skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, an impressive set of problems solved with an impressive set of solvers. Quite a bit of experience stored on that site.

One thing I'm interested to know (as someone with less experience in constraint programming), is when does one employ constraint programming engines like Choco, Gecode, MiniZinc etc, vs. when metaheuristics (such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, etc.) are a more practical solution. Is there a rule of thumb regarding the size search space, type of problem etc. ?
How is pleasure not objective? Frankly, if you’re saying that because 100% of people don’t experience the same pleasure from an activity, then it can’t be objective, then your definition of objectivity is kind of useless for discussion.

People smoke because it makes you feel good temporarily. This is a known effect that is experienced by a large majority. That’s not subjective any more than a release of endorphins during sex is subjective.
The field is only 2.5% of Earth's. That's way too weak, I suspect.
Gary Bernhardt – Build a web app and framework from scratch
From Om Malik: https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/
The usual/obvious solution is to flip the sign bit. (for floating point numbers). I think you're right for two's complement integers.
And Tesla lets you access the rest of your battery pack by paying more.
I have to admit that the 6 months I spent living in Lyon were not all that enjoyable for me, for a myriad of reasons. But the food... no complaints there. I never stumped up the money to go for a starred establishment, but the various Bouchons I did go to were fantastic. Also, lots of sushi. Not sure why.

One thing I learned about the city from quite early on was just how huge a figure this man was. I spent the first month there in an AirBnB across the road from the marketplace that bore his name. A Mexican friend of mine, also a chef, would not stop raving about the time he had spent living there and what this man could do. A huge loss for Lyon, but what he's left them with will be of benefit for years to come.
Money is no object to HFT firms when it comes to reducing latency. A recent technique involves laying optic fiber cables with hollow interiors, so that the internal refraction of light spends more time in a vacuum and less time slowed down by the pesky glass medium.
Might as well be living on the moon.
Now I don't know about carplay specifically, but Android auto works great even without a touchscreen, giving you the tactile feel that you want, and there is no reason why BMW can't extend the customizable physical buttons to work for functions in AA.

And Tesla does get shit for not supporting either, quite frequently. Not to "boycott" levels, but it has absolutely affected my last car purchase, and the fact that they don't support it makes me want the brand a lot less.
This has literally nothing to do with net neutrality.
Till Toyota goes all in on electric I don't see it in the near future. Toyota so far has been promoting and trying hydrogen based cars rather than electric.
I'm curious, what's the definition of hard vacuum?

Obviously there will be a few nitrogen molecules bouncing around in there so it seems there must be some arbitrary cutoff.
Also known as a True Scotsman.
put on some headphones and a blindfold then, cars really don't work in high-density environments. if you want to be alone, try living somewhere with less people where cars actually make sense.
Ask HN: 0/30 in the job hunt. Is this typical?
Ten years of professional full-stack experience and having trouble finding a development job after relocating. I've gotten to 30 technical interviews in the last 5 months, and have received no offers.

I'm able to get interviews for the majority of positions I apply to and typically do pretty well through the first few rounds of interviews and even homework assignments (that I once swore off). I tend to do poorly in technical interviews, or so my 0-for-30 streak would have me believe. And I'm not sure what to do.

I honestly believe that if any company called up anyone I've worked with over my career they would vouch for my capabilities. Somehow my behavior or responses in technical interviews must be suggesting that I don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm considering taking myself out of the workforce, or at least stop applying for jobs. What tech jobs don't require a technical interview? I've built the tech for several startups both as part of a team and by myself, I've managed teams, mentored engineers, launched products...
It's hard for pictures to convey just how stunning these stations are, and the fact that the photos in the article were not particularly good didn't help.

I'd recommend anyone to visit and see this for themselves. It doesn't hurt that it also gets you to your destination with amazing accuracy.

It's quite telling that instead of having a sign indicating the arrival time of the next train (in minutes) like all other underground systems I've seen, they have a counter that counts down the seconds until the next train. Also, the counter only has two digits, since it doesn't need more.
Hyperloop ultimately is about a way to bring the advantages of high altitude jet travel to much shorter regional hops, essentially bringing the stratosphere down to sea level. It's not really about mass transit within a city. Don't need 500mph for that.
It does.

The plain packaging with disgusting imagery as used in Australia has been shown to be effective in reducing youth smoking. The less people try smoking when young, the less continue smoking when older.

