skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Thoughts on HN's “whining about down votes” policy
There are many flaws to HN, I think this is the biggest.

Regardless of your rebuttle, questioning why a comment is being down voted is apparently breaking HN policy. Moderator @dang made me aware of this recently.

"Breaking policy"??? Really? Everyone who questions a downvote is breaking policy? This either is the most stupidest "unquestionable" policy or the holier than thou attitude on HN has gotten out of hand.

Do we really believe here that every knows what the purpose of a downvote button is or we just pretend to be better than Reddit?

A lot of people here just downvote because they come from a different school of thought from the opinion or do not agree with the comment. But is that the purpose of the downvote button? I hope not. I thought it was to penalize irrelevant contributors not punish alternate but relevant opinions.

And what happens when you question the premise of down votes? The mods tell you you are the one breaking policy. Perhaps the mods ought to look more into what is being downvoted rather than just shoving canned responses to those who stand their ground.

It is sad that right or wrong has been reduced to majority rule on a supposedly accommodating platform like HN.

To the mods, you really need to do better moderating and maintaining the principle behind expression on this platform, otherwise why are you here?
No it’s easy to get paid, just at a deeply discounted rate.
That's correct, it is no longer dead.
> in which they assume that the Mountain View & other Bay Area offices have been completely destroyed

pretty sure both the hayward and the san andreas faults are not capable of this sort of destruction.

sounds more like a dark nihilistic adolescent fantasy.
"For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your strategy both fraudulent "

Sigh. The SEC is concerned with lying about actual numbers. Not about future projections. What a terrible comment on a startup forum. "Fake it until you make it" it as about having confidence -- not about lying to investors. Please downvote this parent comment.
> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.

And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
Have listened to the first session and here's my feedback:

- Really like the voices used; slight scottish accent is quite pleasant

- Helped dissuade me of some of my more immediate concerns about hypnosis

- Was a bit longer than i'd like, will be a tougher to fit in to my schedule than 10 min Headspace sessions

-Overall great looking app and I'll keep trying the rest of the sessions
That is such a sad event for you to have to perform forensics on. Did you find anything of note about the demo programs?

I really want to ask for more details about the suicide but I feel that would be crude.
I seems like simple common sense that buyers' agents counsel their clients to not express excitement or speak overly favorably about a property while inside it, not unlike pitchers and catchers covering their mouths during mound meetings.
I plan on plundering from the preppers.
Aktu (http://aktu.io) is some kind of GoogleNews + GoogleReader : news aggregator + rss feeds
So how did it ever match his twin? Not being facetious but echoing the parent comments confusion. Do the age related changes occur the same way in identical twins?
I think the issue for the article is that identical twins are not epigenentically identical to begin with, time in space and life in general will only tend to magnify that. In essence, the headline is doubly misleading.
and welcome Aktu (http://aktu.io) :-) ok, shameless plug :-) but i just finished working on the first version and would love some feedback :-)
I don't mean to just be a pedant when I say this, but the use of the word crackpot is missplaced here.

Crackpot theories are eccentric and not commonly believed.

I am interested in crackpot theories because sometimes they end up turning out right, and I think within that dynamic there are important lessons for humanity that we end up learning in very hard ways.

For example, the Great Depression paved the way for the acceptance of Keynesian economics--ideas previously written-off as crackpot theories. Another: NASA engineers warned of the exact dangers of a foam strike, under the exact conditions in which it took place, were at the time written-off by senior management. Social scientists that studied this described part of the problem as Groupthink.
A O(1) algorithm for implementing the LFU cache eviction scheme [pdf] (2010)
Is there a whitepaper associated with this? I found the project page and the github page, but I want to see:

a) What's involved in getting the C code to be 'safe' - how much annotation overhead, etc

b) How this interacts with C Preprocessor

c) What the runtime overhead is (usually the killer)
You might enjoy reading Seveneves
Another fun experiment is to write script to cover a disk with points, then do a full calculation of all N gravitational forces at a point along the radius. Calculate the acceleration of a mass at that point and back-calculate the velocity that would orbit with that inward force. Repeat this for many points along the radius and plot the rotation curve without doing any dynamic simulation. There can be some interesting numerical issues with this but a random set of points to "measure" the curve will still show it.
You can't forbid judicial review. The supreme court has the ultimate power.
We have tried to do this by adding a "null terminated string" type. Start in section 2.4 of the specification (https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc/releases/download/v0.7...).
Git is ... alright, but it doesn't deserve quite as much praise as it gets. I have well over a decade of experience using source control at a fairly high level, and I have experience with a wide variety of source control systems. Git is currently more or less the best thing that's out there in a lot of ways, but it still has a whole shit-ton of shortcomings.

