skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally envision quantum computers and machine learning working together to "solve" biology. QC would solve difficult molecular dynamics problems (like protein foldings, enzymatic reactions...) and ML would learn those results to simulate large aggregates of such molecules (like a whole cell or even a whole organism).
See also: "the network that ate my font"

http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/sysadmin-war-story-the-netw...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15258238

tldr; printers have a hardware cache for fonts that's cleared when rebooted, havoc ensues
I do devops consulting, and typically I end up with more billable hours for AWS setups than bare metal or managed server setups. The idea that AWS takes less effort to manage is flawed. What instead tends to happen is that more of it gets diffused out through the dev team, who often doesn't know best practices, but often nobody tracks how much of their time gets eaten up by doing devops stuff when there's nobody explicitly allocated to do the devops tasks.

There can be advantages in that the developers more often can do the tasks passably well enough that you can spread tasks around, but if it's not accounted for a lot of the time people are fooling themselves when it comes to the costs.

When it comes to large companies like Spotify, the situation changes substantially in that they're virtually guaranteed to pay a fraction of published prices (at least that's my experience with much smaller companies that have bothered to negotiate).
So do vegans have a workflow that makes their diet convenient. The thing is, one has to start somewhere, and no one starts anywhere because they see the change as inconvenient.
Vegetables are expensive because subsidies are small. There's no free market in agriculture.

I'm not exactly sure how candies are causing climate change.
I love how my paper and pens never try to force me into paying them $5/month forever.
It's not very hard for large planes to outpace a cruise jet, for the very reason that cruise speeds are rather far from maximum speeds. Even a cruise jet could outpace a cruise jet.
Full stack debugging + shaders has made this greybeard cry.
I am living in Lille, France, where Gobee.bike begun its French expansion. I am commuting by bike and as a cyclist I do agree with the comment above.

Dockless bikes quickly became a nuisance, a few days after gobee.bike released their fleet. People left those bikes everywhere, including on pedestrian space and bicycle lanes.

On a personal note : there is a well maintained and dock-based bike sharing system provided by the town council in Lille. If bike sharing, as some point, become a part of the town's infrastructure — see: Paris with Velib, Lyon and Lille — I do not see the need nor the space for concurrent offerings from different bike networks.
I wonder who these bikes are supposed to appeal to. If you are a cyclist then you have your own bicycle, or you have a choice of bicycles. You don't leave the door with your bike left behind so you can take the heavier, possibly vandalised, possibly unavailable public transport bike in order to get to your destination later.

Sometimes when catching the train I cannot take a bicycle. In theory I could hire a bike at the far end and just leave my bike at the start station. However, this I never think to do. I might think of getting a bus or even a taxi but I would never think to get a hire bike. Even though there is a rack of them outside the station.

Out of my non-cycling friends, the people that drive to work or just walk, these people have not taken their bicycles out of the shed for many, many years. They are no likely to re-orient their entire commuting experience around some hire bikes as they decided a long time ago that being on the streets with no crumple zones was not for them.

I do know people that do get about on Boris bikes once in a while, as a fun way to get around London with friends on a weekend, but not as part of a serious commute.

There are better ways to get bikes on the road, the bike to work tax free scheme being one of them. This has got a lot of people cycling in the UK. It is also about time that normal bicycles are a bit more legally sensible. With cars we no longer allow 1970's standards (e,g, no seat belts). I am not saying we add airbags to bicycles but we could update the law so bicycles have to have lights the minute they get put in the showroom, mandatory and part of the bike. LED lighting makes that doable.

Similarly, tyres could be made to be 'road legal' with some puncture protection made mandatory. There could also be a small tax benefit for bicycles designed for utility purpose, taxed differently to the sport bikes that have no mudguards.

With a lower tax on 'utility' bikes a subtle shaping of bikes sold could result in safer roads with more people riding year round, mostly for commuting reasons. People would be able to pay the extra for their carbon fibre road bikes that don't have the lights, mudguards and sensible lock, that would be standard VAT, not the bargain 'utility' rate.

A defined 'utility' bike that is personally owned could be insured very differently to a 'sports' bicycle, perhaps more affordably, with reasonable third party cover. Meanwhile 'fixies' such as that one that was involved in a tragic accident killing a pedestrian, those bikes would not be as cheap to ride or likely to be so prevalent on the roads.
My memory isn't as good as it used to be. I thought the article was about Edward Frenkel at first who wrote the fantastic novel Love and Math [1]. It's about his life growing up in Soviet Russia as a Jewish mathematician. He was good friends with the famed physicist Murray Gell-Mann who discovered a theory of hadrons, leading to the quark model we have today [2]. In the novel he talks about some of the groundbreaking work he has done. But he's mostly known for his cinema work on the emotional fullness of mathematics and physics. I would nominate him for a Nobel if I could. But Fields medals are about pure mathematical achievement, right? So I'm not sure he would qualify.

