skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How is it optimized well when there is still lots of copying going on? Anything in the same process space should just be a matter of passing a pointer or a pointer with very little information wrapping it up.

Sure, you could pass a pointer around. But then you'd have all the usual headaches about concurrent modification (some of this stuff is mutable when you get down to the implementation/pointer level) and garbage collection (who has it?).

It's optimized well enough that the perf penalty is minor. Copy-on-write semantics, "tail-send" optimizations (I don't know what the technical term for this is, but: data or pointers are moved if a message send is in particular positions in code, without getting the GC involved at all until later) and more are all used where they make sense.

Could it be faster if you built it around a zero-copy runtime? Sure. So could Perl. But then you'd be building your own runtime, with different priorities and tradeoffs than the one that already exists--one whose biggest benefit is that you don't have to build it yourself.

Erlang doesn't promise zero copies locally, but nor does it take the most wasteful possible path; I am not a deep BEAM expert, but am consistently surprised at how well it works. Seldom have I wondered "hmm, the runtime could do something fast/cool with this particular type of code; I wonder if it does..." and, upon checking the available sources/debugger output, been disappointed.

The runtime isn't built around hyper-efficient zero copy semantics (it has a garbage collector, an M:N scheduler, a bloody instruction counter routine that runs every time you invoke any function at all for heaven's sake). For all that, it's more than fast enough for anything besides high-performance scientific computing/number crunching locally. If you need to do that, use a language that lets you sent pointers between threads exactly how you want. If you still want to use that in Erlang, add some reduction-count markers in your $fast_language code and hook it up to Erlang via an NIF.

The BEAM doesn't waste time/complexity more than necessary on hyper-efficient local optimizations so it can focus on its main strengths: really good concurrency and parallelism, and making a near-bulletproof, super-high-performance set of primitives for distributing your code with minimal changes. Of all the "you call this function as if it were local, but it actually runs remotely in nearly the same exact way!" tools out there, even ones invented recently with the benefit of history to learn from, Erlang/BEAM's implementation comes the closest to fulfilling that promise IMO.

> Why would reference counting be worse than copying?

Refcounting is a valid strategy in some cases, but has drawbacks as well. It doesn't handle cycles well, and requires some stop-the-world events (or lots of locking complexity) for garbage collection in concurrent environments. More details on Google, this thread goes into the differences reasonably well: https://www.quora.com/How-do-reference-counting-and-garbage-...
I might be alone here but in high school we had a single class to teach us money management and how to file taxes ourselves. It’s only complicated if you have complicated situations. Vast majority of people probably shouldn’t be using software anyways but the marketing makes them think they’ll get a bigger refund.

I also wouldn’t have a problem with them getting rid of all the weird rules around certain deductions. Example, is web hosting a utility or subscription service?
I cannot say it is true because I would not consider myself learned. I will say that the 10-day retreat thing comes off very culty, and it is in their interest to encourage the course. They've built a massive monument apparently funded by donations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Vipassana_Pagoda

See my other comment for my more in-depth review. There is certainly a better way to learn than the Dhamma.org 10-day courses, but it might not be readily available in any form today.
"How many here know that babies have no gauge of attractiveness towards people, and thus don't prefer to be around attractive people?"

I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of sophistic assumptions and bad data you would need to reach a conclusion for a question like that. And then you would have to look in the mirror and say to yourself “my contribution to society is spending research money to determine whether or not babies prefer to be around attractive people”
Is it possible with Erlang to make sure that two Erlang processes are co-located on the same physical node?
I've been trying to find a Kubrick/2001 anecdote I vaguely remember, maybe somebody here has a source? Roughly a lighting technician found the initial very bright point-source lights needed to illuminate the space ship models were dangerous and prone to fire. The technician explained this to Kubrick and Kubrick asked him to set up the current (hazardous) lighting setup again. The technician asked "you don't believe me?" and Kubrick said something like "I believe you, but I haven't seen it."
Facebook fuels broad privacy debate by tracking non-users
Calculate Linux 17.12.2 KDE Edition – See What’s New
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can have a genetic disposition to being worn out by chronic stress.
The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font
Those numbers might seem low to you, but that easily puts police officer in the top 25 most dangerous jobs according to this source:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...
The only problem is learning to fly is prohibitively expensive for most people. Skydiving is a much cheaper activity.
None of which changes the fact that democracy was not invented in the Middle Ages or England as per the context of my comment.
I think the way it would naturally work on G+ is that Meme Boy will use circles this way. So if you get tired of his memes, you message him and ask him to make a Meme Circle and not include you in it.