Even when you use git according to the finest shade grown, hand picked, organic best practices available you are still going to routinely run into situations where dealing with git is just a straight up pain in the ass for no good reason. Every source control system has its weaknesses but in some ways git's are even more annoying because so much of the rest of it is engineered so well. It's like opening up the trunk on a maserati and finding a compartment that's lined with splintery unfinished recycled pallet wood and held together by chewing gum, it makes you wonder why it's there and why having some piece that is such a comparatively low quality continues to be tolerated year after year.

Again, overall I think git is pretty great, but the persistent lack of effort toward improving git's core weaknesses is incredibly frustrating.
What are you referring to? sbrk? mmap? I typically use either the heap or the stack myself.
> Any business or organization that relies on a centralized database as a core competitive advantage can potentially be disrupted by blockchain technology.

That's a pretty big "potentially" since many of those organizations use centralization as a defense against bad actors.
Thank you for the reply. I spent most of the day talking to a coworker about this stuff, but I didn't see your message until just now.

I agree about the abuse of notation, but even with your improvements, there is still plenty to be confused about. In particular, the denominator has P_[B](b), which looks like a function from R^2->R (the PDF of B in measurement space). I guess it could also mean that PDF evaluated at the specific value of b. However, I think it's actual value is supposed to be "the integral from negative to positive infinity in all directions of whatever is in the numerator", which isn't at all obvious from the notation. However, maybe I've got that wrong.

Let's go one step further. On the left side we've got a function R^3->R with parameter 'a'. On the right, we've got two functions of 'b' (R^2->R), one in the numerator, and another in the denominator, presumably evaluated at the value 'b'. Both of those evaluations give scalars, and so it looks like we just get a scaled version of P_[A](a), which is definitely not the right answer.

An alternative is that we're not really evaluating those two functions at 'b', and instead leaving them as functions. If that's so, where did the free variable come from? It's not in the argument list on the left hand side. Although it is in the subscript on the left... Yeah, I'm still pretty confused :-)
There is a specification: https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc/releases/download/v0.7...

We have been trying to publish a paper on this, perhaps one day we will be successful! Our runtime overhead is very good, and our interaction with the preprocessor is minimal.
"DNA is not fixed, they change all the time."

Then why is it significant that time in space changed it?
> And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal.

I am all for being brutally aware of reality...but, there is also a time horizon to these things. Most great startups had to break through resistance. Maybe the resistance you guys saw was simply resistance to change...

Maybe tweaks to UI isn't what wins this game...maybe its tools like Pilot or services like bench, or maybe its something like the car solving the horse manure problems of the turn of the century...

And to be fair, there are some studies that show cognitive strain being linked to better focus or something like that (Disclaimer: I have no idea what im talking about, but am pretty sure Thinking Fast and Slow discusses it.) so, maybe a harder UI is better...

What I do know is that I want software to make my life easier and more efficient. And I don't mind if that takes away part of a means of my livelihood, I'll figure out the next step the same way I got to where I am today.

If I understood you correctly, the folks in charge of this are very good at their jobs and I am sure they are optimizing for their quarterly earnings, or bonuses, or whatever else they are incentivized to do...and I get the idea that they see bookkeepers as their customers, not business owners, and are serving them as best they know how...
but this feels like the lazy way out of innovating.
> can you go to amazon headquarters and exchange an AMZ share for an office chair?

If the total value of share prices drops below the value of the assets, you can buy all the shares, take the company private and sell off all the assets to make money.

Assets (vs liabilities) thus can put a floor on the value of a stock price.
I can't imagine the thought process that would generate this comment. Could you elaborate a little more? I'm genuinely curious.
Epigenetics is the idea that genes can express themselves differently based on the environment they are put in.

It is how you can have the same genetic code in your brain as you skin, but the cells the genes are part of are completely different.

It's how you can have a hard drive with a ton of information on it, but choose to read only small portions at a time
Google Introducing New Maps Api and Unity SDK
RPi is great. But... I love these, and encourage them to keep innovating. Thank you for you work.

I've already got n of them that I'm not using. N might be 4 in this case. I want usb3 capability, so I can get real 1 gig eth, plus access to a faster hard drive. I don't see a real advance

What I really want is a system with 2 eth jacks. Then I could build an interesting gateway.
Carmack invented modern VR
the github is just a spec, you have to use llvm/clang to use this extension. it would be nice to make this an independent executable to do C checking, apparently not the case here.
> I think most HDLs are approaching the diminishing returns of abstraction already.

