skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are reliable for things they are "designed" to. For example for motoric coordination, coordinationg body automatic functions - breathing, pumping blood, etc. They are also highly reliable for new things, if properly trained - like playing music, riding bike, flying plane, playing games, etc. Parsing natural language is not easy task, it involves symbolic processing, yet brains are better at this than computers.

Complaining that brains without training are not reliable is like complaining computers don't work correctly without software.

BTW - many of the errors brains make are not because of unreliable parts, but because of system design - we have some firmware that made sense before, and now is problematic. This firmware is reliable - it works as intended, only now the problems changed, and we can't change the firmware, and patching this in software causes some problems.
> I'm pretty sure that if you just "connect the uploader's POST to the downloader's GET" then the Node server would have to buffer the entire file from the submitter before sending it to the clients.

Not at all. Use stream.pipe(). I've done it countless times and it works really well.
How much space will be dedicated to fawning over Mark Zuckerberg?
That was one of the proposed actions, but it looks like they didn't choose it. Which is a shame. US-only will not harm those that have no congressperson to write to, but it will also be an interesting talking point in the US media, who might start asking if SOPA will force jobs out of USA (which it might well do).
This form of exploratory computing has existed for a while in CPU instruction scheduling. Branch Prediction etc. is widely used.

The big trade off has to be power consumption.

If you diminish accuracy, fine. But if your handset dies because some genetic algorithm didn't converge in 3 minutes, that'll be a problem.
Very minimal.
How the Myth of the Algorithm Fools the Market
Show HN: Notification Control my weekend project - Email notification setup
You missed the temporal context of what I wrote:

"A few decades ago [...] if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own."

I agree with you on the quality of the BSD code, and I'm glad such great code is readily available. But a) I definitely had been programming before 1990 (the copyright on that BSD code), b) back then hash tables were far less tightly integrated with programming languages than they are today and fewer people knew about them, and c) if you want to be pedantic Hash Tables have been around since 1953, so way before most programming languages that are still in use today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#History - they're however much more commonly understood, and in ubiquitous use today!
Translation for readers:

Let's say you have some floating point numbers, like...

float A = 42.90F;
float B = 00.01F;
float C = /* ... */;
float D = /* ... */;

(A + B + C) will not necessarily produce the same result as (A + C + B).

In fact, if you do (A + B + B + B ...) very much, then you will wind up exacerbating the problem --- it can be a source of bugs if you repeatedly increment a counter by small floating point values. For example:

const int Iterations = 10;
for ( int i = 0; i < Iterations; ++i )
A += B;
printf( "%2.4f\n", A );

The output is 43.0000, as you'd expect. But what if we increase Iterations to 100? We get 43.8998.

Astute readers probably would note that 00.01F can't be exactly represented in base 2, and wonder whether something like 00.0125F would still suffer from this problem. Alas, yes:

A = 42.9000F
B = 00.0125F

8 iterations == 43.0000
80 iterations == 43.9001
800 iterations == 52.9006
8000 iterations == 142.8820 /* we would expect 142.9 */

So if you want to parallelize some computations, and you want to do 4000 iterations on core #1 and 4000 iterations on core #2 and then sum the results, well... let's see what happens:

float A1 = 42.9000F;
float B1 = 00.0125F;

float A2 = 42.9000F;
float B2 = 00.0125F;

const int Iterations = 4000;
for ( int i = 0; i < Iterations; ++i )
{
A1 += B1;
A2 += B2;
}
float A = A1 + A2 - 42.9000F;
printf( "%2.4f\n", A );

The output is 142.8885 -- which is different from our earlier result of 142.8820!

You may be tempted to try various things to get around this fact... for example, what about counting from zero rather than from 42.9000? (Answer: the error can be even worse, which is a topic worthy of its own separate post) ... but you will quickly discover that this is a fundamental issue. The order of operations matters.
The actual post linked here is basically an intro and is kind of "meh" by itself, but the series of posts it introduces is quite good and answers a lot of the questions people have about how you do a seemingly "imperative-style" application in a purely functional language.
You may joke, but I find the Internet to be more libertarian than anything else, and by that I don't necessarily mean the people on it, but how the Internet works.
Built this because I've found that email notifications have gotten out of hand.

