skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While standardization and support for [threaded] APIs has come a long way, their use is still predominantly restricted to system programmers as opposed to application programmers. One of the reasons for this is that APIs such as Pthreads are considered to be low-level primitives. Conventional wisdom indicates that a large class of applications can be efficiently supported by higher level constructs (or directives) which rid the programmer of the mechanics of manipulating threads. Such directive-based languages have existed for a long time, but only recently have standardization efforts succeeded in the form of OpenMP. OpenMP is an API that can be used with FORTRAN, C, and C++ for programming shared address space machines. OpenMP directives provide support for concurrency, synchronization, and data handling while obviating the need for explicitly setting up mutexes, condition variables, data scope, and initialization.

From Introduction to Parallel Computing

OpenMP: http://www.openmp.org/
I don't have any proof, I guess you'll have to take my word for it :)

I can tell you my birthday, but will that really help? If you look at my comment above, you'll see that I don't really like giving my age out. I did it this one time just because I wanted some of my followers to know (I wasn't expecting it to be on Hacker News). There is no way for me to show you my age other than you meeting me in person, but hopefully you can judge by the way I talk.
It's interesting how people come out of the woodwork with their personal theories on AGI. Do you/ we even really know how general intelligence works, or even how it emerged i.e. incrementally, or in a dramatic mutation more recently? Last I checked there wasn't a scientific consensus on either topic. To then come out headstrong and say "AGI will be like X" always makes these AGI conversations a tad farcical.
I didn't mean it as a normative statement, just one about the technology required -- I share you concerns.
Her weight loss and pain looked like cancer. But it wasn't.
The mismeasure of ape social cognition
If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass.

Tons of decisions mozilla makes are taken dispite generally negative outside feedback, usually with a vauge convoluted justification with some metric.

Its ok to do what you think is best and right, but if you want an open participation from the outside, its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does). The entire conversation process around mozilla products is ridiculously straight jacketed, and unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored, or have your points moderated out of existence. A good example of this tendancy is the conversation surrounding the proposal to track visited urls[1], you either accept that differential privacy is information theoretically secure (it isnt), and you accept that mozilla should have this information (metrics are an unqualified good), or your posts will be removed. Nobody is enthusiastic about contributing to a project that ignores what they care about, even if the people ignoring you think its for the greater good.

It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x (including values of X which are in direct opposition to an open, free internet), while ignoring the strengths that firefox has and why people are actually choosing to use it over chrome.

As you say, it is 100% hopeless to try to be a better chrome than chrome is, Google outresources you 1000 to 1. I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/8... feedback here is virtually 100% negative, but I gaurentee this change is going in anyways.
I started it from scratch. I mainly reference a book about the implementations of operating systems.

I initialize a basic GDT in the bootloader because it is essential. Without it, you cannot run the OS in long mode, which will unlock the capabilities of a 64 bit system.
Companies with fake back-stories are an ongoing problem on Wikipedia. There were big headaches with the articles for Skyy (Vodka) and Hollister (surfwear for people who don't surf).

Skyy was completely outsourced. Originally, the alcohol came from Midwest Grain Products in Pekin, Illinois, which also sold ethanol to refineries. It was shipped by tank car to the railroad sidings of Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose. Frank-Lin is an outsourcing firm and distributor for booze products. They do some additional distillation to clean up the alcohol, add de-ionized water and flavoring, and bottle. Frank-Lin makes about 2,000 different brands with a huge variety of names. "Whether starting from a prepared prototype or simply a verbal 'concept', Frank-Lin can innovatively create any distilled spirit and coordinate its effective production."[1] Skyy, the company, was purely a marketing operation. Skyy management eventually exited by selling out to Campari, which has their own production plants.

The Wikipedia article for Skyy was originally a puff piece copied from Skyy marketing materials. That was flagged as an ad, and Wikipedia editors started digging into how Skyy really worked. This resulted in frantic efforts by Skyy promoters to change the article back into a puff piece. Didn't work.

Hollister's origin story is completely fake. So were their Robb Havassy surfboards (used for decoration, not surfing), which got them in trouble. Hollister's first store was in a mall in Columbus, Ohio.

[1] http://www.frank-lin.com/production.html
Ask HN: Experience Using the Scaled Agile Framework?
Please share if you have come across an organisation using the Scaled Agile Framework. Both positive and negative experiences are welcome!

Here is a description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Agile_Framework
It's funny, I agree 100% on being totally uninterested in those topics (i.e. small talk), yet I think I'm on the other side of the spectrum -- an empath.

