skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Old and somewhat contrived example, but the first thing to pop into my head is the famous fast inverse square root function.

float FastInvSqrt(float x) {
float xhalf = 0.5f * x;
int i = *(int*)&x; // evil floating point bit level hacking
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1); // what the fuck?
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f-(xhalf*x*x));
return x;
}

I can't think of a way to write a test that sufficiently explains "gets within a certain error margin of the correct answer yet is much much faster than the naive way."

The only way to test an expected input/output pair is to run the input through that function. If you test that, you're just testing that the function never changes. What if the magic number changed several times during development, do you recalculate all the tests?

You could create the tests to be within a certain tolerance of the number. Well how do you stop a programmer from replacing it with

return 1.0/sqrt(x);

And then complaining when the game now runs at less than 1 frame per second?

Here's a commented version of the same function from betterexplained.com.

float InvSqrt(float x){
float xhalf = 0.5f * x;
int i = *(int*)&x; // store floating-point bits in integer
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1); // initial guess for Newton's method
x = *(float*)&i; // convert new bits into float
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x); // One round of Newton's method
return x;
}

It's still very magic looking to me, but now I get vaguely that it's based on Newton's method and what each line is doing if I needed to modify them.

I actually just found this article [0] where someone is trying to find the original author of that function, and no one on the Quake 3 team can remember who wrote it, or why it was slightly different than other versions of the FastInvSqrt they had written.

> which actually is doing a floating point computation in integer - it took a long time to figure out how and why this works, and I can't remember the details anymore

This made me chuckle. The person eventually tracked down as closest to having written the original thing had to rederive how the function works the first time, and can't remember exactly how it works now.

I think the answer is both tests and documentation. Sometimes you do need both. Sometimes you don't, but the person after you will.

[0] https://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
False equivalence is the moral reasoning du jour, didn't you hear?
Hmm, "Enter your credit card payment information to send this alert."

Nah, real world experience shows that people who supposedly have common sense will happily put their payment info just about anywhere.
Where is parking <$130 month (or the equivalent if you purchase enough real estate to hold your car)?

5miles is very close to downtown. Street parking sort of works, if you get enough mercy from your neighbors not parking on-street.
Well, since many joined for networking purposes, and the identity stays fixed (no throwaways) and transparent (with rich personal profiles), I guess we are being mindful about our impression.

As there are things you won’t probably speak out at work, so there’re things and emotional responses you keep to yourself in a professional community. Is it good? Is it bad? Haven’t figured it out yet.

I got really sick from reading the neverending, overblown feminist headlines in YC Female Founders group on FB. Leap has been growing into something else, luckily, which I suppose is provided by the fact that it was built and nurtured by female engineers (thus partially sharing a certain mindset and culture).

Also, with a decent amount of supportive culture present, I still woudn’t call Leap an emotional support group. The responses so far have been consistently useful and constructive.
I think it was something I heard in person .. can't remember where now! Probably at Wispapalooza.
23k per year of incentives for each job created? With an average household income of 66k/year? https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/WI-Demographics....

Shirley you must be joking. (apologies to Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker)
Coincidentally, that's also where the jobs that pay for expensive living are.
You just need some extra clothes to handle -18°C no problem at all IMHO, and as long as the temprature is below freezing you will have no problem with shitty roads. I would say the winter is the best season to bicycle, you can go everywhere.
gRPC connections are persistent, so a single client will always talk to a single backend in that configuration. It's fine if you have lots of clients but can easily lead to load imbalances.

That's why projects such as Envoy exist. I'd link it, but I'm on mobile.

Keep an eye on it.
You mentioned problems with gRPC, but I think every one of your problems is with protobuf. Is that correct?

Also, regarding point 3, I'm confused with two things:

- You want "free form" data, but you're talking about protos in the context of Go. How would you define this "free form" data in Go?

- You explain that "free form structured data is important for systems that accept foreign data ... where the schema isnt known". Why are you using protobufs for this usecase? Protobufs are specifically meant to make the schema known, and be enforced by serialization.
Communications and trade clearly overlap here, so I think we should pursue it from both angles.

But historically, the FCC has a long history of regulating all sort of communications, not just things with public RF. The Communications Act of 1934 made them the successor to the Federal Radio Commission, adding responsibility for telephone regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
From what I read, the whole issue turns on the definition of broadband as a Common Carrier according to the suit from Mozilla, which is alleging that the FCC's decision falls under the Arbitrary and Capricious standard. But in the case cited for precedent, the telecoms didn't challenge the FCC's prior claim that Common Carrier applied. If they can successfully do that, then the FCC is free again to abdicate NN regulations. Again, I am not anti-NN. I just think the stronger legal justification, precedent, and evidence is going to be found in antitrust law.
It is hard, at this point, to claim that people working to advance the success of companies like Google and Facebook genuinely care about freedom and privacy. If they did, they would quit, and go work for competitors. The sort of talent these companies bring in have high incomes and are extremely sought after... it's not like they don't have a choice.
Behind all the blog blithering, here's the interface mockup:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/thunde...