System Verilog goes a lot of the way, but there are many good abstractions missing in HDL. Structs were my biggest complaint before System Verilog.
The difference here is that there’s not much else. In contrast, things like the internet or web had tons of legitimate use from day 1.
> No amount of fences or mutexes is going to help you if threads are operating on their own version of a variable that got cached in a register, or optimised away. You need to understand volatile to write correct multi-threaded code.

Any properly written Mutex or similar implementation is going to act as a full memory barrier and compiler barrier, meaning variables will already not be cached across lock/unlock. And if you're not properly taking your locks before accessing your variables, `volatile` is not going to save you. The fact is, if you're using a lock to protect a variable, marking it `volatile` gains you nothing and just slows your code down.

> "yes, to prevent threads from working on stale data".

`volatile` absolutely does not guarantee a variable doesn't contain 'stale' data. That's the entire reason you need memory barriers in the first place. Even through the compiler will read a `volatile` variable from memory every time, that memory may still have a stale value in the CPU cache, which `volatile` will do nothing to prevent. Only proper use of memory barriers ensures everyone is working on the same thing, which `volatile` does not do.
The ratchet up since 2016 certainly does not have me disillusioned.
Sven Computer Crashes LGBTQ SxSW Meeting
Ask HN: What Blockchain project look most like Amazon (Question Continued)
For fun. Lets say were pre 2000 and the gap can be big 1995-1999.... what project at this current state looks like amazon in ideology towards use of tech?(ie: they used the internet to capture a new storefront that could hold unlimited books and pay low rent because they didn't need to be on main street, pass those savings on)

None as answer is acceptable.
The idea is interesting, but unfortunately it's still too hard to remember the rules and encrypt or decrypt by hand. One-time pad is much easier.
can do, not will do.

I've yet to meet anyone who got siri to do anything, let alone useful, on the 5th try. I can mumble microcontroller part numbers to google, or other odd non-standard words/phrases and 90% of the time its correct on the first try; half the time i'm astonished that it even was able to figure out what i said
Location:Fredericton, NB, Canada
Remote: Yes - Preferred
Willing to relocate: Yes, after October 2018, for the
right opportunity.
Possible locations:
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Ontario, Canada
Japan
Germany
I am a Permanent Resident of Canada and have Israeli and German citizenship.
Technologies:
AWS
Google Cloud Platform
Azure
Linux
Apache Libcloud
Bash
PostgreSQL
Python
nginx
Résumé/CV: https://elad.yarom.info/Elad_Yarom_Resume.pdf
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eladyarom/
Email: elad.yarom@gmail.com
Site: https://elad.yarom.info/

I build cloud-agnostic, self-healing Linux stacks to keep you and your infrastructure flexible.

For the past 4 years I’ve been working as the Lead Systems Engineer for a Y Combinator startup. My portable stacks have saved the company over $700,000 (US) in infrastructure costs over the past 4 years. I know to build your stack to run anywhere, and run efficiently, so that you can leverage your YC cloud credits and scale your product to the next level.

If you have interesting problems at scale, or are looking to take your prototype to production, we should talk.
I have been paying attention to lunar tides as a factor for earthquakes myself.
If you care about surveillance, bitcoin is the last thing you want to be involved with: you’re creating a permanent non-repudiable record and gift-wrapping it for them!
That isn't what I'm arguing; of course we must know how to use our tools. If that requires also understanding implementation details, even trivial ones (e.g., "it's a DAG"), or if the interface and words used to describe the usage are non-standard, awkward, or worse act to obscure what is actually going on, the tool and/or its documentation is poor.

For example: in this case, knowing what a branch is, how to create and delete one, and how to merge with one is necessary. Knowing that the branch identifier is a hash, called a "reference" or similar jargon and what that entails, internally, is superfluous and adds pointless complexity: if that's really required then git isn't good. I have more important things to think about as a developer than what internal machinery operates git.
They probably know they're acting crazy and don't care because they believe that's part of the ethos of being a founder, to be outrageous and misunderstood.

I'm sure for many of them being despised or criticized is just as much a benchmark of success as anything else.

It's sort of similar to the "there's no such thing as bad press" but more personality based.
> “Cost center” doesn’t mean “unprofitable department”.

That's unnecessarily pedantic. A cost center is an organizational subunit that incurs cost but does not directly contribute to the company’s profits. Since I said "department" and "cost center" it really should be clear what was meant. Why, it is just like the article itself using "Amazon" as both a noun and a verb!

