skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hitchhiker's paradox is correct, taking a point and looking backward or forward will correctly give an average event 10 minutes away, but combining the events to give an average of 20 minutes is false. Two events have been chosen resulting in a conditional probability.

Put more clearly, an event happens on average 10 minutes in the past, but using the same starting point for the event in the future links the events with a dependency. We could also arbitrarily start looking forward at the instance of the event in the past, or another random point in time.
> How is being able to detect circular references a useful skill?

For all kinds of systems, where there are references input by users as data, one needs to be able to contend with this. Systems which crawl webpages have to contend with this. Parser-transformation systems need to detect these. Such detection could be useful in memory management. It's not just the ability to detect a circular reference. It's the ability to contend with problems of that type.

Furthermore, two of those UC system CS grads had eerily similar responses, consisting of, "Oh, is that a graph algorithm?" plus a literal handwave. Is there some pool of TAs somewhere that has that attitude towards graph algorithms?
In "Liars and Outliers" Schneier argues that perfect security (in the form of perfect compliance with all societal rules and norms) isn't the sort of society most people would want to live in, and that some degree of disobedience is unavoidable and occasionally desirable in a free society.

Not that Schneier is condoning what Manafort did here. Rather, I think the implication is that if you are doing something that runs contrary to what those who control the levers of power in society would want and you don't want to leave a record of what you're doing, you shouldn't use email. Or even if you're not doing anything suspicious but just want some privacy.
Quite a few times I’ve googled something only to hit SO answer as the first match where the accepted answer is my own... Oh, right...
That list is for CrankShaft which has been replaced by TurboFan > 6 months ago. If you continue to experience slowdowns please file a bug and it can be investigated.
Agree. Need to be able to see what it is and play with before I set up an account. The point to prompt to create an account is when the user is about to leave: "set up an account to save this page".
Tracking Down a Compute Shader Heisenbug in Elite
Ask HN: Can't remember a URL consolidation service I saw on here awhile back
Hey all - awhile back I saw a posting here for a service that could consolidate an organizations URLs with a base URL.

For instance, for company xx you would have:

github.xx.com
jira.xx.com
zendesk.xx.com
etc etc

Through your account with this service you would specify the destinations of these URLs/subdomains (ie github.xx.com would take you to xx's github page).

Ring any bells?

Thanks!
> Frankly, I’ve seen as many golang error handling bugs in the wild as I ever did with java or c# style exceptions.

This has not been my experience. Idiomatic Go -- that is, not trying to do obtuse, clever, or dumb things to avoid error handling -- results in very clean and error-free code by default. I see unexpected runtime errors maybe a few times a year. I haven't seen unexpected panics in years.
These pitfalls sound specific to payment systems, but really they're just software engineering pitfalls viewed through a payment lens.

Be careful around the types you're using to represent monetary amounts. Strongly typed languages will give you some defense against accidental rounding errors (don't use floats).

Are you adding a payment system to a product or are you creating a payment service that your product will use? Coupling your product / business logic with your payment/billing code may work for now... but in a year you may need to add another consumer or extend the billing code in a way that won't be possible if it's too tightly coupled with the business logic. Will you need to support multiple payment options per user? Subscriptions?

Also, if you're planning on using a single CC processor, Stripe is a pretty good choice. Just be careful about the coupling I mentioned earlier, you don't want to be too tightly coupled to any external services (like Stripe or another processor).

Another thing to keep in mind -- what does downtime look like? Will your payments fail, will you lose customers? Or is it designed to handle and recover from downtime.
You are beyond ill informed. The huge majority of middle American housing is located in areas with much better air quality than any of the big coastal cities like Los Angeles.
I can't tell of this is disengenuous or not..
I think that looks awesome! Makes me wish I was a JS programmer so I could try it out :)
Considering that Xiaomi or Huawei don't run iOS, it seems like a good deal to me ;-)
Definitely! I'm glad to see this is on other people's minds :)

We're huge on backwards compatibility (and think everyone should be), which is why we don't want to expose something we haven't stabilized yet. We'll have a way to export our just-before-codegen internal representation (shame on me for forgetting the PL term) once it settles down a bit. It's very much like a DOM, so there's not too much craziness there.

