skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd replace the outer list comprehension with filter() but otherwise the code doesn't look "obfuscated" or even ugly. The alternatives would be map and lambda or expand into a for-block, both of which are less aesthetic from my point of view.
If you've never read his books (esp. "Physics for Entertainment") in high school , then you really did not have fun with Physics.

His math books:

1. Mathematics Can Be Fun
2. Figures for Fun
3. Arithmetic for entertainment
4. Geometry for Entertainment
5. Lively Mathematics
6. Fun with Maths & Physics

His physics books:

1. Physics for Entertainment (1913)
2. Physics Everywhere
3. Mechanics for entertainment
4. Astronomy for entertainment
5. Tricks and Amusements

Free electronic edition of "Physics for Entertainment" @ Internet Archive.
http://www.archive.org/details/physicsforentert035428mbp
> I also feel obliged to talk a bit on nonblocking IO or asynchronous IO (AIO)

Wait, that is not correct. His IO is blocking. He gets a notification when data is ready, from the select/poll/epoll (the asynchronous part), but when IO is actually performed (read, write, recv, etc), the operation it is still happening in the main thread in user space, and it blocks it.

Currently only the file system (I think) has truly asynchronous and non-blocking IO. It is provided by the aio_* set of system calls and is has been sort of an exotic beast (it is not that popular).

Here is a good chart of the possible IO types and their combinations:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-async/

And of course:

http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
If changes are going to be made to the ethanol subsidies, shouldn't changes be made to oil subsidies as well?

according to this article, http://www.tradereform.org/2010/11/daryll-ray-oil-subsidies-..., if oil subsidies are $150 billion (excluding related military activity) and ethanol subsidies are $16 billion and ethanol is making up approx 4% of US oil consumption.

Should oil subsidies be reduced as well?
I think you're misremembering history. It's not bad because 'it violates the separation between content and presentation', it's bad because you end up with tag soup. The table's demise was purely that it was too hard to maintain in anything more than a trivial layout. When you started getting down to your third nested table it was a friggin' nightmare. Also cells and rows had weird quirks as well as missing properties where you'd then have to nest a span in every cell just to get it behaving properly. Oh and also the occasional sacrifice to the dark god of 'table-layout:fixed'.

The rest of it though I agree with you.
Ask HN: Actuarial Intern, located in Taiwan?
Hi HN,

I'm finishing my undergraduate career with a degree in applied mathematics. I've already lined up two things in Taiwan, teaching English, and Mandarin Chinese courses.

I'm interested in interning as an actuary, but is anyone hiring interns who won't be able to come into the office? My plan is to spend my free time brushing up for the first actuarial exam.
I had this running about 10 years back, and the number of boards it covers is a little bigger now but still small. Odd mix of supercomputer and embedded users. I wonder if any of the large cloud providers are using it, as it is much more reliable than a BIOS which can fail in so many ways.
Maybe its the philosophy major in me, but where exactly is the paradox? None of the reasons discussed seem unintuitive or defy logic.
mmmmh... dan?!

wait till i see you on monday! :)
I see a black cloud looming for China. The "One Child" policy is making their age distribution very top-heavy (much more so that the U.S. "Baby Boomer" phenomenon). Also, two-thirds of men in China smoke (and over half of male doctors). Furthermore, as a populace gets richer, its diet tends toward eating more animal-based products and obesity and cancer rates rise. I see a very large health-care problem in China's future that will certainly slow down their economy.
It's also a risk-mitigation problem: making sure that nothing goes wrong with the solution to the plumbing problem.

NASA probably isn't optimally cost-effective, but I suspect that eats more money than the plumbing problem itself does.
"One possibility would be to have 5-year Dutch auctions of medallions."

Or you could stop pretending the government can legitimately criminalize a harmless business activity at the behest of a rent-seeking cartel. Money is not obscene. Driving a customer from A to B in exchange for payment is not a crime.
China has a significant population advantage and the US has a huge physical and social infrastructure advantage, but who is on top nominally is far less important than avoiding a Russia or Japan style collapse. The US and China are both having issues with letting their well connected elites fail. Taking risks is good for society but trying to get state support for risk taking causes huge market inefficiency and eventual failure.

PS: The specific US issues like healthcare, ridiculous military spending, and debt are still easily fixable as are China's corruption and Pollution issues the problem is forcing people who benefit and influence the current system to suffer. EX: Removing the mortgage interest subsidy would be a huge long term boon to the US but good luck getting that passed.
Copyto.co: Bookmarking and Web Clipping in One
No the network sockets are set to non block and will return E_AGAIN once you have emptied the kernel buffer. Thats still non blocking.

