing all the work, not a multithreaded one) are the bottleneck there as well. I'm curious to see how that plays out.

Anyways I admit my mistake. Thanks HN for the schooling :D
If everyone knows how to conduct scientific research, they will be crowding out other fields such as musics, cooking, fine arts, and more. It's a tradeoff for giving everyone equal access to such knowledge.

It's like saying that everyone should be a programmer, but people waste time trying to learn programs when they can hire a programmer to make a program for them. Then these people will do things that's worth their time such as making musics or cooking food.
Planet killer