But really, if Meme Boy enjoys posting memes, he likely already will have a Meme Circle. So you just ask him to remove you from the Meme Circle.
old.ycombinator.com
Another great writeup of making of a 64k: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html
I used to do a lot of demoscene stuff as well [1]. I've been trying to get back into it but I've found that all of the software engineering I've done in the meantime has kind of driven the "just get it working" mindset away somewhat.

I used to just write code that "happened" to work, more or less. Nowadays I would want to get unit tests in place, make it cross-platform if at all possible and get a nice GUI going for easy tweaking. It's made it impossible for me to get anything done in the limited free time I have :) ideally I'd write it in Rust, but there, too, I am waiting for tooling to catch up. I get the feeling that I'm not so much waiting for the tooling, but I'm using the waiting as a sneaky way of procrastinating and fooling myself...

[1] http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65
Well, I asked the author for the data that led him to believe that the Julia community is "monopolistic", and he got mad and blocked me instead of linking to anything...

https://twitter.com/ChrisRackauckas/status/98552939470474035...

So your remark is pretty spot on.
When you pass a message, all the terms will be copied into the memory space owned by the receiving process. Refcounted binaries don't copy the value, just the reference of course (as well as updating the reference count information). This results in a lot of copying, but also makes process memory management very simple: when a process dies, you need to clean up the global state: decrement refcounted binaries, send notifications for linked processes and monitors, and release all the process heap memory. You don't need to inspect the process memory or worry about dangling references to it.

Refcounted binaries are (mostly) effectively copy on write though; if you create a term that's a modified form, a new value will be formed.
I think he was saying that concatenating 100 updates into one database API call is faster and/or better than using a case statement like that.

Both methods will be faster than sending 100 separate update. postgre API calls.
Yes, I always thought taxes were easy when I filed a 1040EZ.
Then came real life... and I discovered there were probably previous deductions I should have been taking (that exceeded the standard deduction) which could have saved me thousands of dollars and weren't available on the EZ.
From the article:

The most common cause of death on the job were intentional shootings, which claimed the lives of 46 officers last year. Almost as many officers died in car accidents.

Only 46 actually died from intentional shootings.
Coming from a long line of miner families from my father's side (my hundreds of times great great parents used to be dwarven miners some time before the defeat of the Sauron) I must say the concept of Bitcoin and gold mining are not that different. It is just the tools which have changed.
No dispute there, friend.
Computers interact with the world too. I'm looking at a screen that produces patterns of light based on the internal state of my computer. How is this different from a brain interacting with the world? The brain is a finitely sized hunk of matter and matter seems to follow laws. We currently have no reason to assume that those laws can't be simulated by sufficiently sized computer, so anything observable the brain does a computer can do too.
This is the kind of stuff I grew up on, so when I’m critical of the software and the implementations here, the bloat, the unnecessary dependencies, the slowness... this is the standard I judge them against. The mentality and the techniques in the article are applicable to any kind of software. When applied correctly, they make any software small and fast.
Here in my country the "practical manual" for this tax year is 1163 pages long, but the web app of the ministry has most of your information already stored. For the vast majority of people filing taxes it's just a matter of clicking "OK" a few times.
This certainly used to be true, back when ram was expensive and drives were slow. But progress on both of those fronts has massively outpaced the increase in typical structured data, which is what you would store in a db. It's rich/unstructured data that has increased hugely in most usecases. But I would argue that it's not as cut and dry nowadays, particularly with the amount of serverside processing that is being done in other non-db areas.
In other news, chicken are being forced a grain diet seems cruel.

https://m.imgur.com/s05awRy
Enough money to exclude the little guy?

2017 lobbying, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23...

Google $18M
Amazon $13M
Facebook $11M
Apple $7M
It's rare to have a meaningful algorithm where memory is the absolute only bottleneck. Not much else aside from memcpy and even that can see a benefit from SIMD tuning on many systems.

Especially since high performance software is glad to have even a 1% boost in speed.
The legitimate side to this is that people should know what their government is costing them. Because of tax withholding, many people don’t even realize how high/low their taxes are.

I have a belief that we should get rid of tax-withholding, and have people just write a big check (or receive a EITC check) for all of their taxes at the end of the year.

To me (and I think many republicans), hiding the taxes you pay with withholding is really pretty slimy.
Even then, the risk of overly rosy prediction of returns by bureaucrats is high. A defined contribution system, plus a social safety net (medicare, social security, etc) is a better system.
Ask HN: What is the best way to access SEC filings data?
As there seems to be no standard way to access SEC's EDGAR data, I was wondering what is the best way to get a company's filing data. I need this for a side project.
U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton, Jr., was a POW for ~8 years during Vietnam. He did something similar.