I dont think he is using aio_* which Linux does not really implement usefully.
What a silly article.

Furthermore, even assuming that women do in fact choose lower-paying jobs, to what extent is this tolerable? After all, whether the cause is societal pressure or neurobiology, either way women are influenced by something outside of their direct control.

If you're going to declare it "intolerable" when a person is influenced to do something by their neurobiology, then what in life is tolerable?

What would it mean to be free of the influence of our own neurobiology? It's not even a meaningful question -- our neurobiology creates all our desires from the will to power to the need to poop.

Besides, instead of asking why women choose low-paying careers, perhaps we should be asking why men choose high-paying careers. After all, high-paying careers largely tend to suck -- they're physically, mentally or emotionally draining and the hours are long. But young men want to earn a lot of money so they can... you guessed it, impress women.
There is no "hate", only criticism. Don't be so averse to it.
Python doesn't provide an API to aio_* because they're basically useless (on Linux at least).
I need to read the article(s), but there is one valid, limited application of ethanol in the industry/product. It is superior to MTBE from an environmental perspective.

That means, as an additive. Not as a primary fuel source. And for this purpose, no subsidy is needed, as far as I know (and now that the risk associated with MTBE is prohibitive including from a business perspective).

P.S. Oh, and Brazil is making pretty good use of ethanol, although I'm not too familiar with the environmental downside in their production -- I suspect there is some.
Nice. Especially because it offers Open Firmware and EFI payloads: http://www.coreboot.org/Payloads

I'm guessing that doing init work on 3rd party expansion cards is left up to the OS. This makes sense, but might be troublesome for poorly designed adapters...
Just curious, but why have you decided on becoming an actuary?

I ask this because becoming an actuary is a difficult process due to the amount of studies required and the cost benefit isn't as lucrative as many other similar fields that would require less effort.

I come from an accounting background and I studied alongside aspiring actuaries. The starting salary and long-term prospects are less than accountants, when it's by and far easier to become an accountant. A number of my friends, now wish that they decided to become an accountant instead of an actuary.

I don't mean to question your decision, but I just wanted to offer an alternative outlook from experience and offer options.

btw. I'm taiwanese and I'm sure you'll have fun in taiwan. If you're an Asian Born Chinese (ABC) or an American in general, then you'll have an amazing time.
This article would have been irritating if it had proposed Yet Another Solution. But that might just be my bias -- I don't think there is a solution here, which makes me think there's not really a problem, either. It may just be that no matter how hard we try, discrimination is so deeply part of how our brains work that we'll never be free of it. Heck, even wanting to be completely indiscriminate is a sort of bias when you look at it sideways.

One thing I would like to see is income distribution across people in the same profession. Obviously, it is difficult to control for things like skills sets and where they overlap. But then you have too small of a sample population...
This is the first gender discrimination article I've read that isn't horrendously biased and attacks the issue from both sides ending in a "we don't know."
I have never used it. It looks nice, the only thing against it I can come up with is that it doesn't look like prototypes but more like a finished product, so it might not be as suitable for early tests.
Making cloud computing more secure - Homomorphic Encryption
Although it's a bit of an apple to oranges comparison Copenhagen suborbitals are on the trajectory to launching a human into space in around three years time. In a months time they'll have their first testflight from Bornholm in the baltic sea. They're doing this whole thing based on nothing but sponsors and goodwill. Their budget is around $8000 a month - orders of magnitude lower than spacex. They also built the worlds largest homemade submarine btw.

Until now they've developed solid rocket boosters, parachutes, recovery programs, astrouanut survival and cockpit, etc. etc. and have not run into major problems yet.

Some links:

Website: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com

Static test of solid rocket booster (110.000 HP): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g_xjGOJRws&feature=relat...

TEDx talk by Christian Von Bengtson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua9oGxNNGd0

All their technology is open source by the way.

Shameless plug: These guys survive on donations, and a few months ago I helped start a support organization to help them survive economicvally. It's $20 a month to be a member, and we really need more members so we can get these guys into space. If you feel this is a worthy cause and want to join send me an e-mail (it's in my profile). Our website is http://raketvenner.dk/ (currently only in Danish...)
Bookmarked! I loved it.
Fine. This is definitely good news. It proves a company is doing a great job, it gives hope and inspiration to other business try to be innovative and bring back the American spirit. But what will happen to space programs if American economy goes into a harder crisis? People will probably vote not to launch anything, not to look at the sky, but to spend money on land issues instead. My big concern is regarding the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. That could bring many succesfull companies down, specially those on American markets only. China can be a big issue to America if it starts no to believe in dollar currency anymore. In this context, beating China on innovation at Space programs might not mean Americans won.
That sounds like a list of correlations, rather than causation.
No. They would return E_AGAIN after the data has been read or written in blocking mode. If select comes back and says "read is ready on socket 4" then user code does read on socket 4 and gets (say) 4K of data followed by E_AGAIN. Getting that 4K of data happens in a blocking mode. To make it non-blocking you would provide a pointer to your user space buffer to the kernel and it would determine when IO is ready _and_ proceed to put that data in the buffer.
I came here with that exact quote in my clipboard. Also entertaining is the hand-wringing and explaining that goes on whenever someone notices that education doesn't perfectly predict income.
What role, then, do Open Firmware and EFI play if the hardware is being initialized by coreboot?

