skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sometimes feel like I'm an alien on this planet. I can't imagine how "customers buy benefits, not features" could possibly work.

What I mean is this - I'm not going to buy a product that I don't understand, period. Be it a piece of software (from kitten photo apps to CAD software) or an appliance, I only buy (and ever imagine buying) things for which I at least clearly understand what inputs and outputs are. I can use this software to upload JPGs to friends. I put dirty dishes in this appliance, add some consumables, and clean dishes pop out. Those are "features", not "benefits".

On the other hand, when I see people selling on "benefits", I immediately assume they're dishonest and steer away. The listed benefits usually are, at best, a serious abuse of some cherry-picked words, and at worst outright lies. It's one of the strongest negative signals for me when evaluating companies (especially when I don't have third-party information on their actual products).

Do most people really live their lives looking for something to buy that will make their lives "connected", or their company "full of streamlined cloud synergy" or something?
I'm fond of felt-tip pens.

I used Liquid Expresso pens back when I was a bike messenger. Every secretary would try to steal them, and often beg me to leave one for them.
I've never had issues with writing. I've doodled with one occasionally, and have run into issues then. Checking it now, it seems fine at a 45d angle. It does require more pressure at smaller angles, but my normal writing pressure feels fine. I normally write at a 70d angle for reference.

I didn't know Copic made pens. I've heard really good things about their markers so I'll have to try one out.
The interesting thing is that he thanks PayPal for their help in this case.
LuaJIT is one of the faster JIT VMs in existence.

Lighttpd and nginx both started to get mind-share in the english speaking world at about the same time (nginx was written by native russian speakers IIRC).

Lighttpd was faster than apache for the same reason that nginx was, a more modern, non-blocking design.

I don't think that lighttpd is written in lua though. It probably supports lua scripting, though I haven't used that feature of it.
Tiramisu: A touch screen tree editor
The crime explanation doesn't make that much sense for Chicago, which is geographically quite large and remains one of the most segregated in the country (due in part to the legacy of redlining, which continued into the 1970s).

Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and purposes might as well be different cities.

The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.
Yes.

The last time Linode got hacked while I was still a customer, I learned about it on HN from a third party before Linode even publicly acknowledged the incident. I decided enough was enough, and switched to a less cost-effective provider with a better security track record.
I'm one of the authors of the paper they compare against (Partitioned Elias-Fano), and since I saw the StrangeLoop talk I've been curious to see a more detailed description of the index, so I was very eager to read the paper as soon as it came out.

I think it's an interesting approach, but I have a few questions about its practical applicability.

For one, space utilization seems to be a serious issue: bits per posting are more than double than the Elias-Fano indexes in their experiments, and furthermore, they claim that they used the Java Partitioned Elias-Fano implementation of MG4J, but MG4J does not have one! It only has an Elias-Fano index; since they get the same space from PEF and MG4J, this means that either they are using a random ordering of the document identifiers (otherwise they'd get another 2x improvement from PEF with proper docid ordering) or they're misusing the PEF code.

Also, they claim to use 5 corpora, but they're actually 5 slices of the same corpus (Gov2), sharded by document size classes, so both the collection sizes and document sizes vary and it's not easy to correlate them with the observed performance characteristics. A trend shows up anyway, that as the collection size grows the performance difference between BitFunnel and EF-based indexes gets thinner, which suggests that on very large collections they might even cross. This is not surprising, as BitFunnel query execution is linear in the collection size, while inverted indexes have empirical performance closer to the number of returned results. Also, I could not find in the paper the exact definition of "false positive rate": is the denominator the number of results, or the number of documents in the collection?

The experiments are on a 4-core desktop-class machine; would the results hold up on, say, a recent 28-core Xeon processor, or the memory throughput would become the bottleneck given that scanning the Bloom filters requires to go through a large fraction of the data?

I got the impression that a good use case for BitFunnel is not to replace inverted indexes altogether, but just for the "fresh" part of a large index (say, newly crawled documents). In that case we have fast insertion of new documents, and a small collection (where the performance gap with inverted indexes seems to be high). However, there does not seem to be an efficient way to update existing documents (add/remove terms), because changing the term set could change the document size shard.
Yeah I think this is being built with it:

https://medium.com/@the0cean/announcing-the-0cean-85ae78e9bc...
I'm fairly certain the lunar landing required perhaps not perfection but pretty damn close planning.