I don't care about your child or your day, but if something's bothering you, I'll most probably notice it and.. empathise with it.
Because it correlates with good health? People who feel bad after consuming coffee because of health issues tend to avoid consuming it (either consciously or unconsciously).
I was shooting with a d800 200mm lens, no filter. There is no visible sensor damage, both when examining images and the sensor itself. I have to check out the lens. I left it on the sun for a good 20 minutes in live view but there doesn't seem to be any damage. Thoughts?
Yes. I found this to be true in general, and not just with books but also film, music and even programming languages.
And again, if you want to talk about the constitution I'm all for it. But just don't do that in the context of "you know, maybe this guy is innocent". That's silly and counterproductive.

The practical thing happening here is that the prosecution almost certainly could build a case on the evidence they have, but in practice they don't have to because the judge is willing to hold the guy in jail on procedural grounds.

Again, I'm saying there is a good argument that this was a bad decision and that the All Writs Act shouldn't be construed to allow this. But that's an academic point. In the real world, chances are very near zero that there is any "injustice" going on in this particular case.
May I have one minute of your time?
I think that analysis only applies in standardized commodity markets where you get where you pay for. If someone is willing to pay X for Y shares of a stock and they got sold something else, what information does that convey? Mostly that an opportunity exists for fraud, if they get away with it.

In lower-trust environments, standard and not easily adulterated products are worth more, and that's how brands got started.
> Forgive me if I am incorrect but don't our laws apply equally regardless of the crime one is suspected of commiting?

The All Writs Act is a law, and it allows exactly what is happening here. The question at hand is about whether that is in conflict with the fourth and fifth amendments. Equal protection is an entirely different thing and not at issue here.
They could be more frugal. And imo a lot of money has been wasted for bad projects. Rust is very nice though.
> Maybe. But let's be honest here: there's CP on that drive. This is a good case for spinning around on HN arguing about the extent of the bill of rights protections in the face of creative application of the All Writs Act. It's a terrible one for actually defending the perp. I mean, come on.

The thing with the law and rights is, is that they are the same for everyone. Eroding them for this guy also erodes them for you.

Don't you think its wrong to be able to hold someone forever without evidence? Isn't one of your rights that you don't have to incriminate yourself?

Or do you think that some people should have less or more rights than yourself?
Yeah, absolutely.
Parents, educate your kids on health and fitness!
I think one thing to learn is how monitors work.
We know intelligence is possible because we exist. The human brain was created by a stupid process of just random mutation and selection. It was designed under ridiculous constraints like very restricted size and power consumption, that we don't have to deal with.

And the brain really isn't that great. Signals travel through the brain about a million times slower than electrons through silicon. Neurons are large macroscale structures. Compare to our transistor technology that is approaching the limits of how small you can build things with atoms. These are just the hardware specs, I don't see any reason to believe the software is much better.
Challenges facing OpenTable: nimble competitors, large fees
> mutexes are slow

Be careful with that. First off, what people refer to as "mutex" is usually a spinlock that falls back to a kernel wait queue when the spin count is exceeded. There are even adaptive mutexes that figure out at runtime how long the lock is typically held and base their spin count limit on that.

Secondly, busy-waiting is often worse than a single slow program, because you actively slow down all of the other running programs.
We had some delays, but things should wrap up on the book soon!

++, --, and ?: are not happening, but SIMD is actively being worked on!
Very well put. And yes I assumed using the same key. the way I like to think about it is that if two completely independent schemes didn't maintain their randomness when combined OTP would be broken and of course that's not the case (not the most accurate way to put it, I know). However I'm always cautious to just say "yes you can add layers" because the last thing I'd want is someone to then try and develop some hybrid scheme by just slapping stuff together that ends up being vulnerable because of key reuse or some other oversight.
Yes, I've heard of Wikipedia. Also heard of this little thing called the World Wide Web and computers, invented by people working for government-funded research institutions, the sort of thing that Rand considered Stadler the most evil character in Atlas Shrugged for deigning to participate in. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that ignoring Rand has done far more for computer-based sharing of knowledge than taking her seriously ever would.

(I doubt Rand would have been a fan of Wikipedia FWIW, no matter how much Jimbo loved her books. Actually, scratch that, I'm certain she'd have despised Wikipedia even without reading it and realising how liberal the average contributor is. Not too much virtuous selfishness in collaborative, pseudo-democratic editing of a reward-free commons or indeed the Wikipedia begging bowl)

Poor old Henry George has to settle for being admired by the likes of Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat Sen, and Rand's own architectural muse Frank Lloyd Wright (some of them were nearly as bad at being Georgists as Jimmy Wales was at being an Objectivist). So as overtly simplistic as I think his economics was, I'd guess he had that going for him.
Computer voting was a mistake. It has been shown over and over that voting machine security is abysmal.