--hardware/low-level noob (bare with me)
If an ISP throttles they should be required to say they are doing so to you the customer and indicate it to you in real-time.

You're paying for a service and if the company you're paying considers your use in violation of the terms agreed to they should indicate to you that you are in violation not some sneaky restriction you never know about. In fact I bet people have called their ISP and played the "it's not me it's you" game when it's actually the ISP throttling their customers.
To save anyone else the trouble: the errata can be found at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html , but it hasn't been updated to include this.
If you like this, you will also like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-World-Physics-Everyone/dp/0674...
> If you think Python was a significant influence in Go's design you probably have not worked with much with Go or its ancestors.

You're correct. I haven't used Go particularly much and I've only heard third-party descriptions of Limbo et al. Regardless, a number of the semantic and syntactic differences between Limbo and Go strike me as Python-influenced (obviously not goroutines or the defer statement) but if you have evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it.

> Yes, Go is not a 'purely functional' language, or 'purely' anything

Whoa buddy. That's not what I meant at all. There's no technical value in being able to say your language "purely" implements some programming style or other. Now, it would be nice if higher-order functions became a little easier to work with in Go; it is also unlikely that this will happen, because that's not one of the design goals. I can't fault them for that, but is there really any harm in pointing out a true fact such as this one?

And anyway, a "purely functional" language is just one where there's no built-in support for mutable state. Obviously this does not describe either Go or OCaml.
Yeah best to avoid them. It works best if you buy hardware around what works, rather than trying to work with poor undocumented stuff.
Paper Computers could lead to Book-like E-books and paper phones
Yeah, I'm so glad, too, that I don't have to do anything and can continue in my position of privilege (which of course, isn't! woot!)
I was pretty much homeless 18 months ago in San Francisco, and now my startup.is taking off. My email is in my profile if you want to chat.
Furthermore, as a populace gets richer, its diet tends toward eating more animal-based products and obesity and cancer rates rise. I see a very large health-care problem in China's future that will certainly slow down their economy.

Is this going to be a competitive advantage for India, with its high population of vegetarians?
The traditional x86 hardware init scheme is to run x86 machine code from ROM's on the expansion cards. This of course limits the cards to only being used in machines that can execute x86 machine code.

Open Firmware replaces this with Forth code on the card and a Forth interpreter. This is how PowerPC Macs and Sun Sparc hardware would load card drivers.

EFI's driver functionality is pretty much the same as Open Firmware, except it uses an EFI Byte Code (EBC) as it's language.
Done that, it's on github.
Right. Unlike wireless minutes, though, ISPs would directly help their competition by offering rollover bandwidth:

http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollo...
Why ISPs will not offer rollover bandwidth
What are taxes, non-disclosures, non-competes, and angel investing rules like in Portugal?
There's a lot to be written on the subject of the British (or just the English, the other parts of Britain being a whole different ballgame) and speech. Certainly I don't know of anywhere else where a person's manner of speech tells you nearly as much about their geographical and socioeconomic origin. (But of course, I only speak one language so my attention is pretty restricted).

In Australia they say there are three accents: broad, general and cultivated, and which one you have is mostly about your socioeconomic level. In my experience, though, it's more of a spectrum, and the "broad" accent goes in several different directions depending on where you are -- I can usually pick out a Queenslander, for instance.

The most interesting thing I've noticed about American accents is that you can often tell someone's political persuasion, at least on the radio, if not from their accent then from their manner of speaking. Flip through the radio dial in some unknown area and you can instantly tell whether you're listening to a right-wing or left-wing show -- the right-wing voice is deeper and more aggressive while the left-wing voice sounds higher-pitched and a bit naggy.
SpaceX aren't pushing any envelopes. They're just doing what has already been done for decades, but for a lower price.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, how about replying? There are only 3 clauses above, so you can just say which one of those clauses is wrong and why.
Can Microsoft be a lifestle brand? My answer to Apple fanboys.
Um, check the GP profile.
The difference is that most plumbing problems result in nothing worse than loss of property and even truly egregious disasters might not make even the local news. Plumbing problems with manned rockets can result in deaths which are almost always international news.
Anything has to be better than the giant mess which is EFI. EFI is worse in just about every way than the BIOS, which is quite an achievement considering how everyone hates the BIOS.
Written in response to this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2522272