Modern heresy is applying anecdotal solutions to situations as learnings for all problems.
Ask HN: What domain do you use for your docs site?
NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly Explains How the ISS Is Like Harris County Jail
This. Build monolith or SOA then shard off the pieces that are bogging down the application, then node them out.
Here in the Boston area, Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville now have lower population and more units of housing than they did before WWII. The average was four residents per housing unit and now it is only two. This is partly why there is never enough housing no matter how much you build: the more there is available, the more people will want to have.
> Do you mean that it's #P and not a priori NP? Counting problems can sometimes be in NP by deciding whether the count is the correct one (with the right encoding, function problems can be thought of as a subset of decision problems). It is unlikely that a #P-complete problem

Essentially, #P is the class of problems where you compute the number of accepting runs for some problem in NP, so yes, #P and NP are closely related.
You can turn a counting problem into a decision problem by a suitable encoding, but that turns it into a different problem (and the complexity depends on the encoding). The more natural fit for a class of decision problems corresponding to #P would be PP, the class of problems where the majority of runs on a probabilistic TM accepts, which contains NP.

> In another comment you mention that finding a solution to n-queens is not NP because it's not a decision problem. I'm confused because I thought the solution would be the polynomial certificate to the problem "an nxn board can be filled with n mutually non-threatened queens."

The point is that deciding whether there is a solution is not NP-hard (it is in NP though, precisely by your argument that a solution is the polynomial certificate that can be verified in polynomial time). Indeed, existence of a solution can be decided in constant time (and is thus in P), since there are solutions whenever n is neither 2 nor 3. Furthermore, for any given n (except 2 and 3), a solution can be constructed explicitly in linear time (for a unary encoding of n). Nevertheless, counting solutions is hard.
Thanks for your insight on this. Yes, I understand there are a lot of risks in 3D printing and lots of people chasing after unicorns. Yet, within certain constraints the technology is very useful. I'd say this might be particularly true of metal 3D printing, where companies like SpaceX are manufacturing complex parts that can't be made in any other way.

I have a feeling that, at scale, 3D printing will become just like CNC machining. Anyone can buy a cheap CNC machine on eBay, yet, from that to using them for non-trivial manufacturing and prototyping work it is a whole other matter.

Today you can buy 3D printers for as little as $100. I bet most of those sit around collecting dust after someone printed a rook, Darth Vader's head, the Eiffel Tower and a few models they downloaded here and there. In other words, they end-up exactly where drones do after the initial love affair.

It should come as no surprise that the majority of actual consistent usage is in professional and manufacturing applications. Be it research in prosthetic limbs, prototyping or limited run specialized parts.

I believe these sectors will continue to grow and require constant improvements in technology. My guess is this is where opportunities lie, not with the now very tired idea of kids making their own toys at home you see in nearly every single Kickstarter campaign.
Having lived in viewing distance of two nuclear power plants in germany, I can tell you I vastly prefer wind turbines. Coal power plants are not exactly beautiful either. Germany is a densely populated country, there's practically no space where you can build anything without disturbing someone. I'm afraid we'll have to disturb someone if we want electricity.
It's 100 years this November since a well-known fix to this balance was initiated. Anyone wants to repeat it?
Yes, I meant the climate formations moving from the north pole, and Himalayas affecting the amount of precipitation reaching North Africa. Can't find that larticular animation at the moment though.
I guess I can imagine subsidized Uber and other services of its ilk making it more practical to get a ride back and forth from the city for various events. But it's hard to see it making any difference in my day to day exurban life. I have a car and that's what I'm going to use on a typical (or even not so typical) day.
This is straight from the cowboy coder's mouth. This is Philistinism, plain and simple.

> "...deliver something, anything...", no need to make it good, "teams make things better," anyway.

No, no, and no. If you want to scale a team you have to deliver quality code.

The cowboy coder spews out code, screams "see it works!", and then moves on to produce more diarrhea for "the team" behind him to clean up, "make better"...

When one realizes they do not yet have a skill (such as producing quality code), it is tempting to scream "quality/perfection is a heresy" because this is much, much easier to say than the labor it takes to develop the skill.

> It’s hard to see more than a week out because anything that takes more than a week to build involves R&D.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. MOST of what we do as practitioners (for those that have been doing it for at least some time) is NOT novel. Estimation is a skill. Estimates can be extremely accurate for those of us that have developed that skill.