> Denton was forced by his captors to participate in a 1966 televised propaganda interview which was broadcast in the United States. While answering questions and feigning trouble with the blinding television lights, Denton blinked his eyes in Morse code, spelling the word "TORTURE"—and confirming for the first time to U.S. Naval Intelligence that American POWs were in fact being tortured. [0]

You can see the video [1] on Youtube.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg
The OpenWorm project doesn't even manage a worm though.
The ORM likely does use prepared statements, it's that most ORMs by default makes 100 round-trip IO operations (one for each update). The code would need to be rewritten without the ORM to send all the updates as one database call. The query isn't expensive to the database, but to the application itself just the IO of the database call adds up quickly.
Introduction to Compilers and Language Design
I realize totally insane, but, I think we should end withholdings. I think people should at the end of the year - cut a huge check to the government. Also, you should be given a Scranton with government institutions listed -- YOU pick where your money goes.
But rich people can buy others' time. Pay-for-play aside, that's arguably that's what lobbying is in the first place. You pay other people to research, write position papers, have meetings, and persuade for you.
See also: Matplotlib Venn [1, 2] which draws area-accurate Venn diagrams.

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/matplotlib-venn

[2] https://python-graph-gallery.com/venn-diagram/
There's still some electronic voting system in France but it's only a minority at the moment: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_%C3%A9lectronique#France
Before dawn, the streak of a missile across Damascus' sky
compilerbook.org redirects to:

https://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/compilerbook/

Just read a bit so far. Good.
Bitcoin market opens to 1.6B Muslims
Fasting vs. Low Carb
To uninitiated, Soviets had school. The School. Level of the secondary education in the Soviet Union in early 50-es was such a quality, that Finns copied all that methodology that gave them generation of engineers. And Nokia.
Asynchronous JavaScript Patterns: Exclusive Task
Every time I pose this question people seems to have a knee jerk reaction that no, it wouldn’t work.

But in my mind, that could easily end up being an issue for the (EU) courts. As a matter of disposition and policy, I see no reason why the EU wouldn’t want to fine Facebook for as much as humanly possible. I’m half tempted to apply for e-residency just to see what happens. It would be interesting if nothing else!
“ Although e-residents receive government-issued digi- ID’s similar to those of citizens, e-residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence, or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union.” – https://e-resident.gov.ee/faqs/about-e-residency/#about-e-re...
Based on an actual event from the Vietnam war iirc.
SirenJack: Emergency alert sirens can be hacked using a radio, laptop
I've seen a few suggestions that perhaps this should be a public service, possibly falling close enough to the remit of PBS (or the BBC for UK folks) to be run by them. Not everything needs to be run by a for-profit company.
Not politically feasible. Older citizens tend to both have a lot of savings, and vote. They would not allow this to happen.
I would highly recommend The Mind Illuminated as a solid instruction manual for beginners who want to start meditating at home.

http://a.co/61TjGpW
Well, people used to interpret experiences with hallucinogenic substances as religious/spiritual (some still do). Would you say that your own experience fundamentally differs? Obviously you didn't ingest chemicals but other than that, is the end result substantially different?
When a person is lost or misdirected, the priority is usually figuring out how to get where they wanted to go. Fixing the map is a low priority. Learning the complexities of the OSM API's and toolings is even lower. The process is complicated with many moving parts and tailored toward commercial level development not end map users. OSM, like any sophisticated database is complex and requires a substantial degree of technical commitment.
There is Tableau displacing the graphics capabilities of Excel.
To agree and rephrase, "public funding" looks like incumbents controlling how campaigns are funded and how those funds are spent. Add that on top of the existing gerrymandering issues and it sounds like we'll have a government even less accountable to the average voter.
How is this not a scam?
"unusable" is a very extreme word for this.
Did you even look at the article? Denton’s story is mentioned in it and the video is embedded.
I'm looking forward to the day when we have a computer that passes the Turing test but comments like yours still show up.
Just sent you a mail (check spam folder if you don't see it, it comes from my own domain, and sometimes it's dumped with the spam)
Had a question about this for while: Are movies where people communicate using knocks really accurate?

I would assume to effectively use Morse code, you’ll need a way to convey short silence, long silence, short beep, and long beep. Knocking misses the long beep.
I don't think this is something particular to Warsaw bloc countries. For example I love GM new look buses that were running around refurbished up until early 2000s, and the main reason they were replaced not because last of them broke down but because they weren't accessible. I bet it's the same situation with Tatra streetcars.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gm+new+look+bus&t=ffab&atb=v112-4&...
> why is this shared as link to github page?

