skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At my day job have an a prod analytics service with all the stuff you mention written in Rust + PG, and the Rust bit which handles data ingestion via HTTP and JSON is only about 5x faster than the equivalent Ruby code. Obviously, that was a big disappoitment to me.

5x isn't too shabby for something potentially somewhat IO-bound. Presumably the effort wasn't 5x to build and maintain that, so if that's a very hot inner loop of something that's great.

What I've found is that using Ruby (mainly gems) idiomatically can just lead to way slower performance. Eg I use time libraries a lot for my day job, and the idiomatic way to write the code had tons of hidden costs and was basically impossible to optimize.

So I wrote a ruby extension in rust, and got a 30x speedup on that code - it was pretty computationally intensive, so a perfect fit for this. Part of it was that I was forced to use more primitive types, but in Rust-land I was able to add types all over the primitives and abstract away to my heart's content, without any overhead. That's just something that's impossible in Ruby - each abstraction always has a cost and there's no way around it.

If you look at the work Aaron Patterson and Shaun Griffin have done and are doing on AR, or what Peter Ohler has done with Oj, I don't think it's fair to say that either the Rails or Ruby ecosystem doesn't care about performance. They just don't put it before usability by default.

Right I wouldn't say nobody cares about performance, some people care a lot and they've been doing great work and helping raise the bar. But overall, the bar is pretty low in the Ruby world.

Chris Seaton (one of TruffleRuby's main authors) has a talk where he shows some of the batshit insane code you see in gems, which they had to figure out how to optimize in TruffleRuby/Graal. Code like allocating a new array and calling the `min` method in order to find the smaller of two values! And that was being called in a hot inner loop! In a gem with otherwise great functionality, a nice website and thousands of users. That's the kind of thing you only see in Ruby-land.

Also, using method_missing (gotta have that pretty DSL, performance and greppability/discoverability be damned) and monkey-patching/alias-chaining/etc is still common unfortunately (though a smart JIT, ie Graal, can apparently handle that).

I am really excited about TruffleRuby and it does really amazing things to optimize crazy Ruby code, so I'm looking forward to Ruby being as fast as say JS in the future. Can't wait for the day I can turn on TruffleRuby in production and halve the AWS bill.
There's a general class of crypto for solving this problem called a VRF. Algorand also has a very clever way to solve the randomness problem, including a method to foil an attacker that is even able to get lucky repeatedly.
>There are health benefits to eating less meat.

Are there? To what extent?

I'd very much like to see the science to back up a blanket statement like that.
> C isn't a special snowflake in the realm of systems programming languages, there are plenty of languages

That's just not true. You see something like assembly, which seems so low-level and implementation-focused, and then you see java with all its high-level complexity and it seems like it's fundamentally something different. C bridges that gap, because you can see all the ways in which it's exactly the same as assembly, yet all the ways in which it's exactly the same as java. If you truely want to understand a computer on every level from silicon to state-machines (idk, it was the first thing that came to mind), C belongs on that stack.

What makes c special is not its capabilities, but rather its lack of abstraction.
Consciousness described as a physical process is different than explaining how you, visarga, are able to experience reality. Understanding how that idea of internal experience, of being, could relate to a plant, seems the revelation here.
one thing, if you were talking keys of length 2048, your talking RSA, and to break it you are applying GNFS, not trying all the numbers up to 2^2048.

2^2048 is so astronomically large a number it has no universe sized meaning, its likely way way more than any discrete chunking you can do of stuff in the whole universe.

Something like 2^128 or 2^256 are more common 'brute' force type numbers, which would correspond to trying every key in a symmetric cipher like AES or a public key signature in ECDSA

2^256 is similarly quite large, but we can practically estimate this to be about the number of atoms in tens of thousands of galaxies.
Not the op, but I have done this on behalf of friends. Some with significant assets. Did you admit to having assets or significant income? If so, it might be very difficult to negotiate. Google for medical bill negotiation services or "lower my hospital bill" and you should be able to find some professionals near you. The consultation is always free. Be aware that some hospitals have become completely unreasonable in the last few years and would rather you file bankruptcy and collect nothing than negotiate. The initial consult with the negotiation service is always free and they will tell you if this is the case.
I think it's about the scarce ones. For example, oil is scarce, and the US goes through great and terrible lengths to ensure we get enough of it.

On the other hand, it's also true that war is often caused by greedy leadership.
But how confusing that we might bring our human thought processes to an after life where we'd need to see Jesus to make us feel comfortable. Wouldn't it make more sense for an afterlife to be so different from our human experience that it's almost undescribable?