[1] http://amzn.to/2HKD3Mc
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics)
Ultimate Flourless Brownies for Two
I just sold my last Apple product ever - a mid-2016 Touch Bar, top-specs. The machine itself wasn't a problem, great form factor and beautiful design... but your points about serviceability, useful ports and dongles is so painful I can't stand it!

I had to purchase a $300USD dock from Elgato just to get full speed from an ethernet connection. I had to pay way more than cost to get a larger SSD and upgraded memory. The only thing the MBP 13,3 had over my Thinkpad E560 is a better graphics chip and slightly better Core i7.

The keyboard blows, the touchbar is kinda useful but only the 5-10% of time I'm not at my desk with the lid closed and the dock.

None of this is to mention the proprietary software.

Old MBP was leagues better. My #1 requirement for a laptop is "can I upgrade the hardware myself"
It does fall and rise on any quarter given apple’s predictable release schedule. Still, 20% sustained marketshare for China at the price they are selling compared to local competitors is quite the feat.
What's behind "don't skip breakfast?"

(see, e,g, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfa... )
There are a few comments under here about lights that default to "ON" after a power loss. I'm not clear why manufacturers didn't spring for a few bytes of Flash memory on the device to store last state. If my BIOS can maintain the ON/OFF state of my computer after a power outage, I'm not clear why my light bulb can't.
The people who take joy in vandalizing things will have no fear in a deposit especially since it’s impossible to prove if they vandalized anything.
It's not clear if they controlled for other factors. It may be that they simply have more money to buy them.
thanks for the link. this is about protecting our 'investments', the fallacy of sunk costs. OTOH if we try to be honest and self-aware, what we're left with are the few core values and ideals, mostly about what choices are acceptable to us, that form our moral core. Maybe that's what he meant by "narrow" identity.
China to scrap limit on presidential term
Our office has something like this: dimmable meeting room lights that are controlled by a single rocker switch.

Since the only UI is "hold the switch down for longer or shorter periods, or press it repeatedly", and there are no written instructions and no discoverability, nobody can reliably work it and we routinely hold meetings in the dim half-light.
I'm on the search for a new laptop as well.

After the Spectre/Meltdown debacle, it's hard to say if any system is free of severe vulnerabilities (unless one is an expert).

At any rate, my plan is to buy either a Dell or Thinkpad direct from manufacturer and install "libreboot".

Alternatively, Purism is attempting to create this type of product: https://puri.sm/products/
Because not enough people have read Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design"

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
Then there's the ST:TNG episode "Contagion" where the crew spends the entire hour futzing around with the Enterprise's computer only to come to the conclusion of "let's reboot it!"

Sigh.
Yes. The beauty of it is that building in the capability makes hosting your own even more cost competitive. Because while you might have to plan for 2x or even 3x your average to handle normal peaks if you don't have anywhere else to send traffic, if you can spin up cloud instances to handle spikes you can plan for far higher utilization rates for your own equipment.
> yet scant data indicates that it helps

But this is not the case. In the UK, these observations are entered into a proforma by the nursing staff which allows them to calculate a "National Early Warning Score". Based on the patients score, the nurse has to escalate to an appropriate team and the doctor on the appropriate team has to take the referral.

Not only does this help identify deteriorating patients, but it helps to fight human factors like "I don't want to call such and such a doctor because they are always rude on the phone so I'll just leave it and hope it gets better"

In terms of actual data, we have a national body (NICE) that provides guidelines and recommendations based on appraising the available data and research. For NEWS scores, see:

For an overview:
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg50/chapter/1-Guidance#phy...

For the full report and evidence used to compile the guideline:
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg50/evidence/full-guidelin...
Apart from old-school productions, there's very little assembly in modern demoscene. 64kB intros use mostly C++ (or Rust). Even for 4kB intros, assembly is not used very often (and the interesting code is in the shaders anyway).
In short, no.

Quantum computers don't really compute many things in parallel. Or rather, they do, but the problem is getting the results out.

To stick with your ray tracing question, you could probably indeed trace an exponentially (in the size of the computer) number of rays, but at the end you have to do go back to the classical world to actually read out data, and you'd essentially be able to only read out the result of one ray picked at random.

Quantum computers are only know to provide exponential speedups in cases where there is some algebraic structure to exploit when condensing the exponentially many computations down to a single result. That's why you can get an exponential speedup for factoring or discrete logarithm, but not for symmetric cryptography or really any other useful problem (except for the kind of circular problem of simulating quantum systems).