The tobacco industry's own studies show that their branding is an important part of getting people to start smoking initially.
Hyperloop wouldn't work as an effective weapon like an airliner can, though.
I installed Android Auto on my Mazda after someone on a previous HN thread convinced me to, and now I can't go back to using the native system. It makes such a huge difference, and works perfectly with the physical controls.
When I did biofeedback therapy a couple of years ago, heart rate variability was the main proxy they used for relaxation. The goal for session was to obtain a steady heart rate.
It's probably a pricing strategy to make more money of those running higher demand stuff.
Black Mirror episode idea: Luxury computer company starts including thermal front-facing cameras, as well as heartbeat monitors in laptop palm rest areas, in their hardware. Releases StressKit, an API which is promptly used by companies to optimize their experiences. At first, it's great: Slack silences notifications when someone's "in the zone," and Netflix has its greatest ever season of hyper-optimized horror movies.

But then our protagonist, a programmer at a large software company, is told to code a feature that subtly influences the behavior of users to drive them towards microtransactions in their moments of greatest stress. Protagonist finds this horrific and threatens to go public, at which point her colleagues, fearful for their own careers, start using the prototype system to manipulate her towards paranoia and madness. In true Black Mirror form, this escalates to neverending existential horror by the end.

*mic drop
> This book is not about OS dev but rather systems programming: "The Linux Programming Interface", https://nostarch.com/tlpi

You can also look through the man pages for free.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

Or if you are adventurous you can play around with syscalls in assembly.

https://syscalls.kernelgrok.com/

Also, the examples for TLPI are available online

http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/index.html
How to Create a Cryptocurrency
I hear you. I am on somewhere around a 0/20 streak right now. The industry can have a lot of extremely pretentious people. I think you just need to be your best self; show as much true passion about development as you have and wait for somebody at a company you like who shares and appreciates your enthusiasm. Also keep up with personal projects on Github to show you are active. This is what was holding me back for a while before my last job.
There have been many variations on these "Laws", which are really observations of existing practice and behavior.

For example, "Proebsting's Law", which asserts that compiler optimizations have yielded annual performance gains an order of magnitude worse than hardware performance gains and "Proebsting's Paradox", which is an unexpected result in a provably optimal gambling strategy.(See Wikipedia for details.) [adapted from proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/]
I don't know what the problem is here. Instead of adding $300 to the cost of the car, you now add $0, and then after year 1 you pay $80/year.

Maybe it's different in America or something, but in the UK approximately 100% of BMWs are leased, or bought with some kind of loan secured on the vehicle (I think based on estimated resale value when the period is up). So the "owner" will have the car for 2-3 years, maybe 4, then they'll chop it in for whatever's newer at the time.

With that in mind:

1 year. Old way: $300. New way: $0.
2 years. Old way: $300. New way: $80.
3 years. Old way: $300. New way: $160.
4 years. Old way: $300. New way: $240.

Cheaper!

5 years. Old way: $300. New way: $320.

OK, but I wonder how many people keep their car for this long?
The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa
Out of curiosity, how long do these homework assignments usually take? A friend has send me his (applied for a remote position) for review and it looked like 4 hours best case. That was even before the phone interview. Doing 5 or 10 of those really adds up.
Cost per bytes? Makes no sense at all.

However cost per hours played... That would be a metric worth exploring. Using some combination of how many people own it, how many hours played on average and cost of game... That would give you the 'value' of each game.

http://steamcharts.com/top

I think back to a game like Manic Miner which was less than 48kB, giving me hours more fun than say Don't Starve (still a good game), which cost me a few bucks on sale and I've played about half an hour... yet comes with a 600Meg install size.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is $960 if purchased outright through Verizon (64GB version): https://www.verizonwireless.com/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-n...

2017 flagship phones are expensive because of R&D, manufacturing, and profit margins. Samsung and Apple both roll some of their own silicon (Exynos + A-series). The iPhone X has a Samsung display, and I'm sure that they give them as bad of a deal as they can get away with, since they're their direct competitor. Though https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171108005056/en/iPh... puts the cost of the CPU at $27.50 , consider the R&D that was required to get to that part and that part cost, and the operating system, which receives continual updates for years after the device is released, which has hundreds of people working on it at Apple.

The LEGO 75192 Millennium Falcon is $800 retail and sold out everywhere. It's just plastic blocks to some people.

The reason it costs so much is because that's how much it costs to design, develop , manufacture, distribute, market, sell (Apple owns a ton of retail locations + employs many salespeople + support people that you usually get free access to), and support the hardware and software while maintaining ~20% net profit margins ( https://www.stock-analysis-on.net/NASDAQ/Company/Apple-Inc/R... ).

The fact that it exists at $1000 is impressive to me given how Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola, HTC, etc bear much less of the cost of OS development + support. http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/11/02/android-versus-ios-s... shows where some of the extra cost of an Apple device goes.
> How so? From my understanding, all you have to do is add up all your purchases that did not have sales tax charged and multiply by the sales tax percentage.

