skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The market does take care of this. No one builds the second sewerage system or railway on the same route, it’s a terrible investment. The first mover gets a monopoly, price gouging happens, public complains and the government steps in. Currently we have private water companies in the U.K. they don’t have their own pipes and they are supplying the same water at nearly the same price, the actual water is provided by another private water company which owns the pipes and has a monopoly which has to be heavily regulated by the government. The result is choice of 10 different companies which charge between say £995-£1005 for the same thing, it’s not an efficient use of my time @ £60/hr to deal with the phone calls and paperwork needed to choose a supplier, it feels like I’m being forced to take part in a stupid game making a purchasing decision for something which is essentially exactly the same regardless of who I buy it from. The trouble is that infrastructure is often a natural monopoly. Countries that provide thier citizens efficient hassle free infrastructure increase thier productivity relative to other countries by reducing the bureaucratic load on citizens. Britain has private trains, electricity, water, phone networks etc. It doesn’t seem to be working very well, for example our rail ticket prices have increased faster than the rest of Europe, our train operating costs per mile are higher than state run systems in other comparable countries. In general our productivity is pretty low compared to other similar countries in Europe despite working some of the longest hours, maybe all the stupid phone calls from utility companies are one of the reasons why.
I wonder if the Gale–Shapley algorithm[0] would work in this situation.

That algorithm applies to the stable marriage problem: N men and N women need to be paired such that no two members in each set would both prefer to be with each other over their partners.

The algorithm has each person rank every member of the opposite gender in preferential order. Then, one side (let's presume the women) take turns picking from the other in order of their preferences. If the woman A's top choice is man X, but man X is already taken by woman B, then he will swap iff he prefers woman A over woman B. If he prefers woman B over woman A, then woman A moves down to her next choice in the list. If you follow this pattern to conclusion, everyone is paired and there will not exist a man and woman who both want to be with each other more than their current partners.

We could apply this to school selection. Every student ranks all schools from most to least preferred. All schools then 'rank' students via any criteria they want. Want to put students with siblings in the school ahead of all others? Easily done. For any equally-preferred students, sort randomly. The "women" translates to students, and the "men" translates to "spot in this school".

Might not stop strategizing, but it's a great way to handle pairings with preferences involved.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem#Soluti...
Yeah, I am doing financial services. Never expected it. I like the people a lot. I don’t like the products though. Thus, I’d say I haven’t found a great market fit for myself yet
Valve's recent action is in contrast with what they state they are trying to achieve with Steam Direct, i.e. opening up the platform without Valve having to decide which titles to allow or not.

Of course, pornographic works were never going to be allowed on the service, but I think there was an expectation that non-pornographic works that have up till now been compliant with Valve's policies would continue to be allowed on the platform.

(Disclosure: I used to work in the VN localisation business.)
I guess mine might be an unpopular opinion, I believe in a supreme being and am religious. Usually when people say thing like "Given we're (largely engineers and science minded folks here" they aren't looking for religious folks to step in and say anything. Nevertheless, I am and it brings me peace and joy.

My beliefs help to answer a lot of the first question.

When it comes to the second, I find a lot of meaning through life. That doesn't mean that I will leave some great legacy but I hope I help quite a few people along the way. I do that by changing my daily routine from what you describe. I don't work 9 - 5 and cap off my day with a prolonged cancer treatment, nor do I cap it off by thinking about my future need for a cancer treatment, heart surgery, or my impending death in anywhere from a few days to a few decades (for clarity, I am not currently dying any faster than a normal American middle ages male, but I will eventually die).

So what do I do? Well I spend a huge amount of my spare time helping others with my family and friends. I volunteer evening in refugee shelters, homeless shelters, drug addiction treatment groups, food banks, and low cost clinics. Sometimes I just help people around my neighborhood who need it. This week on Monday I went and had a long conversation with an older woman in my neighborhood and her boyfriend (both in their 80's) before she was going in for a major heart surgery. We talked about her life, about her thoughts and feelings, about her fears, we prayed together. At the end of the evening she felt better, I felt amazing, and she had her surgery (she's doing very well).

On Wednesday I went to another neighbors and my kids and I cleaned up her yard. She just lost her husband. She didn't ask for the help and I didn't know her real well, but we had a great time and now my family and I have a new friend. It was hard, hot, and dirty work, but who cares? At least I didn't sit up worrying about my mortality all night.

I spent quite a few of the other nights at the refugee shelter. They always need a ton of help! My wife and kids love the people they meet. We have a great time and meet new people and learn new things. And I believe we make a difference.