That's what makes me personally hope that quantum computers will never scale. The likely outcome of quantum computing is the worst of all worlds: all known practically useful cryptography will be broken, and practically nothing will really benefit.
Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness.

People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on the job that was never taught in school. Were they actually unprepared, or are they just judging new grads based on a viewpoint that's colored by several years?

When I was a hiring mgr, this could be one of the most frustrating things in a room. Trying to push to take a chance on a new grad, and having several others tell me they'd prefer the industry veteran who's lateraling. Even for "entry level" positions. Amazing how many people with really good CV's were applying for "entry level" jobs.

On a last thought, there also seems to be a strong lack of faith that people can learn on the job from hiring folks. Maybe its just the above mentioned flood of high CV talent. Software for example: You know: c, c++, java, javascript, haskell, and perl. Ah, but you don't know Ruby, and we're really looking for Ruby. But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more...
YouTubers are now just Uber drivers who might get rich
Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time
AWS (and other cloud provider) costs are non-uniform as you grow.

It goes something like this (from when you small to when you're huge):

- very/quite cheap
- prohibitively expensive
- much cheaper than building and maintaining own infra
- prohibitively expensive/more expensive than building and maintaining own infra

So various companies will end up at various stages of this cycle. Dropbox is big enough to be in the latest stage.
A great deal of the deposits are made during discount/promotional periods.
They're still bad phones - you can't answer or dial them without looking. It's just that they're far more useful as tiny internet tablets and people have in many cases gradually moved to text chat over voice.
> Yes, a lot of companies use cloud services when they don't need them. However, Google Cloud's compute pricing is reasonably similar to DigitalOcean (with sustained usage discounts) and from what I hear these companies will often negotiate discounts. AWS can seem a bit pricy compared to alternatives, but I'm guessing that Amazon offers just enough discounts to large customers that they look at the cost of running their own stuff and the cost of migration and Amazon doesn't look so bad.

Of course, the dollar amounts dropbox saved are compared to those negotiated prices.

In my experience it isn't so much the storage price itself, but the network transfer that makes AWS absurdly expensive.

Most companies don't need something like S3. They can perfectly suffice with one server, maybe using RAID-1, or just using backups. Data corruption mostly happens through logical errors anyway and nothing in S3 will protect you from that.
Yeah, but when tech innovation becomes the only way out of a shitty situation, you incentivize tech innovation! I guess some smart folk figured out that in order to maintain superpower status at all costs you need to maintain the lead at hard-to-replicate tech-innovation, and paying the cost of this with your people's quality of life, and sometimes with their lives, is worth it. For some people at the top it's a big difference between being at the top of "just some random first world country", and being at the top of "practically the world".

Regular people can change the countries they are living in if they don't like the tradeoffs their government is doing, you know... Or vote to change them, but don't be surprised when improving lives comes at the cost of losing "top dog" status.

(Note: I'm not an American, but I see the tradefoffs the U.S. made, and I understand they make sense to some.)
Google Pay’s big global rollout begins
Interesting opinion article on the transition in YouTube’s operating model.
And others pile it on in the name of "user friendliness" or "security"...
Ah, but that is exactly my point: You can lead a decent albeit depressed life on unemployment support. What's your motivation to improve, especially considering that you are in a position where motivation comes about as often as pigs fly?

I don't think there is much of a way to make the goal "nicer" (we can't demand that the jobs get better, and there is already significant benefit: better living standard, better mental health), so the only solution I can think of is to ensure that the hell you're in isn't comfortable enough that you just might end up staying.

Yes, having a decent life is the goal, but in Denmark, the only practical means to that end in this country is through financial income (I'm ignoring the option of already being filthy rich). If you wish to live without finances, you would have to find a country where that is possible—even full self-sufficiency is not free in Denmark. Likewise, avoiding a job, and thereby consuming the fruits of our taxes without contributing, is frowned upon.
Three Customer Experience Lessons from Amazon
Compiling (parts of) a C-based interpreter to C is definitely easier than writing a JIT. Precisely for the reasons mentioned, you can pretty much reuse the entire interpreter and gradually improve the generated code over time. And as an added benefit; once the whole thing can be compiled, you gain the capability to build native executables. I just went through the same process with Cixl myself:

https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/devlog/comp...
I work in embedded software, and Bluetooth is the worst. Hardware and software are crawling with bugs. I like to say it's the most unreliable technology in wide use.

What you see is after all the workarounds that some poor application developers had to implement.
> unsafe is a relatively small percentage of code overall

I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about percentage of code overall when discussing Rust. Take a look at http://githut.info/ you’ll see that majority of overall code is higher-level GC languages.

