skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually want to understand the chip manufacturing process - design, prototyping (using FPGAs, etc), baking process in foundries. And also at least a basic understanding of how IP is managed in chip industry - like "IP core" is a term that I frequently hear but due to the myriad interpretations available online, I don't really understand what an "IP core" really means. Hoping to get useful advice from veterans in the chip industry.

I was about to write a thorough answer but jsolson's very good answer mostly covered what I had to say. I'll add my 2 cents anyway

- To understand the manufacturing process you need to know the physics and manufacturing technology. That's very low level stuff that takes years to master. There are books and scientific papers on the subject but it's a game very few players can play (ie. big manufacturers like intel and TSMC, maybe top universities/research centres). You can try some introductory books like Introduction to Microelectronic Fabrication [1] and Digital Integrated Circuits [2] by Rabaey if you're curious

- You can design ASICs without being an "expert" on the low level stuff, but the tools are very expensive (unless you're a student and your college has access to those tools). You need to learn VHDL/Verilog, definitely need the right tools (which, I'll say it again, are too expensive for hobbyists) and extra money to spend for manufacturing.

- FPGAs are different. No need to know the physics and you don't have to bother with expensive tools and foundries, the chip is already manufactured. My advice is to

(a) get an FPGA board. Digilent boards are a good choice as jsolson said, but there are other/cheaper solutions as well [3][4]. You'll still need software tools but (for these boards) they are free

(b) learn VHDL and/or Verilog. Plenty of books and online resources. A good book I recommend is RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL [5]

(c) I assume you know some basic principles of digital design (gates, logic maps, etc.). If not you'll need to learn that first. A book is the best option here, I highly recommend Digital Design [6] by Morris Mano

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Microelectronic-Fabricat...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Integrated-Circuits-2nd-Rabae...

[3] https://www.scarabhardware.com/minispartan6/

[4] http://saanlima.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&pa...

[5] http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471720925...

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-3rd-Morris-Mano/dp/013...
The capture thing appears to exist: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/hyperdeckshuttle/ - presumably it applies lossless compression. Lossless encoding within the h264 container should be possible.
I've never understood this argument. South Korea is already a US ally, and I don't see how the land of North Korea is more strategically beneficial than South Korea already is. It's not like the US needs to be directly bordering China to be able to launch missiles there or to spy on them.

I think you are right that there is a "prestige" factor to this as well. China doesn't want to lose an ally, regardless of whether having that ally benefits them much, because they would look weak backing down to the US.
> North Korea isn't interested in proliferation.

Of course they're extremely interested in proliferation. Just as Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel, Britain and Russia were all interested in proliferation (insofar as it suited their interests) and for exactly the same reason. The only reason the USSR and China got nukes in the first place, is they had a desperate self-interest in proliferation. North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons was also proliferation, which they were extremely interested in.

North Korea would love nothing more than to give the US & Co. other nuclear problems to deal with. The more so called rogue nations (or really anybody would do) with nuclear weapons there are, the easier it is for North Korea to justify keeping theirs, the less unique the North Korea situation becomes, the less pressure there will be on North Korea to give their weapons up. If five new nations pop up with nuclear weapons, the premise of North Korea being a rogue nuclear entity loses most of its punch, and the sanctions would wilt accordingly.
Certainly it varies by field, I don't know a whole lot of English PhDs in industry, but are a multitude of industry jobs require STEM PhDs (e.g, research positions, quant positions in finance, etc.). Whether you agree those positions should require a PhD is a separate argument.
Why did the post get "[flagged]"???
It could be as simple as the US withdrawing troops from the Korean peninsula once reunification does happen. South Koreans are already very pro-US, and I imagine China really doesn't want to cause an international incident by trying to annex Korea.

I might be wrong however. China is very greedy when it comes to territories it has historically regarded as tributaries, and Korea has been one for thousands of years. Maybe they would use that excuse for an outright invasion, like they did in Tibet?
Yeah, Linux is never going to merge something CDDL into the mainline short of people achieving porcine aviation.

Among other things, booting from ZFS on Linux can still be an experience with rough edges - I think one distro makes it easy to do from the installer (Slackware?), but otherwise you get to follow instructions which are opaque to someone not already familiar with running Linux, and debugging can be weird even if you are (the most common thing I've seen is the initramfs failing to import the pool and dropping to a rescue prompt, then succeeding at importing there - for a variety of reasons, usually not "the disks weren't spun up yet when it tried importing" any more).

There's also the caveat that frequently ZFS gains feature flag support faster than GRUB2 gets updated to boot from those features, particularly since you can't just shove CDDL code into GRUB2, so you get to reimplement the wheel, and zpool upgrade/zpool set doesn't currently warn you that you're gonna make your pool unbootable if you turn on those features.