You seriously keep receipts for every purchase you made online for the past 12 months and spend the time to add it up for your 1040? You honestly don't just check the box that says, "Meh, it was like $1,000 or so," and they take $20 or whatever?
Ethercraft an RPG built on the blockchain
States would get into a race to the bottom in for this effect, which is not what the states wants to do with its own tax collection. That would basically be pulling the amazon tax bargaining with every single state for every single sales tax.

I'm all for it, but that system is likely to not survive.
You could take a look at Ben Klemens’ 21st Century C from O’Reilly. It covers that precise territory.

I can’t recommend it as I haven’t read it yet — it has been on my eyes-bigger-than-my-time-and-energy book pile for a couple of years.
Curious if you currently you hold a position in AMD?
Now they can all the other owners of the car instead of just the first.
I have to try this. I did some eye exercises about 3-4 years back called Trataka. No scientific evidence of it's benefits whatsoever but I had nothing to lose. A few minutes of gazing a candle in a dark room. I have worn glasses from age 10 and the only time my eye power went down was when I was doing this Trataka. Now I have terrible eyesight, long sightedness + presbyopia, can't read without glasses. May be there is something to these unscientifically proven methods. It is a pain to find a totally pitch dark room in modern cities. Light creeps in from everywhere.
I really liked this one: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033677.do
(21st century C, in case the link is wrong as I’m on my phone now)
Thanks for the reply. Any idea if it is even a meaningfully better neighborhood magnetically than the northern hemisphere?
The most recent one was capped at two hours, but some can definitely grow to the 6-8 hour range. The worst part is, the submissions are rarely discussed. They're just a step to get to the next interview.
I'm not misunderstanding anything. I'm simply of the opinion that secure multiuser systems aren't something we can do right now.

Here's just one of the more practical attacks http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/system/files/SP_vfinal.pdf

>but this isn't just any old side-channel attack.

It isn't, but you were already screwed. Now you're just slightly more screwed.
I don't, and I also don't really purchase anything from a vendor that doesn't already charge sales tax, but I guess it could be a problem for businesses. But it is the law, and enforcing it would probably bring about solutions.
From my understanding — one of the things that contribute to the difficulty of migrating away from mainframes is the change in the consistency model — going from mainframe to pretty much anything else seems to involve:

First note, when it comes to getting old cobol apps off the mainframe, the options are 'rehosting', 'migrating', and rewriting. Rehosting is taking your cobol and data and running it all off the mainframe. A couple of companies offer solutions to run mainframe cobol apps on the jvm (compile cobol to jvm bytecode), or compile and run them on some unix flavor. Open/Gnu Cobol is used this way by at least one vendor.

Migrating to another language involves rewriting in two main ways: source to source translating the cobol to the other language, or actually defining a project and doing a full rewrite from the ground up, using the idioms and best practices of the host language. I've seen cobol applications source translated to java using the RES 'open cobol to java' (on sourceforge for the curious), and the resulting java code looks like assembler.

Also note that some of these applications are massive in scope, they've grown organically over decades to encompass business processes for entire industries. There was never a single design document. So, rewrites are generally out of the question. One can sometimes read about boondoggle migration projects cancelled after $100 milions being spent, with nothing to show for it.

Of your two points about data consistency, your first point is irrelevant, your second point is really not relevant either. There three types of data store on mainframes. Flat files, key value tables ie VSAM (think Berkley DB, with fixed length records), and rdbms (either oracle or DB2) Note I'm leaving out outliers like Datacom and IMS as they're very uncommon now. The database is generally not an obstacle in re-hosting mainframe apps, or in source to source translation. They can be a problem in a rewrite because the schema is usually all jacked due to decades of cruft. VSAM can be replaced with dumb tables in a db or berkley db as mentioned. The amount of data stored generally isn't a problem, especially not nowadays.

But yeah, you've got a point, this legacy cobol situation is getting really stupid at this point. I had the oppurtunity to ask a VP once "why source translate to java when you can run cobol in a jvm like microfocus offering y?" His response was "customers don't want to hear cobol, we had to go to java." Nevermind the generated java was a nightmare, and technological dead end.

These types of migration projects used to be pretty common around the Y2K era, but I see them coming back around again now, because as said, the situation is getting stupid.

I tend to think now that a source to source translation to a more cobol style representation in the host language, that would be maintainable and enhanceble by cobol programmers with very little retraining may be the way to go. Then you get to keep you domain knowledge and investment in legacy code. But no one is doing this.
You'd go into a dealership to buy a $35,000+ plus vehicle and then get all huffy about 80 bucks a year?

That's a pretty strange thing to do. Most BMW customers won't care.
Just sayin, but in most areas that I've been where Engineers make $100+/hr, handymen make rather more than $15/hr.
> These huge-scale customers did not do proper security due dil on the silicon they were buying and made assumptions that were never, strictly speaking, guaranteed by Intel, and in some cases were explicitly documented as not guaranteed within the Intel optimization manuals.