Voting is one of the few things that shouldn't be computerized. It's far easier to swing an election by hacking a few voting machines than to forge thousands of ballots.

No matter where you live, do yourself a favor and vote only on paper.
Thanks! Sounds interesting.

The preference toward the majority (plurality) is not surprising considering how regulatory capture is the norm in the US, due to the strong views of anti-federalism. (Which, I guess wasn't much different in the 60s and before.)
If there really are "30 other ways" the online vendors can ruin my glasses, I'd much rather read a detailed post about those specific reasons than hear more vague complaints about their industry getting disrupted by online sales.
Paloma | CTO | New York City | Onsite / Local | Full-time

We're building marketing software for messaging platforms – kind of like MailChimp but for building & sending conversations through Facebook Messenger.

The backstory: After the election I put together a team to build a Messenger 'bot' to help people call Congress, CallParty.org, which launched in March. To power it we built a dashboard for segmenting and sending content (a bit like a MailChimp for Messenger) which got some businesses and investors interested. So we took 100k in angel funding and formed Paloma as a Public Benefit Corp to further build out an end-to-end marketing software for messaging platforms, and are working on our beta that will be launching in the fall. From there we'll either raise a seed or participate in YC's winter class and then raise a seed.

The team is me and two of the engineers from CallParty who are on contract and insanely talented. I have a background in design and designing marketing software, have hopped around startups the past few years, did YC two summers ago for one of them, and have built a few 'bot' type experiences. Our next key hires are folks to head up tech, sales and marketing.

The platform is API-driven with a focus on integrations to CRMs and various data sources, and includes tools for audience management, conversation building & scheduling, and analytics. It's being built primarily in python with a javascript front-end.

We're looking for someone to lead technical development who is:

* nice

* smart

* down for some really hard stuff

* good at communicating and making decisions rapidly

* excited about building tools for people

* interested in conversation / messaging

* great at vetting, hiring and leading other devs

* excited about contributing to the growth of what is now a very small company

... probably some other stuff because really there's a lot to do.

If you're into it let's chat! email in profile.
Google image search for 'white couples'
> Every time a major advance is made in AI the computational neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!".

I'm not sure which advances you are talking about, but the modern successes of Deep Learning are primarily due to backpropagation and convolution. Neither of the two is considered to be biologically plausible.

Some people are actively trying to come up with alternatives to backpropagation that would be biologically plausible though.

See for example: Bengio et al., "Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning" https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04156
Is democracy basically dead? There are all sorts of disturbing precedents being set over the last 10 years without any push back. Can anyone think of a single democracy, free speech, surveillance or rule of law issue that will get people on the street or even change their voting preference?

This is just the sort of hard case to set the right precedents about rule of law, you just can't lock someone up without trial. It goes against every know tenet of law.

If there is a rule of law that allows this, then it is basically not rule of law as we understand the word.
After 15 hepatitis deaths, San Diego County declares local health emergency
To show the level of political correctness Google is trying to achieve... photos of white couples bring up photos of interracial couples instead.
...experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes—"people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Experiments
Or someone else would have done it.... ;-)
Tech industry elevates lack of emphaty for the same reason as any industry flooded by money - money and power attracts that kind of people. The other reason is early years assumption of some institutions that "disinterest in people" predicts good programming skills. That tilted culture and caused disproportional self selection of people who don't care about others.
Hear, hear! this is fascinating book that anyone interested in rocketry will enjoy. Even if you are not interested in the engineering or chemistry the description of the professional community and process of invention is worth reading.
Every single signature hashes a few kilobytes of data, on average, and there are ~10k signatures per block (more with segwit..). That's 10's of megabytes of hashing per block, even without considering adversarial transactions that purposefully inflate those numbers. That's in the range of 10-100 MB. On my CPU openssl benchmarks about 180MB/s for sha256, so 50-500ms of hash time per block. That's not insignificant.
Apple is hunting weed apps too, or they were?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/amandachicagolewis/apple-and-instag...

https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/21/apple-pulls-number-one-gam... -- this one is back up
I'm not sure about that. Bay Area had Shockley Semiconductor and then eventually Intel. If you don't have something like that, counterculture won't help.
I'd like to know how that works.
> I usually don't like stating my age

So why did you tweet it then?
I just have my wife do it :-) (she's former optician, and calls the ruler she uses a "PD stick")
Influence by Robert Cialdini. Models by Mark Manson. Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen.
I wish I could be you. Life would be much simpler.