It has all the stuff people expect today - dim grey text on a light grey background, large decorative graphics to fill space, little round icons for people, images in your face for every email, and integration with calendar and contacts. The people who send out "newsletters" (i.e. email spam) will love it.
Anthony Levandowski’s former nanny accuses him of stealing trade secret
You would need to find a pre-literate VPL, like Kidsym, or maybe Hands. Those are research languages, but there seem to be a lot of pre-literate visual data-flow and block languages out there these days, none of them is especially popular but they work fine in their own way.
I’m sorry to hear about your incontinence as well!
> Do they carry their own with them and take the time to install it and uninstall it?

Yeah, it is possible to do this without much effort, if the car-seat has a seatbelt strap in the base and the stroller can carry the car-seat around instead of being held in the hand.

I had no car for the first eight months, with my child in SF.

The Lyft plus generally has enough space to stow the stroller and the kid wasn't heavy enough to hurt myself by picking up the carseat with the baby in it.

However, once day-care starts, it gets pretty inconvenient to use a taxi every day.
The problem is not PoW. The fundamental problem of cryptocurrency is scalability. In my understanding, a system is called scalable if adding 1 unit of resource to an existing amount of resource m, improves the performance by roughly (m+1)/m.

This is not a property these systems possess. The computational power of the system remains is bounded by the computational power of weakest full-node.
Not fully

https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages
Your analysis is wrong. Startups and crypto investments can be seen as bets and a 10x increase in favor of you is a lot. And you are not taking into account the effort factor: startups are hard while storing some cryptoassets works even when you sleep. Not saying this will work forever, just saying that many people found it lucky to enjoy the momentum.
Hi @bsaul, our website is currently full of screencasts. If they do not load in your web browser, please tell us what is the browser and what system are you using. The ifrst screencast should appear in the website header - please wait couple of seconds and see if the movie will load there. In the meantime, please test it using Chrome! :)
Only works if you keep all your relatives' genomes secret too. After all, any attack that works on them has a high chance of working on you too.
Pragmatic Thinking & Learning - Andy Hunt
It's really bad when you need a tl:dr on a security vulnerabilities release, it was a lot more bugs than I expected, I wonder if GitHub enterprises is just as bad?
Is anyone starting anything here in the bay area Eastbay? say around the tri-valley area?

Judging by how extensive the guide is, I guess there's a lot of room to make things easier? perhaps someone can build a suite of tools to assist in this process, perhaps automate things?
It's often just metonymy, just as your usage of "crypto" to refer to "cryptocurrency" is.
Optimizing Mobile Deep Learning on ARM GPU with TVM
GB blocks are basically ready with today's hardware though the need is years out. It won't be long before TB blocks can say the same, testing is underway.

Current prevailing theory in BCH land is the block size is an unnecessary hinderance, and will likely be gone in the next 18 months.

Exciting times!
$4.5B + the long term liability of maintaining all the new infrastructure

Wisconsin is already far behind on the infrastructure maintenance front.
Somehow I had the impression, maybe you guys sold through O'Reilly when they sold ebooks straight up too?

Thanks for the clarification! (And you guys rock.)
jazz players use more the ear, the classical more the eye
> We should be breaking up monopolies and fining companies for unfair business practices.

Ultimately in a perfect world if the agencies did as their mission statements said that would work. Monopolies need to be broken up and it can lead to good things, even just threatening Microsoft in the 90s led to Google, Apple, etc emergence.

The problem is there has been zero sign that anyone is willing to go after monopolies, especially after the Great Recession even though it would probably help us get out of the next one easier with more breakups.

The local ISP monopolies are really against net neutrality, Google isn't the monopoly we need to be worrying about yet. ISPs/broadband have local monopolies built on fake competition on purpose.

The vast majority US only has 0 or 1 valid ISP with decent speeds if that at 25-100 Mbps[1][2].

ISPs are the biggest monopoly threat regarding open internet as they control the levers, not a company that operates on top of the internet in the market.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...