We'll be launching a bunch more backends in the coming weeks, so there's a good chance we'll have first-party support for your favorite framework anyway :)
Yes, unless you're gay or smoke pot or like free speech or...
As a French, I think I've as much "China/SE Asia is overfishing" as "Europe is overfishing". But usually it turns political very quick, since the region supported by the fishing industry don't have many other economical prospects.
When people talk about state machines, do they mean deterministic finite automatons? Because i can see a lot of ubiquity in state transition tables in code, but less use in deciding whether to reject or accept a sequence of states which is essentially what a DFA does.
I find this silly to the point of absurdity. I spend far too much time online, read laterally as much as vertically, and have no trouble reading books. I spend 1-2 hours a day reading books of all sorts and have never noticed this attention gathering issue. My kids, who grew up online, also read books and do not seem to have this issue. My granddaughter, who interacts with the Internet mostly through voice at this point (yes, my son has one of those devices and it is interesting to ask her what she thinks she is talking to when she has a conversation with Google) is also quite able to sit down and read a book and spends about an hour reading to herself most days. I don't think any of us are special. I think this is an invented claim being used to make a polemical point.
All credit for the monaco editor to our awesome friends at Stackblitz (stackblitz.com). Gonna announce the depth of that partnership soon ;)

Native VS Code integration is already here! The “3 screens” you see (design, code, preview) are just there for the demo— only the design editor on top is part of Pagedraw. You get to use your regular text editor (VS Code included), and localhost env if you use the full version and install the CLI https://documentation.pagedraw.io/cli/

> Design -> Code is definitely a big problem. Creation time is one, but updating should be easy too.

Updating is super easy if you do the updates in Pagedraw. Since everything is component based, you should never touch the generated code. All the code you write goes in adjacent components that import and are imported by Pagedrawn components. You never need to roundtrip, because you never need to edit the generated code
Shedding old architectures and compilers in the kernel
Hilarious that you use the word "efficient" and then in the next sentence make the claim that the US military has done a great job at keeping the country safe. Yes, they do a good job. But the US military is one of the most bloated, over-funded organizations in human history.
There was a 1.5 hour gap after this block:

https://blockchain.info/block-height/152217
I've long felt that the appeals process for a real estate tax appraisal should include the owner's option of, "Deal! I'll sell it to you [the city/town/county] for 90% of the value you just appraised it for, subject only to being eligible for a Certificate of Occupancy [which cannot be unreasonably withheld]."

Optionally, add a provision that, if the town objects, the owner names a new price for the appraisal that the town can either accept as a valid appraisal or purchase the property for 111% of the owner's figure.
And be careful when communicating with and/or meeting the strangers who contact you. They might not be who they purport to be.
Probably the best way to do this that would actually be fair and as accurate as plausible would be to auction some sort of contractual instrument that pays out or charges the bearer depending on the difference between the sale price (whenever the land happens to sell again, if ever) and a predicted price (set by the auction). The land would be taxed at the rate established by the auction, and the instrument would be configured such that manipulating the auction on your own property is economically unfavorable. This would allow people with expertise in accurate land pricing to make (a bit of) money and remove any arbitrary or unfair pricing from a tax assessor.
"Intentionally misleading" describes practically every headline ever written about Apple.
Serious question but why would ANY engineer stay in such a company ?

There is such a high demand in the bay area for skilled engineers that there is absolutely no reason to stay into any of those startups that treat you like codemonkey. I would leave the first day I have an "ethical" remark after taking a 15` break
Every single example I can find makes it painfully clear it is an undirected graph. Sets may differ going from one direction to the other simply because it is only trying to find a sample set of correlations, not an exhaustive set.
What message does Austin, Dallas, and Boulder send?
Show HN: Deploy a Go Lambda to Ping a Site in 20 Seconds
The most important aspect of cryptocurrency is censorship-resistance, accomplished through decentralization.

Reading your comment, I don't know why you would be interested in cryptocurrency at all.
* What is the average time it takes to mine a block?

* If I choose a time uniformly what is the expected time it will take to mine that particular block.

The difference between them being that blocks that take a long time occupy more space on the timeline than shorter blocks and are therefore more likely to be chosen.
Going through a period of personal reflection right now. Have read the OP essay easily a dozen times over the last 5-6 years. Somehow I read it again yesterday and by chance, here it is today, HN front page.

I'm a traditionally educated engineer (comp eng degree from big 10 midwestern school) who was what I'd call medium ambitious. I knew I didn't want to end up somewhere in some small backwater in suburban Chicago (where I'm from) doing IT for a bank. I always wanted to make great products and sell them for money.

Silicon Valley has changed a lot in the 7 years I've lived here. It's crazy how much venture capital is getting raised today. It seems like almost every week, there's yet another record broken in VC. Instacart just raised 400 million dollars recently. And now Justin Kan's Atrium is doing $10 million on a story and it seems practically every day another self-driving car startup is doing a nine-figure raise.

Looking back, pg is right. For as much as SV claims to be about technology/innovation, it's really all driven by the fastest route to economic power. The place has become noticeably more driven by business guys, "growth hacking", virality, etc. than actual product innovation. Maybe it's for the best, as a lot of innovation is actually in distribution (not just product). But it does make me wonder, what's next for this place?