Even when I unsubscribe from some service, they still keep coming and then I have to login to that service and look around for the carefully hidden email notification settings.

Made this so that in just a minute any person could easily set up email notifications from most of the important services out there.

If people request more services, we'll certainly add them.

Have you had similar issues? Hope this helps!
SOPA is Shelved
I don't think that was their tactic.

Sure, they (Hollywood) would be happy if SOPA passed unaltered, but that's always the tactic: propose a door-in-the-face bill, shift the Overton window a bit, pass a foot-in-the-door law. It happens over and over.

Example: Do you think they could have passed a 40 year copyright extension in the 1970s? Instead, they passed two ~20 year extensions, one in 1976, one in 1998.

Example 2: SOPA and PIPA would have been unimaginable in 1998. Instead, they got the DMCA, which was merely unacceptable. Now, they push SOPA and PIPA hard, expecting to pass some watered-down version, and driving web site owners to extol the DMCA they vociferously opposed in 1998.
Im going to go off topic here and mention http://searchco.de/ which does try to replace the outgoing Google Codesearch.
Could you point me to a description of the VLIW compiler problems? In 1981 a small group of us coerced the Unix verion 7 portable C compiler to generate VLIW assembler as a senior project. There was nothing astonishing going on; the pcc had perhaps a couple dozen things it needed to be able to generate (conditional execution, arithmetic, pointers), and it was a simple matter of not using stuff before the (very primitive and shallow) pipeline was able to deliver it. After graduating I lost touch with that kind of fun tech - I was hired to modify accounting software written in BASIC. I've recovered ;-).
Equally though, someone who has a dusty/muddy car (esp in a city rather than rural area) probably values a car wash less than someone who actually has their car washed every week so their car looks relatively clean.

I keep my TT looking clean because I care a lot about the car and so have it washed every week. I'm probably the target customer for a service like this. I'd also be pissed, as I said above, if someone unsolicited washed my car.
Búzios uma das maravilhas do Brasil - Rio de Janeiro
I decided to learn ruby on rails (via http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ I highly recommend it) and stackexchange.com has been an invaluable resource. Both as I learn the ruby language, and troubleshoot issues as I'm coding.
The presidents challenge
They can proactively call their MP and tell them not to do what we are doing here in America.
Making Games, Made Easy
"The USA still is the most influential country in the world, and this fight is international, just as the web is international."

As a US citizen, I didn't want to be the one to say this (in response to e.g. https://twitter.com/#!/foxhuntingx/statuses/1589645062094274... ) because it might sound arrogant, but seriously, Herr Duerksen is correct: People in Australia, UK, and other non-US places affected by the en.wikipedia blackout can cover their eyes and ears and pretend SOPA doesn't affect them but I think this is a ridiculous stance.

Yes, much of the world looks to/points at the US for various speech &c. policies. Furthermore, much of the Anglophone world uses US internet services and products that would likely be affected by SOPA (facebook, youtube, reddit, en.wikipedia, 4chan, etc.). If it passes, SOPA probably will affect you whether you live in Boston or Brisbane.

There are many people who seem to hard time grasping the fact that US law applies to US sites, regardless of what country you are in (see: "Google turned off my 10 year old's Gmail even tho I live in the UK and it's a US law!!! US law doesn't govern me!!" <- yes but US does govern Google, which operates out of the US).

This fact is a good argument for creating competing services not based in the US (even tho it'd probably be illegal for us 'murkins to use them :/ ).
floating points have well defined rules and have perfectly accurate calculations, they are only "inaccurate" when used as a computer representation/approximation of real numbers. However, they still do not exhibit any randomness (indeterminacy), are usually not a cause of strange, hard-to-reproduce errors (that concurrent, non-sequential memory instructions often cause).
Does anyone know if this includes media like pictures and audio files? 20 gigs uncompressed seems way too small for all of the media on Wikipedia. Granted, it's >2 years old, but that still seems a bit shy.
I think that this technology will eventually replace the current GPU processing that people have been doing. It has all sorts of cool crazy applications, but people will probably still need their good old fashioned deterministic CPU as an option.
Breech of privacy/data protection laws in some countries.
They're both Hollywood's senators, not Silicon Valley's.
Nice and simple. Can't tell you how many times I just delete emails that I never wanted in the first place because I'm too lazy to change my notification settings.