I'd like to think that young children who pass away aren't trapped in an adolescent mindset after death. Growing up in heaven is equally unbelievable.

Instead I think it's highly probably that these near death experiences are more similar to deep meditation where we explore our innermost selves.
Of course it will happen. Over-inflation of asset value leading to large scale economic adjustment is a built in feature of our economic model.
No. It is mocking the idea that the food choices of vegetarians makes them morally superior and entitled to look down their noses at everyone else and be awful to them.

My dislike of the tendency for vegetarians to be all holier than thou was solidified while I was homeless and being harassed online by a holier than thou vegan* who claimed to be vegan because she couldn't tolerate the suffering of the farm raised animals. Meanwhile, she took glee in adding to my suffering, though I was extremely ill and desperately poor because of it.

I am a big fan of "go pray in your closet." Making food choices because you sincerely believe they are morally right is totes cool. Being an asshole to anyone who doesn't eat like you, not so much.

* To make matters worse, she wasn't really a committed vegan. In cold weather, she happily added cheese to her diet. She just preferred to call herself vegan for the virtue signaling associated with it.
Which is strange, considering 34k people in the US alone die each year in car accidents. Driving is a high risk activity.
> BitCoin is not useful as a payment method; it's too slow and wasteful (the hardware and energy requirements are absurd) and the transaction fees are too high.

If you're paying a contractor it's easier and more reliable than paypal and the fees are a fixed amount of money, not a percent like credit card merchants. Plus the lightning network is rolling out.

> BitCoin is not useful as a store of value; the price is incredibly unstable and open to manipulation.

agreed, currently the case, however there is increasing amount of research in stable coins ( makerdao and basecoin, not tether)

> BitCoin is not secure; if you're a victim of fraud there's no recourse. There have been so many heists I can't even keep track of them all.

bitcoin has never been hacked. On the contrast there are tons of examples of paypal and banks locking up funds from individuals, no way to do that on bitcoin

> It's not private; if your wallet address is ever associated with you, everything you ever did is laid out for all to see.

the official client recommends using a new address for each payment you receive and send, also coins like monero exist for full private
Yes, it will and it's already working.

https://www.ccn.com/lightning-network-reaches-1000-mainnet-p...
I've seen numerous big rails apps with times as long or longer, even after decent effort has been put in to optimize. Generally a case of having a lot of things on a page and rendering it all into html server-side (the classic/old rails way of doing things).
CSS selectors for PDF elements?
Is there something like this?
Some make the "minimally conscious" argument about the animals we use as food sources now.

Wonder how deep that rabbit hole will be in 100 years.
Just tried to order 3x15ft rope lights from a sight for that sort of stuff. Around $60 for each spool. They wanted $161 shipping. Same thing on Amazon, $70 each with free shipping. My wife and I order something once a week at least (household stuff). Prime works out well. Plus we get to watch the Grand Tour!
~$1 trillion of real estate is on the move from shifts in commuting expectation
Have you ever just ran until you couldn't run anymore, for reasons other than physical activity itself? There's a point at which you feel you could go further, and in fact know you can, but you choose to stop because the discomfort and exhaustion at that point outweighs the purpose of the run. I can imagine and speculate this is what is meant. The dancers exhausted the point of the dance, and then would fall to the ground for quickest relief, just as you might throw yourself onto a bench after a spontaneous, excess-driven sprint.
> Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die!

Google can't even make GPS mapping work perfectly - it's apparent if you use it for a day. Not to mention that AI vision systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which means they can be hacked by external images. This paper just came out yesterday: "Breaking 7/8 of the ICLR 2018 adversarial example defenses" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00420). The situation is dire.

I think they are afraid that drawing a couple of lines with a marker on a street sign might make it invisible, or turn it into another sign. They can't defend against such attacks because the neural net doesn't actually understand the world, it just observes patterns. Understanding requires causal reasoning.
Pong wasn't the point...
That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed.

Web browsers have progress bars.

I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
Yes, or more in line with it not being a real phenomenon. Instead it might be possible that certain blood loss or panic induces an almost meditative state and that those occur more often when close to death. Tons of people have had similar experiences meditating, taking hallucinagens or on vision quests. My guess is that those experiences are related in some way rather than our souls not sure if they're really dead or not.
US is the best country to have medical problems if you have money AND know how to be a good healthcare consumer. If you don't know how to be a good healthcare consumer, you can buy those services too!
How souped up are we talking..?

Driver of the Tesla might have been inadequate, anecdotes and many videos online show it (and even electric mopeds against some pretty fast stuff!), at minimum, taking the early lead, as you indicated.
I emailed you on gmail posted on the web site.