It is much easier to say "estimation is worthless" when it is a skill that you have not yet developed. Because it is only developed through (often frustrating) practice.

Record the time it takes to do your work. Notice the patterns of problems that you face and how often they repeat themselves.

---

Perfection per se has its hazards but in no way should that truth get us off the hook from developing ourselves and doing our work well.

This post is nothing but dangerous to the nascent programmer-practitioner as it attempts to lull them away from what is possible and the work it takes to get there.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
-- Vince Lombardi
most companies just use

https://docs.companyname.com

But then you have companies like Slack, which picked a whole new top level domain.

https://get.slack.help/

What's the benefit of going with the .help domain?
"And here's why it doesn't matter for most of the US: energy companies are regulated to make a percentage of the money they spend."

This is also found in the ACA (Obamacare) in the form of a minimum medical loss ratio. Insurers must spend 80% of what they take in from premiums on direct medical care and their profit is capped at 3% of premiums. It disincentivizes cost reductions as 3% of $5 billion is a lot more than 3% of $1 billion.
The way I remember it, there was a guy called Hixie something that was in charge of standards implementation at Mozilla and made a terrific job at that. But then he got hired by Opera and saw that there was no point in competing with Gecko and so he started a FUD campaign called "XHTML considered harmful" to lower market standards. He bluffed you into believing that namespaces are far too complicated for the human mind to comprehend, when in reality XHTML hadn't caught on because the CMS systems were not up to date. He did a terrific job at that, so he got hired by Google to publish a competing specification that was actually based on the way that Internet Explorer 6 parses HTML4. He did at terrific job at that, so we are finally back where we started, with a standard that lives forever while IE6 is long gone, and Goggle can scavenge the specifications from this forgotten future for ideas they can present as original. Even Mozilla played along with the HTML5 scheme, it was like watching a nuclear superpower go down in a fist fight. How can you not call that politics?
This is the closest thing I'm aware of, but I'm not educated in this field:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22930552-600-plastic-...

The "grass" generates electricity when it waves back and forth in the wind.
My bad!

RE: Christian anarchists / Tolstoy

I read Maxim Gorky's My Universities recently - a novel about his coming-of-age in late 19th century Russia. The reigning philosophy that rears its head again and again is Tolstoyan, that Gorky tries to press his Marxism against. Interesting cultural battle!
I grew up in a middle class suburb on the edge of the Phoenix sprawl. Your comment is a little ... unreasonable? How much time have you spent in either suburbs or slums? Or do you usually just fly over them?
The idea of technical podcasts intrigues me.

But, I just clicked to see the content of 'Talk Python' podcasts, and it seems that a lot of it is meta-talk... smart people talking about the fact that they're going to teach someone, _not_ teaching the postcast-listener stuff (besides perhaps the knowledge that some X and Y module exists?).

I think I'm just asking too much here... because creating instructional content takes _time_... to organize, think about, record, review, etc. Hm, maybe instead of complaining, I'll have a go at it...
Prediction: evolution will solve what humans are incapable of. That means species of fish evolving that specializes in eating plastic. Kinda makes sense. While plastic isn't bio-degradeable in the normal sense, perhaps the digestive system of a specialized fish will succeed. After all there is an abundance.
> What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If ISPs were not dominated by federal-government-originated monopolies, then our traffic would have a variety of routes available to it, found by a breadth first search of ISP switches and DNS services, with tolls (effectively) charged at each step of the cheapest path. When possible, market forces are always a better solution than government force.
If an ISP in Hawaii has no local servers for [big advertising-data company 1] and the cheapest route for that data is more expensive than [company 2 with Hawaii server], it should be legal for the ISP to negotiate directly with to subsidize the cost of using [domain 1] for its end consumers.

What is bad for the end customer is this federal/private monopoly control of ISPs. If cities, regional government entities, and private backbone viaducts controlled ISPs we wouldn't need net neutrality legislation and more importantly the president would have less legal clubs with which to beat ISPs who refuse any government demands.
Net neutrality is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The root problem is these large private monopolies that are under the thumb of, and also lobby federal officials.

> It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

This is not the closest analogy. One possible analogy is like a gas station defraying the cost of the toll road, in exchange for the right to be built on prime land.
Another closer analogy would be like the toll booth on the road charging you extra if you are coming from the bank driving a branded, armored cash truck, which has a quantitatively, provably large value derived from getting from point A to point B. Is this behavior morally ok? I think the answer has to be yes otherwise how can we justify any level of regressive taxation for public services? Indeed how could people trade effectively without taking into account the other parties' interest?