Is my life meaningless? I don't think so. I believe there is more after this life. However, even if there is nothing and we are just an extremely short blip on an extremely small blue dot around an unremarkable sun on one of the little spiral arms of a little insignificant galaxy, I still don't believe that life is meaningless. I enjoy the moments I have with the other insignificant blips that I come into contact with.

My point in posting is not to brag, I don't really care for accolades. My point is to show meaning. So my answer to your major question is: find meaning in your life. I've given a few suggestions. Start right now on one. If you walk out of your house right now and look around, I bet you're find someone who needs you.
Movies have that as well though. Remember the Nokia in the original Matrix movie? It was slowed down for a second while it was thrown in a bin.
I'm surprised the article left out mention of PyPy, which is pretty comparable to something like V8

http://speed.pypy.org/
Looking to buy a pharmacy? Medscare.us is best option for you
Language implementations don't work that way. However, the PyPy JIT has been around for over a decade and works wonderfully. It is a continuing disappointment that only about 1-2% of the Python community knows about and/or uses PyPy.

(PyPy on LLVM has been a thing before. It requires constant upkeep and isn't very fast. I'm sure that the PyPy team would love to hear from prospective maintainers!)
It sounds like the problem is in the people or procress then if they cut corners and aren’t thorough.

I didn’t see the computer or data failing in my hastey read through of the piece. It always contained what data the people entered.
That is not how high the cinema ever gets. The focus plane never completely aligns, the backgrounds shift, the projector vibrates and its lenses have edge artifacts. The scanable 16k film would look way better in Oculus VR than reprojected.
My solution is to encode the swapping in the placement algorithm so that any pair of students can be swapped if they both get a more preferred school. This way you eliminate the gaming aspect since you can't later decide that you want to trade for a school lower on your list. Simple. Fair.
Patients New to ADHD Medication: Wait a While (http://www.medscare.us/product-category/buy-adhd-online-with...):

Home-conveyance isn't a decent choice for individuals who are simply beginning with ADHD+ drug treatment (http://www.medscare.us/product-category/buy-adhd-online-with...). Until the point when you subside into a workable regimen, early days can mean loads of experimentation.

You would prefer not to pay for expansive amounts of a drug that you'll wind up not utilizing. That is inefficient the distance around.

Every other person: Worth Considering (http://www.medscare.us/product-category/buy-adhd-online-with...):

By and large, home-conveyance works best for individuals who have settled on a drug and measurements and hope to take it for the inconclusive future. Or possibly 90 days.

One thing's without a doubt: Home-conveyance could simply spare you enormous measures of time, cash, and stress.
>It's not the worst type of puzzle except if you do not know of a solution it might take a while to figure it out.

I would guess the interviewer probably rates people who have memorized the solution far higher than people who have never encountered it and solved it with their brains.
For what it's worth, both my dad and my best friend have had dramatic reductions in their migraine frequency after they started using kratom on a regular basis.
I love my “Vaterland” :) but I’m not sure if that’ll work. We are to small and Facebook to large and smart for regulation
Seems to be a common theme, the Times is also very hard to get away from. Shows a lack of confidence in their product - unlike prime and netflix which are very easy to cancel.
That's not quite right.

We're talking about a fundamental shortage of capacity for popular schools here. i.e. there are 10k spots and 8k students, but the top schools have fewer spots than interested students.

A private system wouldn't solve this problem. It'd only allow profit-seeking schools to admit the richest students only. It's not a recipe for societal success because you're giving children a ticket not based on merit, but based on their parents' riches. This is closer to a plutocracy than a meritocracy. But either way, merit is hard to define because we're talking about 11 year old kids deciding on secondary school in the Netherlands starting around age 12.

So you need some way of ranking students. The first one is student preference. It's not the case that you get enrolled at a school you had no interest in. The vast majority of students are enrolled in their schools of choice, but some of them may need to accept their 2nd or 3rd choice. In any case, the game theoretically driven choice affords students the highest chance of getting into a school closest to their preference.

The Dutch public school system does quite well and has good outcomes, a testament to how few private schools there are despite private schools being given ample room to thrive here.
Today’s dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out
The point is, those using the service are paying (in taxes, or similar). They just don't pay at the time of being served. Pre or post paying doesn't make it free.

Let's not be so naive.
If someone can ELI5 to me what is Pearl's do-calculus, that'd be quite great.

I have tried to build an understanding of it since he got the Turing prize, but have failed so far.
CPython has always strived to be a simple easy-to-read reference implementation of Python. They have rejected many patches over the decades which would have sped up various things at the expense of readability.

People should not use CPython for speed; they should use PyPy for speed.
The "Brainstorm / Green Needle" illusion is a huge mindfuck.