Let’s chat.
F1's on AWS are I think ultrascale+, though I don't know how fast Amazon actually lets you drive them.
That was the end-game. They didn't have enough reserves to cover liabilities long before there were outward signs.
> The flip side of that is that they aren't contributing much to insurance premiums.

Can we be certain of that? That is, even if the vaccination costs $30 to $40, will the insurance be billed for that amount, or do they get billed something like $300 instead?

I haven't tried to pay for a influenza vaccination out of pocket recently, so I don't know what most places would charge.
"For these reasons, CloudKit allows several first-party apps to run their conflict-resolution code in server extensions. This allows the app more flexibility to specify what other records and information it needs to resolve the error. In some cases, iterative resolution is performed by the extension. For example, in iCloud Drive when a client attempts to store a record representing a file and the file name conflicts with an existing file, the extension may attempt to rename the new file but in doing so may create a conflict with a different file, requiring additional resolution rounds. To facilitate server-side resolution, CloudKit stores conflicted records and server extensions are expected to clean-up such records after conflict resolution."

Interesting — I wonder if 3rd party developers will ever get access to this functionality?
If my hasty math is in the ballpark, the raw data for 500 trillion square meters would be a few hundred petabytes. Not cheap, but cheap enough that I would guess the cost and logistics of acquiring the data are much more of an obstacle.
Plenty of very smart people have terrible social and emotional intelligence.

So, I don't think so.
Yes. Basically if your reason to not eat meat is because you want to minimize your carbon footprint then usually you won't attack people for what they eat, but because they have a larger carbon footprint.

Personally I fly a lot (I don't particularly want to), so therefore I could never use that argument. But I have met people who fly as much as I do who try to pull the morally superior diet card and I just move on because they have missed the point entirely.
Not so sure about that.

I've literally missed the sign on a trade before, and it was 7-figure disastrous. (I've missed the direction of movement on individual symbols a number of times, but this one time I literally went the wrong way on everything by accident.)

Markets adjust too quickly to flip your position and profit in any reliable way. On planned or anticipated events, people are all locked and loaded waiting for something to happen.

However, I'd much rather know the sign because at least I can put on some position and guess a little at the magnitude.
Super random to see this pop up like 30 seconds after I was listening to this Todd Terje song featuring him (a cover actually but this version is great):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Din_eWjJWe0

Great slow synth pop type track if you're into that.
There are people with jobs, families, and other hectic schedules that still walk their dogs, attend clubs, mow their lawns, put up Holiday lights, have hobbies, even volunteer.

What I'm against is this crab mentality and envy that having contributions to open source is looked upon as if it's yacht sailing - when it's really hard work and quite thankless, heh.

I highly doubt every time I hear people saying "they don't have time", the person truly optimizes their schedule to be productive, or has forgone common "normal" timewasters.

Every time someone is playing video games, chatting, using social media, watching TV, and having spent on nothing productive: that is when open source can happen. You can do a lot in an hour of time.

If you look at my open source contributions (to other projects), more than half are:

- updating continuous integration / tests

- code styling

- documentation

- typos

How much time does it take to fix a typo? 1 minute.

To improve documentation? 5-25 minutes.

Code styling? 1 minute to 1 hour.

Updating CI? 10 minutes to 1 hour.

Those are all great stepping stones to help you gain momentum, instead of malingering with no direction. Nobody is going to come along and volunteer on your behalf, this is about your personal constitution.

A lot of my other patches come from work. In the natural course of duty, there's opportunity to send code back upstream.

My largest contributions span 2 days or more.
Whoever's behind it seems to be stuck at the "gaussian blur compensates for all forms of design inexperience!!1" stage too.
Researchers create optical transistor comparable to an electronic transistor
This. Why, why, why?

I mean, I'm sure there's an ostensible reason. Maybe there's metrics that show it increases engagement (which I'd believe, since it kindof fits with the studies that say an uncertain reward is more addictive than completely predictable reward). Maybe adding a special sauce ML algorithm to the feed generation process lets a product manager add a bullet point to their resume and yearly review.

But I kindof think the reason has to be something that is not going to be particularly user driven or otherwise reflect well on FB, because as far as I can tell most users who are conscious about it reaaaally would like to be able to at least set a setting that would give them a strict chronological feed. And yet, that's never an option, and FB never even seems to talk about reasons why they know their way is totally awesome.
Very little of what I write is so specialized that no part of it involves anything that might be useful in different contexts. Some parts, yes, of course. When I see something I'd like to use again and again in different contexts, I implement that component as a module.

By publishing a module as FLOSS, it becomes extremely simple to install. And these modular components join the grand, continually evolving chain of FLOSS tools.