The big question I'm trying to figure out for myself is, do I want to play the big-money startup game or be a small business owner? The distinction is getting sharper each day. I never really wanted to be a billionaire but realistically, "having a big effect on the world" is absolutely how things are measured here, and if you aren't trying to dent the universe, you're basically viewed as a zero here.

It's interesting what guys like tom preson-werner have done. He could probably be a famous brand-name VC (has the resume and connections for it) but instead, he's doing a second company in language learning. I really respect that he wants to build good stuff, even if it doesn't mean raising a bazillion dollars. I'm not surprised the company isn't HQ'd here.

EDIT: It's also interesting how just "doing something big" impresses SV, even if you don't succeed. Examples: Slava (rethinkdb), Dalton Caldwell (several failed startups, now partner at YC), Adora Cheung (also partner at YC after Homejoy crashed and burned), etc. They seem to respect ambition perhaps even more than building a solid business or company. It's really bizarre.
Taking care of yourself and those around you is basically the definition of tribal thinking. It is that which leads to being unable to address wider scale problems which involve everyone.
White settlers buried the truth about the Midwest’s mysterious mound cities
Previous discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158868

Side note, why is this story allowed to remain on the front page yet this one from 4 hours ago was removed with 22 upvotes on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468939

Bias? Selective rule enforcing? Both links are high quality technical reports. There's clearly a feature for PAST submissions on each HN link.
The 2018 version of this is https://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2018/alternative-...

I'm not sure why the 2016 release was posted instead.
The algorithm as expressed in the article is simply the result of observing simple mechanical actions. We don't know whether those mechanical actions are actually what the ants are 'thinking about' when they build a bridge. As a result we've 'mapped' actions that the ants take into terms that make sense to us. It's not clear what "the algorithm" looks like in the original space, i.e. in the ants' heads.
Inheritance is a way of relating two or more pieces of code; it's a programming abstraction. If you try to apply it to the problem domain, by "modeling" things, for example, you're in for a bad time.
You act like spending $50k on something you don't need is the equivalent of lighting the cash on fire. That money goes back into the economy. It provides jobs, it increases money velocity. For the economy as a whole, it's really good that the wealthy or large companies aren't super frugal with their money. After all, someone has a business employing people to make custom leather interiors for private jets, when the standard interior (or first class commercial) will do just fine.
Thanks for the feedback! Working on the live demo.
State machines (that contain both labeled and unlabeled transition systems) may indeed serve as operational semantics of some formalisms, but they can be denotational semantics of others, or even studied completely separately from any programming formalism.

Not only process algebras, but even the lambda calculus is naturally expressed as a state machine, where the states represent the expression, and transitions represent possible reductions (lambda calculus is nondeterministic).
If you look through the later items in the series, it seems to get more complex than this. In particular, a character can use either 0 or 1 weapons at a particular moment, and either class can also use the Dagger weapon. It's not that each character inherently only has, and uses, the only weapon appropriate to that character -- this would make things quite a bit simpler.
As far as I understand, the insurance-negotiated system works more or less fine in USA, the major problems seem to be with uninsured rates; I have no first-hand experience from USA but the discussion about the health system claims that often they're either not able to obtain such information (especially if they'd be shopping to obtain a quote from multiple providers) or, alternatively, get hit with significant "surprise" extra bills from different additional providers. Of course, the issue may be exaggerated, but that's the impression I've got from media.
Just to be clear, the title isn't (just) meant to be provocative. I'm honestly curious why Millennials don't seem to be engaged locally with their communities. Any ideas?!
Stellar Smart Contracts
> Think heel striking happens because of the large heels we have have in shoes.

I think you are right. I had to wear "normal" shoes after wearing zero-drop shoes for about a year. Within a few minutes of walking, I was back to heel striking.
Thank you for your feedback. As I add design/add additional features to GitMeet, how can I also be attracting users to reach critical mass? While the ideas that I originally outlined are certainly sensible, is there anything in particular that I am missing in my approach? Are there other ways of spreading the word about GitMeet? Thank you for your thoughts and time!
I live in NOLA. Universities cannot retain promising young faculty because they don’t want to raise kids here (unless they were born here themselves)
After 2016 rocket explosion, Elon Musk’s SpaceX looked seriously at sabotage
We've been teetering on the verge of collapse for a very long time and we keep failing to globally collapse.

Maybe watch Saving Private Ryan? How do you know your random database issue isn't the lynchpin that you need to fix to help keep us from the verge of collapse?