But the commodity hardware is SOOOOOO much cheaper, you know?

Everything about Intel was always about "good enough" from since probably ... 1982? And "good enough" security in hardware was always "nobody cares". IBM, certainly, was screaming about the level of insecurity in commodity hardware and software forever. DEC similarly.

But commodity hardware is SOOOO much cheaper.

No one. And I mean NO ONE was every going to give up even 10% on performance or cost in order to be even slightly more secure. At any level of the stack. Intel, Microsoft, Google ... all are guilty of this up until probably this year. Anybody who suggested that would have gotten laughed at and/or fired.

The market spoke--and security became an afterthought.

Sadly, this is STILL true. While there is much gnashing of teeth about Intel, everybody's implementation of security is far worse. The thing that is biting Intel is that the monoculture means that it is a universal and scalable tool as opposed to at the software level where each individual company has to be compromised in a slightly different way.

It's only been since everybody is putting everything in the cloud that people now care about actual absolute values of security.

The problem is that all of the hardware solutions to these bugs cost RAM somewhere. And RAM is now the gating factor of cost and performance on most chips. RAM fell off the Moore's Law curve back about 32-22nm and isn't coming back. So, the performance hit to mitigate this is real.

No one was going to be the first to fix this EVEN IF THEY KNEW AND CARED. Everybody learned from painful business experience that the first guy gets all the arrows and the second guy gets all the profits. So, everybody was going to wait until they were the second guy--which was only going to happen when something bit everybody.
Just bought a domain https://seeing.fun and will try to do something good with it.

I have already written extensively about natural eyesight improvement in my native language, and also I'm a web app designer and developer. I can combine these things into seeing.fun

One thing I know, is that this practice should be relaxed and even fun, definitely not serious. If you become serious, there will be no results.
On Secretly Terrible Engineers (2015)
Dean at the Wharton School: Is This (Crypto) the End of Money?
Thanks for the advice, and good luck to you.
> There were free vending machines for PPE

Employers are required by law to provide PPE for free.
Re:Sakurai, are you just talking about neutron interferometry in a gravitational field? That is a completely different effect and not relevant.
Air travel is extremely safe, though. In fact, we went all 2017 without any fatalities from air travel.
Anecdotal, but I expect to keep my car until it dies. I have a 2004 3 series that's at ~240k miles. I would just factor the $80/year for 15 years into the price of the car when shopping.
How would a fire get going in a near-vacuum?
But he didn’t do either of those things. This is an idiotic argument.
When I viewed it in Chrome, it offered to translate it automatically, and it was pretty decent.
AWS SDK for Java 2.0 – Developer Preview (2017)
PySpark and Flask Boilerplate
To be fair, that that is even possible is because they installed better, larger battery packs than were initially promised in the first place. Even if the buyer never pays for the 'extra' miles, they still get the benefit of improved responsiveness and less wear and tear on the cells that the larger pack brings.
There are various theories about the causes of decreased accomodation in presbyopia, hardening of the lens being one. Other possible factors are axial elongation and ciliary muscles, e.g. https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1219573-overview#show...

Like many things age-related, you want to be doing vision therapy before there is irreversible damage. Use it or lose it. Since the decrease in accomodation is gradual, vision therapy can be done before reading glasses are strictly needed, at the current accomodation limit.

Behavioral optometrists take a holistic view: http://www.mccrodanvision.com/vision-development-education-c...
The key phrase here is "as apps go". I have never paid $25 for an app, and neither have most people. This pie chart sucks but it seems to imply that < 5% of apps are $19 or more: http://blog.scottlogic.com/2014/03/20/app-store-analysis.htm...
bmw got their money way back in 1975 and it certainly didn't come from me.

It is strange to own a car that is older than I am and safety is a big part of it. I have some self imposed rules that don't get rid of the risk, but do reduce it. I won't let kids ride in the car, but adults are free to make up their own mind. I only drive it in good weather and I'm pretty obsessed about maintenance. It's also tiny, so I can give myself tons of room around other cars. Modern cars are bloated (though it's annoying to be in front of pickups since the headlights are higher than my roof)

Compared to my 2016 daily driver it would much more dangerous to actually crash, but I am convinced I am far less likely to actually have an accident. The visibility in modern cars is awful as a direct result of the thick pillars required for them to be safe. In the 2002 I can see everything; there is no blind spot for cars to hide in. It also requires huge amounts of concentration to drive. The power band (what little there is) is all up top, so you have to be in the correct gear at all times. My 2002 requires actual driving, so I'm engaged at all times. I sometimes scare myself with how little I can pay attention in my daily.

If you want the same experience in a modern car get a fiat 500 abarth. Buzzy little engine you can thrash and corners on rails.