At first it was kind of a nuisance to go through this process. Now it's almost automatic, and very fast and easy. What I found useful to me might be useful to others some day.
City Sunglass
If you’ve ever made a chatbot you have to do this. Add in a fake few seconds delay so it seems like it’s considering what you said in its reply. Replying instantly makes you feel like you’re being railroaded and ignored.
I coded a font composed of animated pie charts. Like it?
I wouldn't say one encourages chaos over another. The background is a simple pattern that emerges early on while the social dynamics of the "place" are being discovered by the participants. It's literally the simplest coherent thing you can create and requires virtually no communication between participants.

As time goes on coalitions form, cooperation becomes explicit and you end up with more complex patterns (the rainbow) and art (the minion). You saw this same thing play out in /r/place too.
Perhaps they will need to have the latest sound simulation tech to lively it up for the fans.
Well map software on a phone isn't written to specs that account for liability for human life for one. Apples and oranges.
JS lets you easily implement bars that do reflect progress.

Turn on the animation => start an async action (e.g. a database call) => end the animation. An error occured? Show the error. Here, simple and informative to the user - and much better than raw html.
Indian aviation industry hails Union Budget 2018 – Aviation
Microsoft (Chakra JavaScript Runtime team) | Seattle (Redmond) | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/

The Chakra JavaScript runtime team works on Chakra (the JavaScript runtime that powers Edge and other Microsoft properties), and ChakraCore (the Open Source heart of Chakra). We work primarily in the open, with standards bodies and the Node community, to help make JavaScript and the web better for developers everywhere.

We are looking for somebody with C++ performance engineering expertise to come join us on our mission to make JavaScript fast with Chakra on these platforms. You must be eligible to work in the US, have 5+ years of experience writing high-performance C++ code, have some background writing JavaScript (either for the web or Node), have expertise in low-level performance tooling and investigations and be interested in participating in technical discussions in the open with both internal partners and external communities. Compiler/Runtime experience is a plus, as is experience with API design. You will be required to pass Microsoft background checks prior to the start of employment and periodically thereafter. Further details regarding this process will be provided in follow up correspondence.

This is a unique opportunity to do work helping millions of users around the world, and to participate in open communities to shape the future of JavaScript. If you think that geeking out about language design, squeezing out that last bit of performance by hand-tuning assembly instructions, closely analyzing perf traces or working on the next generation developer tools, sounds like fun, send us a short intro + resume to chakracore (at) microsoft (dot) com.
I probably should have put a winky in there.

Whoops.
Some sort of scheme using Shamir's Secret Sharing with a set of oracles, as long as it's not possible for the oracles to easily discover each other to collude to decrypt the secret on their own.
Ask HN: Which books do you wish you'd read earlier in life?
Which books do you wish read when you were younger?

Alternatively:

Which books that you read while younger do you wish you'd followed more closely / taken to heart more?
It seems unlikely. PDF files are generated by a huge number of programs, each doing it differently. There's also almost no semantic information in the PDF format.

Every time I have to extract information from PDFS that isn't simply text or pixel graphics I'm basically starting from scratch.
Duplicate: This story has been posted 3 times in the last 24 hrs...but the title has been changed here.

Search :

~$1 trillion of real estate is on the move … here’s why

For example - I posted it yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282215
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Hire a medical bill auditing service, usually the initial consult is free. I don't know which hospital but they will certainly tell you if it's one that is unreasonable and refuses to negotiate.
I have no professional experience in finance, and I wouldn't try to go long volatility because it's too expensive and risky, but why can't you buy puts and calls at the same time? Or, I have read that there are options on the VIX.
US football cryptowars imagined by a 1970s NSA employee
I find the pseudo-moralizing about law-abiding citizens to be rather grating.

If a stranger in front of me dropped a $20 bill I would certainly let them know. However, that doesn't mean I am a law-abiding citizen. My empathy does not prevent me from stealing from grocery chains, whether faced with a human cashier or a machine. My morality is not based on law, nor should law equate to morality in all cases.
An example of a problem where Ruby significantly outshines Python would be welcome.
Yeah. How do you slice consciousness?

Consciousness, like Artificial Intelligence, is a slippery concept. They both tend toward being unattainable by anything-other-than-human:

i. As we implement progressively more abstract concepts in computers, those layers of abstraction become mundane things that computers can do.

ii. As we learn more and more about how non-robot-like other organisms are we can quite easily push consciousness further in to the human-only corner by just adjusting the definition of consciousness.

Insofar as consciousness can be defined as the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings the yes, plants certainly are conscious.*

Do they posses self-awareness?
Ask HN: Are there any good online communities for macOS devs?