Because it's for Hackers.
"hypercompetent rationalizing system"

If true, can you state which chemicals are in charge of the hypercompetent rationalizing system? What happens when these chemicals are absent or their delivery is absent?

More so, if you really feel the mind is entirely the product of chemicals, can you describe what is happening when someone faces a tough choice, one which, up to the last second, could go either way? Are you suggesting probabilistic outcomes for normally deterministic chemical processes?
This is completely untrue. Vipassana, which means "insight meditation," is a core Buddhist practice which is far broader than this one teacher and his course. If you read the wikipedia article [0] on the branches of Buddhism that emphasize Vipassana, you'll see that S.N. Goenka gets a mention ("...as well as nonsectarian derivatives from those traditions such as the movement led by the late S. N. Goenka"), but it is in no way limited to Goenka's school or his course.

As a Buddhist who is very passionate about Vipassana from the completely different angle of Mahasi Sayadaw and American teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Culadasa, this thread is more than a bit frustrating!

For Boston area folks, the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center is one example of a great place to learn this type of meditation practice, as well as about Buddhism more generally if you are interested.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassana_movement
It's in the article that you are commenting on.
"Unusable for the privacy-aware" does the job
I do not. US bribery laws are among the most strict in the world (including relative to Europe) and prosecutions are common. Just last year a sitting US senator was tried for bribery charges (which ended in a mistrial because the jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict).
iguy, agreed. You have have no idea because you haven't tried.
Which war? The US backed them in the civil war.
> I was scrolling around the world, setting directions for how to cross Russia by foot (which let me tell you in case you ever wondered, should take roughly 60 hours, depending on locations used)

Huh, out of curiosity, I just checked Google Maps, and it suggests that walking from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok would take 1,883 hours. That's quite a discrepancy. I suspect that Google is probably more accurate in this instance.
Could it be 60 days?

Russia has a maximum east-west extent of some 5,600 miles (9,000 km) and a north-south width of 1,500 to 2,500 miles (2,500 to 4,000 km). (According to Encyclopedia Britannica)

How long would that take to walk? Let's look at another continent for data..

According to the Pacific Crest Trail Association the Pacific Crest Trail spans 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometers) and the elite athletes can do two months, generally it takes five months.

So: 60 days to cross Russia North-to-South is not entirely out of question.

And then, who knows what the author meant. If you were to walk from Pattina, Estonia to Rasony, Belarus, that's about 60 hours and almost all of it is in Russia and in a sense it crosses Russia.
FB probably knows where you live.
Person A copies information on opening hours, the address, postal code, phone number etc. from the website (or even multiple sources) of a business onto Google Maps. Person B then copies this information from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap. The copyright either lies in the public domain or with the original website, not Google (Maps). This should be crystal clear and is in no way ‘an experiment’.
This quote is just another example of willful misunderstanding of issues by the people in Congress. They don't even try to understand an issue but stick to some talking points that make sense only on the surface. It's really infuriating that such idiots are allowed to participate in the discussion of important issues.
The same happens in health care.

If the IRS sent a pre-prepared tax return it would give the tax payer an advantage because the IRS would give away what it already knows. In the current situation the tax payer sends a return and the IRS compares it to the data they already have. The tax payer doesn't know what the IRS knows though.
Ask HN: How do you track API usage in multi region app?
In a multi-region API, EU and US region are usually 150ms apart.

Assuming a customer might send a request to US and EU region simultaneously, you maintain a counter `total_api_calls`. Incrementing it simultaneously from multiple regions at 1000 req/s.

How do you make sure the count is consistent in both regions?
> What I wonder is why are Jupyter notebooks so popular?

How easy is it to share a Jupyter notebook with someone else, versus sharing an org-mode notebook? Think about the recipients rather than how hard it is for you. Assume the person you share with needs to be able to re-run your notebook. Assume the person you share with isn't using the same operating system that you are. Be honest and think about all the steps involved.

With Jupyter, I send a single install link to Anaconda. With Emacs + org mode + python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib, I might not even know where to begin if the recipient is using Windows or Mac. The recipient needs to install emacs, and they need to know how to use Emacs. They have to know how to install python packages (and possibly a package manager), and ideally be able to use virtualenv too.

If I need different libraries than what Anaconda comes with, I can put the commands in the notebook, and I won't mess up the recipient's system version of Python. With org-mode, they'd need to figure it out on their own.

If I choose to use a different language than Python in my org-node notebook, the recipient will have to install that programming language and environment themselves before they can use your notebook.

It's the simplicity and bundling of dependencies that make Jupyter popular. All the flexibility and power you get with org mode comes at a high price.
Google for Education Certified Innovator #LAX18 Application