[2] https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadb...
Tracking your child's movements gives the far more autonomy than locking them in the house, for parents concerned about their children's whereabouts. Outside of cases of abuse (not to be discounted), parental location tracking isn't infringing on "free-range children"
I like that nobody caught on. But yes, that's basically a Metro system. The difference is that a Metro system doesn't allow divergence without transfer and it's a "mass transit" system. Autonomous vehicles provide an opportunity to blend controlled and uncontrolled transit paths, privacy, and the ability to diverge without transfer while increasing traffic efficiency, reducing the dangers of driving, and freeing up commuter time for other activities, just like mass transit.
Or the standard "too big to fail" sunk cost fallacy will save them.
It is hard to see how the FTC would be able to help if an ISP decides to block a peer-to-peer system that has no central service or business model.
The huge flaw with the 13" MBA was that although thinner and lighter, it had a bigger footprint than the 13" MPB. Particularly crucial with confined deskspace such as coffee shop, flying, on a train. Add in lack of RAM and retina and it was never compelling for me much as I adore thin and light (and happy with new 12" MBP for it's further reduced footprint, although the RAM situation is maddening).
Old and poor people suffer severe lifestyle degradations, the don't simply avoid the "waste" of care expenses.
> In a way this is very similar to buying art which probably doesn't have much utility except among other wealthy people as socially agreed upon store of value.

Art may not have "utility", but it does have value, so the analogy here doesn't quite work.

Also, 1% of 10T is 100B, not 1T.
Google is a global monopoly with it's hands in literally everything. A significant percentage of all inter-human communication, whether voice, internet, email, or messaging goes through Google. Possibly a majority.

Regional/local monopolies are barely a concern worth mention in comparison. It's as if you're worried about the street dealer, and not worried about the head of the cartel.
Do communities need to justify their existence by reference to some problem that they solve?
That is a huge font. With X11 fixed 6x10 or 6x13 font you get two 80-column screens at 1024, and three at 1440. At 74 columns you can get three screens on 1366 displays.
I don't know. Something is going on in my locale.

I contacted my legislators about this a couple of times (maybe more?) first by email and then by phone. This was before Pai did the inevitable.

The staff who answered the call were variable in how aware they seemed to be about net neutrality. Some of them seemed to know what I was talking about, and others seemed clueless.

At the time, maybe a week or two later, I got a typical kind of response. I wouldn't say it was canned, but maybe something like that, explaining their position and so forth, which I knew. I've received many of these types of responses over the years on various issues (I'm not saying all the responses I've received have been like this, but a lot of them have been).

The thing that's strange is that the last couple of days, about the time the dems managed to gather their 50 votes, I started getting these emails from some of the same legislators explaining that they were crafting a response. These were legislators that already replied to me, a couple of months ago or so, and the vibe I got was that they wanted to reapproach the issue or something. I've received one of these letters, and the overall position hasn't changed, but it was more detailed and a little more defensive or something.

I'm not sure what's going on, but my gut impression is that the GOP legislators here are realizing they're on the minority end of this issue with regard to public opinion, and are trying to reapproach voters with a different PR spin, trying to do damage control and a "do-over" on an issue they weren't paying too much attention to before. They seem a little nervous about their position to me, even if they haven't changed it formally.
And they would be very limited in their destinations.

Cars can go anywhere.
That would be walking not jaywalking. A pedestrian cannot be on the motorway let alone cross it.
The difference between Trump's annual physical exam and yours
Glad you asked. P/E ratios can be anchored (with expected earnings growth and a risk premium) to interest rates.

Whether stocks pay dividends or not is not terribly relevant, see Modigliani-Miller.

Thus, share prices are rationally anchored to economic reality. Of course, there's a lot of estimation involved, and people can get it wrong for a while, individually or collectively.
> I now have portable battery packs and cheaper USB-C chargers all over the place that charge both my phone and MacBook Pro

This isn't true if you buy both an Apple phone and computer, you have to get an Android. Just more evidence of Apple's backwards and confused direction as of late.
Correct, I (author) am from Croatia, and in the Croatian language, there are no definite or indefinite articles.

I have noticed that I do not even see that I drop most of the articles.
Only when I use some grammatical spell checker than 90% of errors are missing articles and that I notice it.
WPF was very successful, it didn't kill off Winforms but it was used in many many small enterprise apps.

Then Microsoft just...abandons it. Many were annoyed by that.

UWP would be reasonable if they didn't require giving up so many .net features, I'm particularly disappointed that they killed off the DLR for it, and made reflection more costly (because it is supposed to be ahead of time compiled only). It also reminds me of Silverlight in the number of arbitrary things left out from WPF.

So rather than switching from WPF to UWP, I've gone from WPF to...Javascript/DOM/Canvas.
This looks very cool! I especially like the geographical stuff, that being something that is dear to my heart.

I have a couple of questions that may sound trivial but are important to me. I haven't tried installing the studio yet, so please forgive me if installing it would answer these.

First, all the screenshots, along with the doc pages, use a dark theme with very low contrast: only 47% contrast on the body copy in the docs, and much of the text in the screenshots has even less contrast than that.

I know that low contrast dark themes are very popular, but younger developers are often unaware that they can become very hard to read as you get older or if you have less than perfect vision.