Not sure which analogy is closer to your intent, but to reason honestly by analogy we should get as close as possible to the same situation.
Works for me with uMatrix. My default setting blocks all third-party JS, but lets first-party JS through. The page renders correctly for me as far as I can tell.
I’ve got both and they’re both excellent workhorses. I use Lamy mostly with Twsbi as alternatives for different inks.

Paper is a bigger issue with fountain pens. Avoid Moleskine, choose Rhodia.
Your point about nuclear is interesting; do you know an approximate magnitude disadvantage of varying nuclear plant output?

Presumably it's a concern of cool-down thermal stresses, or perhaps flux tilting/uneven fuel burnout. Or is it something else entirely?
You'd think that with ever-increasing evidence of the havoc that climate change is having on our coastal cities, we'd be better off actively discouraging more people moving to the coasts and investing in other places.
There are some similarities, but ConvNets really remind me of LeCun's airplane vs bird analogy. There are similarities such as learning very similar intermediate representations (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5288363/), but they are also very clearly not doing the exact same thing that a human is. It's a technological emulation, and that's good enough for me.
Now you are talking Florida home owners vs boat live-aboards.
Yes, the hassle element is definitely there. The printers that simplify or eliminate some of these issues are not cheap at all.

I think there's a huge distinction between the occasional consumer-level user of this technology and professional users.

The first market isn't much different from the drone market. Lot's of cheap crap printers that end-up on shelves after 30 days or less. The second market is one that can support continuing growth and innovation. And the one that has a real need and real problems to be solved.
Thinking Books podcast
> It also doesn't sent data to a privacy abusing company like google.

Actually the data is sent to Google.
Downvote away. I'm more interested in learning than I am in internet points. And thank you for your comment explaining your downvote.
Obviously, when you're selling proprietary information. A service should have no right to enforce reinterpretation of the bits received any more than you have a right to enforce how people are to interpret the semantic content of your posts. (And in fact, I could easily go around selling my reinterpretation, and that only becomes a problem once you're arguing damages.)
Why would you have data loss? Why would crashes be worse than when Postgres is not run in a Docker container?

In our project we ran a master/slave Postgres setup and hourly backups. I don't fully remember the details, but as far as I know that's as safe as you can get regardless of Docker.
I started to write something a bit like this a while ago for SQLite and C++, https://github.com/Gloopio/SQLighter we also have a more complete/full featured version that we use internally, although I was not sure if there are enough people that would want it - for it to be turned into an open source project.
John Steve Steeve Jans Basketball Training Camp
Fung's theory prescribes exactly what you did. Eat unprocessed foods, don't eat too much, don't snack all the time, skip breakfast, fast 24-36 hours every now and then. Whether or not you get fat is largely determined by insulin levels and homeostasis. Insulin level is elevated in obese people due to insulin resistance. Fasting and not snacking (and skipping breakfast) help reset insulin "thermostat" to within normal range and maintain it through relatively minor lifestyle adjustments.
[[pro tip- a lot of startup companies actually do not do anything]]
Not sure if it's relevant question here but here I go: I was driving from LA towards Joshua Tree National Park and I saw so many wind turbines which were not operating even though there was plenty of wind blowing and the adjacent wind turbines were running. Is there any reason they were not operating? Can't be maintenance problem as I saw so many not running.
What a ridiculous statement. Middle class suburbs are equivalent to inner city slums? You must have a very strange concept of what the suburban middle class is.
If you're like me, nothing. I need to sit down and find ways to break something to understand how it works.

What I do find useful is listening to books on practice or management. Something like The Pragmatic Programmer, The Practice of Programming, and Clean Code. These are high on substance but (relatively) low on examples, so I feel I can still benefit from their insights without having to be in front of a screen.
One tool to test four different image recognition libraries
+1 to the Lamy 2000. It’s a glorious timeless classic. It’s like a Porsche, useable as an everyday workhorse.
The question you need to answer is can you sustain this for the remainder of your lifespan.
>  the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website

> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.

I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.

These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.
Marketing is hard. Writing compelling advertising copy is hard. Figuring out what people want and need to know about your product is hard.

Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the difference.

Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people like them.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
I want to see this guy review the Tarsnap website. For all that some people don't like my web design, I'd like to think that it's very easy to figure out what Tarsnap is.