I’ve been professionally developing software since 2000, have a lot of experience with different languages and platforms, and I’m speaking from my experience. There’re 2 major reasons why now in 2018 I still pick C++ for some software or some components of it.

(1) Code that relies heavily on native interop. Like OS APIs for lower-level device IO, advanced networking stuff, GPU interop, other OS APIs. All of these APIs are C, or sometimes on Windows it’s C++.

(2) Performance-critical CPU bound code. One part of that is SIMD, but pointer-based structures also help a lot, and they are not small percentage of my code. BTW, another thing missing in current Rust is custom allocators. In C++ I can implement a custom allocator in just a couple hundred lines of code, and plug it into any collection for non-trivial performance gain in some use cases: https://github.com/Const-me/CollectionMicrobench Another C++ feature helping me with these performance-critical calculations is OpenMP.

Of course, Rust evolves quite fast, and it may change some day. But in its current state, I don’t think Rust is an adequate C++ replacement for the kind of problems I solve in C++.
Show HN: Creating Custom Ubuntu Web Link App
Digital reality: The focus shifts from technology to opportunity
I'm going to verbatim copy a conversation I had on twitter a few weeks ago[0], because it seems particularly relevant, and I want to credit whomever is behind the algoglitches twitter account with coming up with the term "formerly fixable objects":

@JobvdZwan: My mother called me the other day asking why I "installed Bing". Because she does not grasp that software can modify itself, it did not occur to her that Firefox itself switched after an auto-update. In this light it makes sense that family members blame you for "breaking" their computer if you helped them out months or years before: if you fix, say, a door, it will not spontaneously change after that. But fixing a computer is not like fixing a door.

@algoglitches: Interestingly doors will probably be computers a few years from now cf https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/you-a... . We will refer to them as "formerly fixable objects" and they will produce their own glitches.

@JobvdZwan: Did you just make up the term "formerly fixable objects"? Because that should be a term.

[0] https://twitter.com/JobvdZwan/status/962328161429151745
seriously guys? why is this being discussed? just get normal switches and try to use the saved time to develop a product which provides actual value to the world.
Standing desks 'increase pain' and slow down mental ability, study suggests
On ground standing still and at 30,000 ft height is probably the safest times for the generators to fail. Plenty of time to fix. Imagine this happening during take-off or landing?
The counterargument on the last one (Human-competition threshold) seems weak (and simply wrong) to me. In related link argument for wide range of human abilities rests basically on comatose humans being unable to do anything at all and mutation-adds-random piece-to-machine metaphor.

Mentally-impaired human intelligence level is enough to replace some of the workforce, combined with some actuators and perception abilies of average human.
China poised to end two-term limit on presidency
No, spending $100m does not make sense either.
Does the growth of machine learning require politically aware programmers?
China proposes to let Xi Jinping extend presidency beyond 2023
Clinician impact and financial cost to NHS of litigation over pregabalin
That's what i meant. Sacking democracy and market economy to fix these things is an overkill and there is hardly a better way.

European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.
The low-cost mini satellites bringing mobile to the world
The Phone Charger of the Future Will Go Pew Pew
IMO there are many many more reasons:

- you need to iterate rapidly with with scale and reliability. if you have the right expertise this becomes very quick to setup. it lets you focus 100% on product iterations.

- you need (predictable) on-demand compute for crunching large amounts of data or running some batch jobs. it just doesn't make sense to do this on your own equipment.

- your median cpu utilization is low, so you want to save costs and you move to a serverless architecture, effectively moving the cpu utilization you pay for to 100%.

- But most importantly AWS isn't just compute and storage primitives: AWS has a vast array of abstractions on top of the cloud primitives: managed clusters, machine learning services, virtual desktops, app streaming, CI/CD pipelines, built-in IAM and Role based access control, to name a few !
Yesterday i was used my what's up number in my sister what's up account. After that i was again used my what's up number in my account. But today I understand my older what's up and installed what's up latest version. I Am trying to open up my account of my older number but it's not working. Veryfying code not come. What I can do now?
which LUT?
consider that the cost of complying is immediate and borne by the agent, whereas the penalty of defection is discounted according to the degree to which people believe it can be postponed (insofar as they consider the penalty at all).
Everlasting Thoughts – Blockchain based text sharing platform
There is lack of faith that people can learn another Angular version even. You have experience wih 1.6?! We do TS+Angular 4 over here, sorry mate! Such companies are simply not hiring - bragging, teasing, probing the market perhaps - but certainly not hiring. Not only the framework landscape is broken but as well people are extremely anal about their preferences and choices.
Seconded, but I know it as "surgeon knot". Someone show it to us on a seminar as proper method to tie dance shoes, because other methods are not working at all.