I'm not a distro maintainer or anything of the sort, but between the above rough edges and concerns about redistributability of CDDL modules compiled against the Linux kernel and patents, I'm not surprised that people shy away from it unless $BIG_CUSTOMER throws a lot of money at them to make it a first-class citizen.

(I'm also really curious, consequently, why Canonical is diving headfirst onto the wagon...)
The cost depends on the technology. More modern processes are dramatically more expensive (don't even think about something like 28nm). If you're looking at something ancient like 130nm, 0.35um, etc then it's going to be something like $1-2k per mm^2. Normally there's a minimum cost of a few mm^2. Expect to get a few tens of chips back. Transistor count has no effect, they couldn't care less what you put inside your part of the wafer, so long as it follows the design rules (for example minimum % coverage on each layer to prevent it collapsing vertically), but obviously if you need more transistors you might need more area.

Yes it's 100% possible to do an open-source design, qflow has been used to make sub-circuits of ASICs, but it's going to be extremely difficult. There are lots of things missing which you'd have to take from the fabs PDK or design yourself, for example open source I/O pads (sounds boring, but actually lots of work with ESD, etc). Combined with huge missing feature-sets in the open source tools, like extraction of designs back to SPICE circuits with parasitics and complete DRC checking, you're not going to have a fun time.
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Hah, cool. Nice to know you've talked to a variety of people.

I myself don't do enough of either so I'm not helping myself enough yet.
Even easier: declare the Korean peninsula as Switzerland.

China collapses the DPRK and allows it to be reunified under South Korean leadership. The US withdraws all armed forces from South Korea. Both China and the US agree that Korean territority is inviolable. With nuclear consequences if either / anyone violates this.

North Korea avoids its leadership being killed in a war / assassination.

China avoids the US on their borders.

The US disarms the North Korean threat.

(South) Korea gains an incredible security guarantee and becomes a unique crossroads for the region.

Win/win/win/win.
Fair enough, just trying to understand it just as everyone else. My only other thought is maybe with all the recent ransomware news some have switched (companies maybe?). Hard to say really, but I hear you. I work in a all Linux shop, and one of my coworkers who works on Linux all day keeps Windows on his home laptop and doesn't care to switch out the OS cause it just works for him.
OMGBuntu doesn't believe the figure http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/linux-marketshare-6-91-pe...

> The figure is impressive but is also highly irregular and out of sync with the reported Linux marketshare from other companies like StatCounter and Wikimedia.

> [...]

> Netmarketshare also stress that the graph showing Linux’s big leap is based on “preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance”.

Anecdotally, I was at an Erlang and Elixir event on Saturday morning. The first three speakers were using Ubuntu machines. I didn't notice what the fourth one used. Maybe it's the subject but conferences use to be MacBook monocultures with an occasional Linux or Windows machine.
I think it is dangerous to assume rationality. Un may not act rationally, so his actions may not make sense from your perspective. History is full of people who didn't act rationally from the perspective of others.
Thanks. You are doing the "manual" community maintenance, things that don't scale as pg put it. I certainly appreciate it.
Some of us don't like sweet things. All the best flavours are sharp or sour.
> Maybe CS and AI is an outlier

Yes, it is a huge outlier. Probably the most extreme outlier there is.

> Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry

In CS? Yes. In most other fields? Absolutely not.
Merge from master back to your branch.

This is how my team handles merge conflicts: your branch must cleanly merge for the pull request to be approved (which means you must resolve conflicts in your branch first). If there are two branches that may conflict in terms of functionality (but not at a source level) we call that out, and have the people involved reviewing both. When it comes time to merge, we usually merge the first one done to master, merge master to the second, then do extra testing in the second branch before merging it.

Sometimes if we know one branch blocks the other, we simply merge one to the other, but then still go to master separately. This makes the pull request review much simpler and keeps the code isolated while not duplicating effort. This works best when a big bug has a quick and simple but incomplete fix, and a more risky and complex but complete fix, or when there's multiple aspects to a new feature. We can decide to ship the first branch earlier if necessary.
I'm just curious why HN highlights new users. Why do you think they do? HN already tries to take action against "aggressive" accounts or astroturfing with ghosting them, so it seems possible because of that, that they highlight new accounts for similar possible reasons.
His own words in this interview: http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/08/22/voevod/ (in Russian)
Reprocessing plutonium has a risk of criticality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident
The last sentence worth reading the entire article!

Real-time web analytics is a seductive concept.
It appeals to our desire for instant gratification.
But the truth is that there are very few product
decisions that can be made in real time, if there
are any at all. Analysis is difficult enough already,
without attempting to do it at speed.
One point that I don't think is mentioned is failure to properly represent a device in artwork.

http://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw-...