I especially loved this line, because it's the exact question I immediately thought:

> Am I experiencing a hundred micro-yannys and laurels every day without knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind
Dubai has first class in the metro. You can either buy a first or second class pass.
Those papers and systems deal with Prolog-like languages, not Datalog-like ones. These are different languages, even though there is a common set of similar-looking programs with similar-ish declarative semantics but completely different procedural semantics. In particular, it's easy to write programs that easily compute the desired results when run on a Datalog system, but that run into an infinite loop when run on a Prolog system.

Also, the solver here is special-cased to treat only a certain subset of Datalog that is much simpler than the full language.
That's a poverty problem not a banking problem. If you keep a $1000 balance in a checking account, your bank is making $5/mo from your interest.

Like every other thing poor people can't afford, it could be solved by UBI/EITC/negative income tax, or direct service if you like big government, but banking isn't special.
Elon Musk / Tesla Harpooned Baseload Power
Hmm,

I'd be slightly leery about taking advice from someone who admits they actually didn't do well learning math. Looking at the points, most of the advice sounds good but a couple seem a bit off.

Especially: "I can tolerate ungodly amounts of frustration".

Math isn't always easy but my hunch is that if it feels hard, you're on the wrong track. The best moments in math for me are the "it's obvious" times, points where everything just flows from first principles.

I've always "found math easy" and occasionally tutored people who had trouble with it. It always seemed like those who got stuck would make the mistake of thinking math was a grind, that if they pushed through enough frustration they'd get there. I think that attitude might help some fieds but I don't think it helps math.

This isn't to say math really is easy. Rather, I think the appropriate approach is to spend a lot of time and approach from multiple angles until it feels easy (and fun and creative). Work really "hard" to attain a state of productive laziness. But that work shouldn't be a continuous grind either, rather a careful survey of all the ways one can approach the topic.

And certainly being able to tolerate frustration is certainly useful in many fields, programming among them. But I'd say that intellectual problems that benefit from overt are problems where a person has all the knowledge necessary for the solution and merely has to engage in a long, frustrating process of putting them together - like a large but not hugely sophisticated, computer program.
I think the coolest thing about this is that it's using libui [1], so whether you're trying to work on Proton Native, or Vuido, or any other flavor of NodeJS-to-Native-GUI [2], we'll hopefully end up contributing to a single library. (PS: libui has bindings to other languages as well [3]!)

[1] https://github.com/andlabs/libui

[2] https://github.com/parro-it/libui-node

[3] https://github.com/andlabs/libui#language-bindings
The tasks of dropping columns and also of replacing one column value while brining over all others are very desirable data transformations. Codd's algebra had related features (project/extend and maybe an assign) and they showed up in Tutorial D's EXTEND keyword. It is definitely something I think is important enough to add to the rquery R SQL query generator I am working on https://winvector.github.io/rquery/ ( drop_columns(), and extend_*se()'s overwriting behavior). And the R community is already familiar with such piped relation style notation in the famous dplyr package.
The problem is speed of light limit. It will be very difficult to expand beyond our solar system. Maybe that’s the reason we haven’t been visisted by aliens yet
It does a reasonable job:

external my_sqrt : float -> float = "caml_sqrt_float"
"sqrt" [@@unboxed] [@@noalloc]

let () =
let x= my_sqrt 1.0 in
Printf.printf "x = %f" x

becomes something like:

...
camlInline__entry:
.cfi_startproc
subq $8, %rsp
.cfi_adjust_cfa_offset 8
.L102:
movsd .L103(%rip), %xmm0
sqrtsd %xmm0, %xmm0
movsd %xmm0, (%rsp)
movq camlInline__6@GOTPCREL(%rip), %rbx
movq camlPervasives@GOTPCREL(%rip), %rax
movq 208(%rax), %rax
call camlPrintf__fprintf_1291@PLT
....
Ask HN: Mentor for programming language / Garbage Collection
Hey guys,

For the past 2 years, I've been working on a programming language. One thing I've been struggling with for the past 12 months is getting the GC to work correctly. I've been trying to implement a naive mark and sweep collector, for my language. I'm in need of some direction. Would anyone want to help me via Skype or some type of pair programming / screenshare? This is an open source project, with no plans to sell it or anything, however, if you would need money for helping me, I would be willing to pay.
This is a great resource. Thank you for sharing.

I don’t read that as DNS stoping to work, but more reasons why DNS is flaky in different scenarios.

Some of the issues there are things related to mitigation’s against reflection attacks etc. I haven’t read the entire doc, but does it go into concerns around DDOS and other such things, and how DNS servers to mitigate those attacks?