> And actually two of the three segments appearing in Amazon financial reports are profitable.

Amazon had 6 segments in 2017 not 3.

If you look at the Operating Profit, Operating Margin, and P/E considering the context of my comment about AWS vs. the other departments, I think you will see why AWS has kept Amazon (and AMZN) afloat.
Also, FWIW, the last time I asked a psychiatrist about sociopaths it was a very short conversation. He immediately replied that he doesn't see many because 1) there's no real treatment and 2) they usually have no reason to seek treatment.

My sense of the conversation was that the term evoked precisely the same concepts in both our minds (even if his had more nuance and depth), and nothing at all as a muddled as "insanity". I wanted to ask more questions but I figured, what was the point. All he could do would be to confirm what I've read and reiterate the open questions and debates.

"Clinical" is not defined by the degree of accuracy or precision relative to the objective truth of a phenomenon. Depending on the state of the science a clinical term could be extremely fuzzy or perhaps even an ontological misstep--i.e. a grouping of unrelated phenomena, or an overly restrictive grouping. But it can be still be a clinical term serving a clinical role.
Don’t homeotic genes* explain anatomical development pretty well?

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeotic_gene
Politicians needed the prosecutors to make an example of Shkrelli because they needed to distract people from the fact that cornering a drug market and hiking the prices is still perfectly legal and practiced by much larger companies.
Anyone else getting the “Congratulations you are a winner” ad spam / malware which takes over the page and forces a redirect?

I run into this on news sites several times a week. I assume these are ads which are sneaking by the ad networks filter and running scripts on the page, just not sure how they are so damn pervasive?

If these ads aren’t being paid for with stolen credit cards, then why aren’t they people buying them getting slammed with CFAA charges? Is it that hard to track these clowns down?
No thanks. I learned a long time ago that people always tell me who they are right away, in jest. I learned somewhat later to take them at their word.
You don't have to wait for Siri to respond and you haven't had to for a while. Just say "Hey Siri" followed by the command with no pauses and it will handle it just fine.
Self sabotage is a defense mechanism against actual failure. "We failed because the founders didn't get along" is easier to stomach then "We failed because I'm not good enough to do this well."
Yep. Imagine having a webassembly to python bytecode translator in the stdlib. The possibilities...
Thanks for conducting the survey, interested to see the results.

I find it strange (and possibly not very pragmatic) that not long ago at all, rails was almost a no brainer, and now it's the opposite, even though there must be many thousands of live applications.
Great book, another rec here too!
While webasm isn't vulnurable to traditional ROP attacks, it will also lose at least as much performance penalty as IR + g-free/indirect return.

Memory protection in terms of r/w/x been solved for at least about 3 decades now. It would be absolutely trivial to enforce via binary/IR distribution.

At the end of the day webasm is just a shitty IR that only exists because it's the path of least resistance on the web. There's really no point in going from lang-> llvm -> webasm -> llvm -> exec when you can just go from lang -> llvm -> asm.
I believe you have far too broad a task to start out with. You won't be able to gain efficiencies from repeated tasks if you need to be able to repair anything. I think you will only achieve meaningful price-points (ones consumers will pay instead of purchasing new goods) if you can gain significant efficiency over existing home-shop repair guys.
It has started to come up a lot recently in order to produce the above-like click-bait headlines. Here's my standard copy-pasta quoting myself from when it shows up around here:

Epigenetics. It's the make-file for your genetic source code. Certain conditions can cause certain parts of your genetic code to be uncommented or commented-out within any given cell or set of cells. There are actually a number of different kinds of 'comments' (histone modifications [1]) - each set of marks are particular to a different compiler, in different contexts. And these comments/marks are copied with some fidelity to daughter-cells/children along with a high-fidelty copy of the underlying genetic code itself.

So the genes (DNA) themselves are not being heritably altered, rather the recipe for which gene is produced, when, and where can be subtly changed. But again, the same mechanisms that permit the change in expression of those genes during a lifetime (of an organism, or a cell) can be subsequently changed in the next just as easily.

In this way you can store the code for some trait or capability over many generations without having it always be running. It can manifest itself in individual organisms or cells as having very different phenotypes even while possessing the same underlying genetic code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code
Creating new synth sounds does not excite me much...

Some things I'd like AI audio researchers to work on:

- High quality isolation of vocals and other instruments in recordings

- Convert audio recordings into multitrack midi/vst recordings - so a recording of a jazz quartet could be converted into the notes and appropriate patches/sample banks

- Convert between styles of music

- Convincing "vocal synthesis" - think text to speech but with singing allowing emulation of famous singers