There's even been some research done on this; I don't have the source handy right now, but the basic idea is that dark themes cause your eyes' irises to open up wide, while light themes cause them to "stop down" with a narrower opening. And like a camera lens, many people's eyes can focus more sharply when they are stopped down a bit.

There is also the problem of switching back and forth between light and dark backgrounds. All of the web references I use day to day have light backgrounds; all my editors are set to light backgrounds, basically everything I do is that way because I find it much easier to see things. Switching back and forth to one app that uses a dark theme is hard on the eyes.

I did find the PDF version of the docs, and that uses a conventional high contrast light theme, so that is nice.

Somewhat less important, I'm curious whether the studio supports proportional fonts? I don't enjoy monospaced fonts and I find them harder to read than proportional fonts. This is not a big problem like the dark theme, but it would be nice to support any choice of font.

I should file GitHub issues on these, of course. Partly I just wanted to mention them here to help raise awareness among other developers that dark, low contrast themes can be a real accessibility issue for some of us.

Thanks, and I look forward to checking this out!
it's useless as a currency while speculators are making its value so volatile. The sooner this bubble pops and the get rich people go away, the better.
Bret Victor's ideas are a very strong inspiration regarding where graphical interfaces could expand in the future. We strongly agree with his principle, that people need an immediate connection with data they are working on. This principle is one of two foundations on which Luna was actually built. We have described our thoughts in detail in our blog post here: https://medium.com/@luna_language/luna-the-visual-way-to-cre....
>"I do all three of these on Linux"

Well yes you can launch Steam on Linux and yes perhaps play a small selection of games.

My "No you don't" comment was aimed at highlighting the vast majority of Steam usage cases is still Windows only. In the classic consumer sense it's still essentially unusable on linux:

If >10% of my steam library works on Linux I'd be surprised.
> If 3k is a significant amount of someone's life savings, then they should not have put in BTC.

Is that an appeal to consequences or did you have a different point?
> ban human drivers entirely

Such a utopia: not only do the police have a monopoly on violence, but also private transportation.
Every time I pick up my new 13" MBP some tiny part of me notes that it just feels so much bigger than the 13" Air it replaced. I hope Apple brings it back by the time this one is ready for replacement.
If it makes you feel any better, I had the exact opposite assumption when I saw the headline. I assumed it would be about the different ways of thinking to play jazz or classical strengthen different pathways and parts of the brain.
I'm curious, and I haven't found the answer yet - what's the scaling plan if Bitcoin Cash runs out of block room? Just keep increasing the size? Is there an upper limit before the chain increases in size too quickly to be sustainable?
Those are pretty significant drops on the lower end. My 4 GB droplet went from $40/mo to $20/mo.

One caveat is that the prices won't change automatically. You have to power down the droplet and use web console to "resize" it to change the plan it's using.
The curse of modern loneliness
Hey, I'm a founder working on something that can have a pretty similar front-end!

Could you comment on your business model? In particular, how's the company intend to draw in revenue?
Unless you are part of an IPO or are buying newly issued stock you are also speculating on stocks when you buy them.

Note: Not a finance person, just a personal opinion.
I think there's a sort of... for lack of a better term, I'll call it information arbitrage, going on here.

The person who first see the police is likely a receptionist or similar who does not have access to the information specified by the warrant. That person, quite reasonably makes the local management aware the police are present immediately.

Management hasn't encountered the police or seen the warrant yet. They don't know the nature of the encounter, but they know they're supposed to tell corporate immediately. They do so, and make no attempt to prevent the execution of the warrant once they have received it.

Corporate, located in another country doesn't know what's going on except that people claiming to be police showed up at a foreign office. They initiate a lockdown of the local computers until legal can sort it out.

Now if management read a warrant demanding access to something on local computers, then made a call to corporate they knew would cause those computers to be remotely locked, they could be in trouble. I make no comment here about whether Uber is good, but Uber is definitely smart.
In-Person Health Care as Option B (New England Journal of Medicine)
All investments have associated risks. e.g: Microsoft invested in Nokia and turned out bad, except for the acquisition of a substantial IP portfolio.
For my first car (2011), I was paid $1500 out of pocket, about $100/month in loan for 2 years, $40/month in insurance and about $80/month in gas, including out-of-town road trips and driving to airports 200 miles away.

That was pre-Uber, but last time I took an Uber in that town, it was about $10 one way for "short" distances (e.g. 4 miles to go to a grocery store - things are spread out in TX).

The car never had a high maintenance downtime (and only one fender-bender in the 7 years of ownership), and I can't account for maintenance; think it'd be under $80/month.

So we have about $300/month for car ownership, or about 10-15 Uber roundtrips/month. I'd say, there's no clear-cut conclusion here.