In summary: ISP economics are very similar to wireless economics, but ISPs would directly help online competitors by giving heavy users more bandwidth.
It is overrated, because we keep posting about it, on this site and discussions.
There's a Robert Heinlein book where having a logo on the moon is postulated. Anyone remember what that was called? Anyway, this is no way a new idea, and it's a terrible idea too.
In some ways nothing new here. For example, right now you can type in pi into Google, and Google will provide its value above the search results.

I doubt that the page of links will go away anytime soon. For restaurant addresses and other highly focused searches that rely on public information, that works. However, content creators will fight you mightily if you as a search engine want to use their copyrighted content to generate your own content. What's in it for them, if you provide the answer to the customer and take them out of the loop?

And this now implies that you become more than a traditional search company, you become a content company. That's no easy feat either.
When I look in to the infinite wonder of space I don't want to see a fucking coke logo slowly going by.

This occurs in one of the red dwarf novels. After the invention of FTL travel, coke pays a astro-engineering company to trigger a series of precisely positioned supernovae to create a burning message across the sky, proclaiming: "DRINK COKE."

As it is visible 24 hours a day for five weeks across the whole planet, they are confident this will finally win them the war against pepsi.
Reversible Migrations in Rails 3.1
However, to be outrageously precise about it, this behavior is the one of CPython's GC, and should not be relied on as specified by the documentation (beginning of http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html)

Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether — it is a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still reachable.

CPython implementation detail: CPython currently uses a reference-counting scheme with (optional) delayed detection of cyclically linked garbage, which collects most objects as soon as they become unreachable, but is not guaranteed to collect garbage containing circular references. See the documentation of the gc module for information on controlling the collection of cyclic garbage. Other implementations act differently and CPython may change. Do not depend on immediate finalization of objects when they become unreachable (ex: always close files).

As the Zen of Python says: explicit is better than implicit and in the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. Hence the decision Python (IMHO rightfully) made about being explicit about it, and allow whatever current of future memory management scheme to be appropriate and forward compatible. This is already happening with PyPy (http://pypy.org/compat.html).
From the Lunar X prize teams we know that it nearly fits within a 30 million budget.

how so? from the lunar x teams I know, it is exactly the opposite.
I think he has enough credit to be able to go back if he wanted to.
Wow, I was just thinking about how to accomplish this idea yesterday.
Regardless if these plugs actually increase efficiency, their novelty will make them a commercial success. Who doesn't want a car with a Laser-Powered Engine(tm)?
I'm pretty sure it's a very dry joke, people have advertised similar ventures before that ended up being pranks.
It's a shame that nobody has a chassis like the sun fire 4500 anymore. The closest I could find is a 5U Thinkmate STX XA48-2510 which would work out at about 32 cents/GB.
There are cycles to everything. Cycles go between two polarities. I think that 2012 is about a large important polarity flip. An analog 1-bit going back to an analog 0-bit (or vice-versa).

This context is known. But the content is unknown. We don't know what will happen, how it will happen, or how long it will take. Peace on Earth? Apocalypse? Maybe.

But whatever it is, we'll look back and say, "The turning point was somewhere near the year 2012."
Glad to help. I hope the plans work out and that you find Portland to your liking. The only thing I miss from Austin (besides some of the food -- we have great food here, too, mind you, it's just different -- and my friends and family) is having a top rate university in the area. PSU is decent and there are some good smaller schools around (obviously Reed is great), but the number of world-class lectures that UT had, which were generally open to the public, was astounding. But it's a small price to pay for livability. Enjoy the change in scenery!
It’s Silicon Valley or the Israeli Army for This Young Entrepreneur
Building Jobs Tractor (1st) weekly update
Why Facebook+Skype Is Not a Bad Idea
Pakistan leaks photos of people shot at Bin Laden compound
Which data structure is this?
Couldn't I could make the same argument about flickr.com? I take a picture. I call it "drinks after a bike ride." I tag it with "Pina Colada Bar." I make it public. How long before Mrs. James sees the picture? One in a million shot, right?

What privacy problem does color.com have that doesn't apply to flickr.com?
Video: Scala Web Underground
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The Fc.exe command does not work when files differ every 128th byte
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"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"

Good grades are certainly not enough, but they are almost always required. Oxbridge only invites the best students to interview, and even the top 5 most academically competitive schools in the UK struggle to send more than a third of their students to Oxford or Cambridge in a good year.