If all the little cogs in the machine fail, we got issues.
really interesting, thanks for the post ^^
Sounds like the kind of situation which will crash once interest rates rise. I hope your cash is in USD or another solid currency. At this point I do not think it is a question of getting lucky, if anything you want it to keep going. Longer it goes on the more cash you have and the higher the discount rates.

My worry would be that once prices crash two challenges will appear:

1. Once the crash starts there will be tons of attempts to stall the inevitable. It could be months before prices hit a true low point.

2. Credit is going to dry up. Domestic banks will not have the balance sheets to allow for further lending. What loans will be available will be hard to get and more expensive than is "fair".

Which speaks to how difficult it is for consumers to benefit from conservative behavior in times of folly. Unless you save enough to buy discounted assets in cash out-right consumers buying at the bottom of the market are also buying in the context of restricted credit.

For my own situation, me and my wife are buying a house here in Japan. Over here bank's balance sheets are super-healthy and banks are extending large volumes of credit easier than they would in the past. My friends and co-workers got accepted for large home loans at reasonable rates. I have studied the bank balanace sheets as part of my stock investing so I am not worried of us being in a over-credited state. In fact japanese banks home loan load has been decreasing on a percentage basis over time as old bubble era loans get paid off.

Yet it appears to me that Japan is in a phase of expanding home credit. Or atleast expanding home credit to lower/younger quality borrowers in response to fewer traditional borrowers starting families and buying homes.

The net result in Japan is that buying a home is a massive good deal. We were careful with the location and builder but I needed to put no effort to get a loan at an insanely low interest rate.
TIL that Circle pivoted into OTC, there's no mention of it on their main https://circle.com where they had the previous product running.

https://www.circletrade.com/ and simple searches do not give much information.
Samsung's Galaxy S9 to include blood pressure monitor, research app
Unfettered capitalism has been doing a number on the rental market here lately, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you.

That being said, if you got a critical mass of young techies down here that loved the culture, why not? It’s not that much dirtier or more dangerous than SF
>Of course they can be 'spiritual' (i've known several), with one clear philosophical caveat: religion, by definition, is dogma which requires faith. Faith requires, by definition, that one accept as truth universal aspects with no evidence. Being a good scientist requires, among other things, to accept nothing without supporting data - which is the opposite of faith.

I've yet to meet a scientist who does not take something on faith (need not be tied to religion). And I've not met a devout person who at times required data.

Which is why a religious scientist or a skeptical theologian is nothing worthy of notice (at least if you spend time with the two camps).
Show HN: SWSH – A SSH client for Windows
I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?
So what do you think of where we are now in 2018 (as we creep nearer to the nearing peak of 13 years ago)?

US Home Prices 1890-Present: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data/Fig3-1.xls
I'm really curious how accurate the tool generates responsive designs. I feel like, it would have it's limits.

It would be helpful to know what those limitations are before spending too much time and only to find out it won't work for us.
I was curious so did a little Google sleuthing. The first thing I learned is that ram fighting is, historically, hardly unique to North Africa. That said, the second thing I learned is that ram fighting has a very long tradition in Algeria and Tunisia, perhaps pre-dating the adoption of Islam.

I realize the article isn't really about ram fighting, but this aspect of Algerian culture was new to me.
Mongol Horse Archer – tactical botnet with pythonic hierarchical state machines
You have enough money for food or coal. It's below freezing. Someone is prepared to throw coal at you for yuks. Easy choice.
Depends if you want it in a journal or not.
Publish anything using https://leanpub.com
Microsoft’s Legal Cloud Cover
How can any essay written today about young people (not) caring about their physical community completely ignore the high school students protesting, marching, and speaking out against gun violence?

Okay, so maybe they are too young to count as Millenials.

Then what about Occupy Wall Street? I saw a lot of Millenials in pictures from that, along with spin-offs like Strike Debt, the events leading to the UC Davis pepper spray incident, etc.

Or Millenials protesting the rescission of DACA ... including those Millenials otherwise protected by DACA.

Or the Millenials involved in DisruptJ20, many of whom are still dealing with indiscriminate and haphazard police roundup during the inauguration.

This Medium essay completely ignores all those Millenials who both care about their physical communities and are active in trying to do something about it.

By doing so, this made me angry. Who is this "we" the author purports to stand for?

The essay ends "Our silence is deafening." Perhaps instead the author isn't listening.
Even in the case of tangible property tax, this would not apply. Tangible property tax refers to capital expenses like buildings, furniture, etc. Inventory would not be subject.
The 'Brady Bunch' links to 'Idi Amin' through George Steinbrenner. Might have known.
Chiming in with New Orleans
155,000people In.Sudàn Could Be in Famine Within Months