How much does a pottery decorator know about horse harnessing? Do they draw it differently on purpose because it looks better?

Edit: so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biga_(chariot) has some good images, the harnesses are clearly ludicrous, they must be bad representations (eg on the leopards); http://www.romeacrosseurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/r... and https://i.pinimg.com/736x/74/75/30/7475306e0270a04a278e52374... shows something reasonable (same harness form), so I guess it must be fake (ie modern). Any other good images??

Edit2: this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greek_-_Hydria_with_the_F... shows a neck strap being used for reins and a midriff strap seemingly attached to a chariot [sorry my terminology is lacking].

Edit3: it seems the idea of edit2 was already in the article, para beginning "There the matter rested until 1977, when J. Spruytte reinvestigated Lefebvre des Noëttes work."

Also FWIW - "Romans did not seem to harness horses in tandem" this http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll... purports to show two sets of horse in tandem, as does this http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll....

This http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll... shows a four horse chariot on which you can clearly see the breast strap linked to a shoulder collar. There are loads of them, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll... too.

Amazing what resources we have at our fingertips now!
The powers around North Korea might attack because of the risk of proliferation.

North Korea could sell weapons to, say, an oil rich non state actor in the Middle East that might use a missile launched from a ship to attack Israel.

Proliferation has already been a huge issue. Pakistan may well have already helped North Korea in their missile or nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea might attack if they suspect that a strike or invasion is coming. Their warning systems are not of high quality. That's probably why they worry so much when the US and South Korea do exercises.

This is not to say any of this will happen, just that there are plausible reasons why either side might try something.
Makes sense to me, didn't surprise me, and doesn't impress me either. I find it entirely a natural and logical response. Are you going to leave out one person who's in the very same sudden need and sudden distress as you?
I don't think I've come across anyone who's considered themselves a soft drink connoisseur before, so what is there to be cynical about? Plenty of people will tell you they're into wines, and they will give you accounts of the growing seasons in particular years and places.
The big (and some even not-so-big) companies hire lots of PhDs -- roughly 8% of Google's employees have doctorates.
I don't think so, xfs is looking pretty good as a general purpose alternative to ext4 and there's no real reason to throw your average user on something more complicated.
"Keeping older devices available for cheaper" does not quite solve the issue, because Apple is also currently selling the iPhone SE. Both the SE and the 6s are down-market, legacy devices. In my view, there shouldn't be more than one down-market, legacy device.
A few months ago, I saw one of my dads friends (my dad is 59) share a product that you plug in via the USB port on an "old laptop" and it brings life to it. It was no doubt a Linux distort on a USB stick. The product claims to bring life back to old slow laptops. If he can get excited about it without understanding what it does, and we know once you have a USB stick running Linux you're pretty much golden depending on how much you want to do, well he would probably enjoy running Linux off that USB stick and not know the difference. Just tell him where the "Internet" icon is. Also many older people adopted iOS and Android and I never had to stand by and explain it all to neither of my parents despite them not being Windows based devices. People adapt. Just hard to say what caused this Linux spike.
> In my experience, type errors in Python get discovered during testing

That would be the optimistic view. In reality, `NoneType has no attribute Foo` errors happen in production all the time.
A very good point. Following that train of thought I would usually look at 'who benefits' and be content with thinking some Western country would have been responsable but the assassination method was just very atypical.
Where was Coates considered flamebait on HN? Can you provide a link? I'm an admirer of his. I see a submission of "The First White President" (which is amazing); it isn't flagged and has no comments, and looks like an ordinary victim of HN front-page roulette.
Nice. Separates out Chrome OS. I like Free BSD getting separated out too. Sadly it's at [a rounded] 0% :p.
Yes :-(
We could build new universities. Take up the slack in all the excess PhD's, increasing the supply of good secondary education, and help stave off exploding tuition costs. Build it from scratch like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, or Olin. Who is "we"? I dunno, some rich guy maybe.
It's a stalemate. China has stated that they will defend North Korea if the US attacks first, and that China will not defend North Korea if they attack the US first. My friends in Tokyo sleep better at night knowing this.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-china-...

“If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.”

“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,” it added.
Yes, easily possible with Infiniband but quite complex with Ethernet.
It’s the Californian English style of expression, which is all about superlatives and deals only in extremes. With the exploding cultural influence of California in tech, it has spread and you now hear it from many people working in tech, regardless of whether they are Californian or not.