Edit: right in the intro. So a server needs to “understand” when it is under “attack” and only then put in mitigations against the attack. In the worst case, the server doesn’t do this, fixes the issues in this RFC to always respond and then amplify the attack.
Assume?

No, but neither can we discount that they may be. Financial regulations in particular usually come about in response to failures and abuses.
It would be nice if they invested a bit more in their railway system, which is pretty minimal.
> But that is then no longer a Datalog solver but a "well engineered purpose built solver".

I don't really agree. Specialized implementations for instances of a problem that can solved more efficiently than the general case are a pretty fundamental part of any mature solver (GMP is probably the most well-known example). This includes even cases where the user says to try the specialized algorithm and the solver checks that you indeed have an instance of it, rather than the specialized subproblem being automatically detected by the solver (there are many examples, but I always think of optimizations for read only transactions in databases--generally you have to declare the transaction read-only up front).

> As for the "built in" part, anything that is not built in must cross an API boundary and usually translate between different data representations. That is a theoretical reason for being slower.

The abstractions required for getting solvers to perform well on problems like this are usually sufficiently far removed from the representation you'd have had if you didn't have to solve the problem that (1) transforming it is only a small part of the overall time to solve, and (2) it is often a cost you already have to pay to some extent.
Really? Im sure I was able to cancel and renew easily using their SMS system.
There are not as many data scientist jobs as the hype makes it seem. Maybe this will change in the future but right now there is not such a lack of qualified candidates to justify taking chances on lesser degree candidates.

All this hype makes it so everyone wants to be a data scientist. You get people who change careers to go into this new hot career. You also have a pool of people who have been working with data well before the hype with experience. The people trying to break into data science will have a very hard time competing with the people with experience over the pool of jobs out there.
A way to keep a large industry fed, providing jobs which otherwise would be outsourced to low-wage countries. The same industry provides the politicians who get to decide over how public funds are to be spent with lucrative positions, enticing them to keep said industry on their side. People often hop from the industry into politics and vice-versa, a practice known as the revolving door between politics and industry.

In many ways this can be compared to the purpose of war in the feudal middle ages where land always needed to be conquered to be given as fiefs to up-and-coming nobility so that nobility would support the current king in his strive to remain in power. Things change but the basic tenet stays the same: those in power want to remain there and will use the means at their disposition to do so.
A solar-powered scientific calculator consumes less than one mW.
I bought Judea Pearl’s new book The Book of Why last night after reading this article. So far I love the book. I manage a machine learning team at work and I appreciate Pearl’s discussion of how deep learning and statistics won’t lead to strong AI.
Any economic benefits would likely come from using cheaper off-peak electricity. Once smart meters and flexible power prices become more common I would expect fridges (and other appliances) with such features to become more common.
India-born CEOs are taking the U.S. by storm
This is a story in 2015, still, the subject is even more true these days.
Call me odd man out here, but I can't imagine wanting that. My input could probably improve a bunch of shows I consider 'bad', but if I think that, it's usually because of either lazy exposition or predictable plot lines. For shows I consider 'good', it's hard to imagine my input making them better, or on the chance that it did, it seems like it would ruin my enjoyment of it.

Past that, since democratizing the plot would almost certainly yield a regression to the lowest common denominator, it seems like a really fun way to ruin quality television.
> There is no way to tell Python(CPython anyway) in which memory space you would it to create that object.

Ah right, that's because all objects are heap-allocated.

You choose heap by using an object for the stack, and rewriting your recursion to use (superficially) iterative code.

You can choose stack allocation instead by using regular recursion: native function calls with local variables.

What you bring up is an interesting issue that can make recursion harder to understand in Python. Having local objects in the stack frame can cause both stack and heap allocation - pointers for the objects on the stack, and the object contents on the heap. Or, you might have global objects that aren't local to the recursive function call or the stack, in which case it's important to understand you're sharing data across function calls.

Generally speaking, you probably don't want individual heap allocations in a recursive function, so it's best not to have local objects. At least performance-wise.
> Thomas Wouters asked if he had looked at PyPy. Shapiro said the company had, but there was only a modest bump in performance for its workload.

It was mentioned, but in a rather dismissive way
If you can solve a very specific issue for any enterprise, there is usually money to be made. Enterprises have very specific problems, often problems that only exist in that that enterprise, and they have huge amounts of cash to throw at solutions.
Moderators: Please warn people that the "bill / pail / mayo" illusion contains an image of a convicted violent sex offender that may trigger those with PTSD.
>It absolutely is. It's called game theory. And 'no strategizing' is a criterion you can optimize for.

True but I think if the optimum becomes “answer honestly which schools you want to go to, in order” then their goal has been reached, no?