I can't empathise, I can only sympathise.

It becomes a bit obvious and somewhat awkward when trying to reassure friends and family.

I can usually tell what's bothering a person before they can, but it's difficult to "cheer up" someone (without ignoring their right to feel) when you can only vaguely understand the pressures of their emotion.

Though I guess you might not always enjoy being able to feel what others can.
Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) is non-profit. Most of the employees work for Mozilla Corporation, which is owned 100% by MoFo.

It's very clear the MoCo doesn't reinvest all the money they make (they have a lot in the bank). And some are getting rich from it, but that's a different topic.
Show HN: A command-line tool that can create sprite sheets/sprite atlases
This seems like a reasonable compromise if people are interested in a language that can do both. Using C's syntax, a language could modify the semantics of terminators , ; : to indicate strict/total ordering of statements.
> A camera is repairable, so it's not like they throw out the entire "broken" item. Dropping the camera would have just created a second problem.

That's the irony about insurance that I was pointing out. The much worse situation would have been covered.
One more voice for the above. I will be stopping at Firefox 56 until I decide what works best for me. I rely on several plugins daily that are about to be made obsolete. Likewise I revert Firefox back to a very classic UI interface that is very compact and familiar. I have avoided Chrome all these years because I can't stand its UI. Now I'm also about to loose the ability to make FF feel familiar along with many of my required productivity add-ons.

I'll ride out FF 56 until I decide where to go next but honestly the many times in the past it has felt FF has ignored the requests of long term users, coupled with lack of differentiation from Chrome, I'm not sure I have much reason to stick around.

Kudos to the team for all the hard work improving the FF core. But you're about to abandon that which kept long term users like myself here through all those rough years. Makes me sad.
... and when you're done with this beginner stuff ... use the de facto industry standard http://robotframework.org/
Interesting link. I hadn't seen that before. Do you know if anyone is actually using this?

From glancing over the docs, my big complaint is that it's not a federated system. Why is trust anchor management centralized?
The logic of innocent until proven guilty philosophy, is that it's better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be jailed. Hence the burden on proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Probability isn't sufficient, in this philosophy, because it's a trap. Of course probably he has on these drives what prosecutors claim, or worse, evidence of his direct involvement. And the trap is the injection of lack of sympathy into the decision making process; of course any reasonable person will say, eww he's almost certainly a creep therefore I'm not sympathetic to his indefinite incarceration. But that's exactly what the philosophy was supposedly designed to avoid, any possibility that innocent people get jailed; not preventing guilty people going free.

This is why you see a lot of effort by prosecutors defending against introduction of new evidence to prove innocence; because proving innocence well after a guilty verdict, itself shows the possibility of jailing innocents. It taints the system. And then you get these ever more perverse notions that executing those who later prove themselves innocent is not an unconstitutional execution when that person had received a free and fair trial finding them guilty of a capital crime.
http://www.businessinsider.com/antonin-scalia-says-executing...
Trying to find any info on this is next to impossible. I'd still be really surprised if modern SoCs were shipping hardware mp3 decoders still though, and if they do, they probably support Opus since almost all VOIP data uses it now.
I like your comment so please don't interpret my remark as evidence of the contrary. I simply think you misunderstood me.

I didn't mean to say that it's hard to transition from interpreters to compilers, only that I found it hard to transition from interpreting/compiling an arithmetic language to a full structured programming language with general recursion, loops, data structures, variables and so on.
Great essay, thank you.

"Have paid for WHOIS protection - preventing consumers from finding out where the website is based". That's not quite true. You can locate a website with the IP address -- WHOIS protection protects the owner of the domain by obscuring their registered physical address.
I was introduced to the basics of programming at 15 but it only really clicked at late 16. Before that I was really interested in electronics and aeronautics/fluid dynamics/aircraft design, but those all went into the backburner when programming came along.

In particular, I got really into Robocode - see http://robowiki.net - the community is still active 10+ years later and the state of the art is still being pushed.

I've ended up working as a software engineer in a related field (computer vision) and the lessons I learned from my early programming experience have given me a massive headstart in design, readability, maintenance and breadth of knowledge. I'd totally do it again given the choice, probably starting even younger.
There is no need to use raw pthreads in modern C++, it comes equipped with a much more convenient and capable standard library module.

I prefer working with channels, which are still missing from the library; but they are trivial to add:

https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/blog/blob/master/diy_cp...