Edit: I guess some Californians got upset and decided to downvote me? It’s not negative in any way, just a different style of expression. You certainly will never hear a Japanese or Romanian person exclaim “this is so amazing!” on a regular basis.
French director Jan Kounen made a documentary with the shipibo tribe while he was filming his blueberry adaptation.

This documentary is called other worlds and you can watch it on googletube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAaCUyCWPRU
I'd think Red Hat would be impacted by that happening. Not all shops would pay Red Hat, but certainly a percentage would. Red Hat made no indication of such things happening in the past few months nor impacting their immediate and near future in their latest earnings report.
We're actually in the middle of a renaissance when it comes to psychedelic drug research. Research essentially ended after the panic in response to Leary's misuse of drugs, and the association of drugs with counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s... and then in the 80s and 90s we had the much maligned War on Drugs.

Now that it's become more widely accepted that psychedelic drugs are comparatively harmless next to opioids, there's been a HUGE amount of new psychedelic drug research. I attended Horizons (annual NYC conference on psychedelic drug research) several years ago when I was doing my neuroscience undergrad, and was really impressed with how many new studies were coming out. Interesting enough, a lot of it was focused on psilocybin (e.g. treating anxiety in end of life cancer patients), because LSD still has a bit of a bad reputation after Leary. Probably the most interesting researcher I met was a professor in Europe who was doing fMRI scans of grad students on psilocybin. Nowadays, MDMA has been receiving a lot of attention for its potential to treat those with PTSD.

Anyways, super rambling response, but there's reason to be more optimistic about psychedelic research compared to decades past.
Perhaps related, if not quite as ambitious:

https://hdmi2usb.tv/home/ - Open video capture hardware + firmware

I would also recommend this project if someone doesn't have an idea of their own, and/or doesn't have any fpga experience. So if someone is looking for people with both of those doing work in the open who might be willing to mentor them, finding a way to help this project is a great way to get started.
In this case, it's not really how useful/appealling the software is, but if there's some kind of correlation between languages and defects. So if skyrim was rewritten is haskell, then perhaps they'd have less defects.

But looking at the data and their analysis, while there's some interesting stats saying typed and functional languages have a correlation with less defects, there's just too many variables at play.
That happened with the Patents Act 1953, where the phrase "or process" was added by Congress.

According a legal law professor this was also when they removed the requirement for a working model, but I suspect that this was actually the date when the process to deposit a model was removed. There is plenty of models being sent after 1880 to USPTO (according to museums who write about their collections), so clearly it didn't all stop 1880. Also according to internal policy documents from inside USPTO that dates to early 1960, "the only thing you need to bring us a working model of is anything you claim that reverses entropy", which again highlight a change in attitude during that time in history.

That said, you are right that the official date when the requirement ended was 1880.
> The US & South Korea agree to cede between 1/3 and 1/2 of North Korea to China ...

If you think this is an "easy solution", you clearly haven't talked to Koreans much. You might as well cede Alaska to Russians.

(Those armchair diplomats...)
Copyright and trade secret is too weak. How do you protect, e.g., video encoding techniques with copyright, where public disclosure is necessary for interoperability? Patents worked really well to create an interoperable world of content and players from MPEG-1 to today. Or the software algorithms sitting in your WiFi chipset. Someone has to pay for all this R&D, but for the technology to be interoperable it has to be disclosed.

Putting the technology in a pool and charging implementors for patent licenses is a good way to do that. In my opinion, it’s better than depending on Google to bankroll all these things with their advertising money printing machine (VP9).
From 2.5% in July to 4.9% in September. Seems highly unlikely that many millions of people decided to switch desktop OS within a couple of months, without anyone noticing.
Life is palimpsest.
You can buy the ingredients for ayahuasca (B. Caapi vines and P. Viridis leaves) online for cheap.
Revolut is a banking app. People are extra sensitive when it comes to handling their money.
For 14 hours or so people couldn't access their funds. That's the sort of error that can easily be enough to sever ones relationship to a company, depending on individual context.
It was apparently $100k spent by RT to promote news stories. Why is it so unusual for a news company to spend money promoting news stories on social media sites?

This is nothing out of the ordinary (including if a government did try small actions to impact an election), and yet it has become such an intense witch hunt during the 2016 election.
Zombie Apple Delusions
I would argue that they do not to be split up, but commercial advertising has to be banned from the internet. This would fix pretty much every issue we face now.
Help clear the lies that make slow and ineffective response politically palitable.

Learn and tell the truth about what's happened to them.

I remember working for a bit for Big Pharma, a couple of decades ago, when Peurto Rico was "the future" for them and they were going to... "modernize", or something, the island's economy.

Uhuh...

(To quote a song, maybe a bit out of context, "same as it ever was".)

http://billmoyers.com/story/vulture-capitalists-circle-puert...