If you're logged into the service you're wanting to change then this makes it a breeze.
I'm confused, why is that protest at Joseph Ailoto Plaza instead of in front of Sen. Feinstein's office? http://g.co/maps/r8s85

Perhaps because the chosen location is in front of City Hall and usually has media trucks nearby?
But they also mentioned the file name too

They only mentioned that it was from the filename in the comments. So initially at the start, it wasn't clear that's how they did it.
Wikipedia Joins Anti-SOPA Blackout
My first reaction to this is - "Ugh. Haven't we been down this road with XML?" I don't want the format du jour baked into my datastore. Now, if it had a field that stored some sort of abstract lists-and-hashes structure (sort of redis-in-a-field), that sounds more interesting to me. I realize JSON is isomorphic to just that, but it still seems like flavor of the week.
Quote from the article:

>When a competitor of theirs filed for a patent on the idea, they weren't concerned. After all, Luma knew of prior art for their mechanism stretching all the way back to 1885.

So why, when they learned of the competitor filing for a patent on the idea, if they knew of this prior art, did they not send all of that knowledge to the patent office? Yes the patent office makes mistakes, yes the patent office often does not find a piece of prior art. But they (Luma) are at fault and share some of this blame for not sending all that stuff they knew about to the patent office once they learned of the competitor's filing.
Are Domain Registrars Using Verisign Price Increase to Pad Margins?
The new generation of tech millionaires (Under 30)
The english Wikipedia uses a massive number[1] of MediaWiki extensions. At the very least you are going to need parserfunctions (used in basically every template) and cite to properly display basically every article. Math, wikihiero, syntaxhilighting, poem and who knows how many others are needed for non-general pages. You'll also be missing images and getting them would require significant effort since there has not been a batch download in years and have to get images from en and commons.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version
Look at PostgreSQL's hstore data type - that's pretty much what you're asking for.
ClojureScript One Overview (video)
Yes. I also remember there being a previous discussion about those posts on HN. Does anybody care to dig it out?
All this for the possibility of interposition?
Yes, it seems so. The impact is there for this little-known and little-used feature. Instead of optimising for the common-case scenario where the symbols are not overridden, the ABI optimises for the corner case.

Using LD_PRELOAD isn't so rare and strange that you can propose throwing it out without quantifying its performance cost. I can't recall offhand why I needed it (I would guess Valgrind or Massif) but I've used it several times as a developer. What exactly is the payoff for giving it up? It can't be bigger than the current performance difference between statically and dynamically linked executables, can it?
Which is why every good numeric library should have a "correct" reduce functions implementations that guarantee minimal errors. in case of a sum of an floating point array, that would be a tree-based sum, possibly coupled by sorting the array beforehand.

Also, if you do some kind of map-reduce style work distribution where different nodes perform same operations on different data, it pays off to use a deterministic (pseudo-)random algorithm for work distribution, so that your results can be reproduced.
Stanislaw Lem Google doodle dissected
I don't see any hostility. The comment was certainly not polite, but I wouldn't say it was unfriendly.
It doesn't, due to licensing issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Whe...
I'm thinking the number of new facebook's accounts per second...
Where does to 200Gb figure come from? I was quite busy building a web crawler too at the time and I can distinctly remember that our crawlers had about 17Tb of storage. So let's say we had crawled something like 15Tb of data to get a meaningful sample of the web.

I agree with the gist of the blog posting though.
This website makes me sad for our species. Somebody thinks "Rolling Stone" is essential.
Looks like it's a day of reading Simple English Wikipedia...
You need to talk about your new business idea
The filename could contain enough information to be a big breach of privacy by itself. Think "microsoft bankruptcy proposal.doc"; "google downsizing plans 2012/2.xls"; "ipad 3 presentation draft.ppt".

Temptation can be resisted, but in this cases you are in trouble just for glancing.
Why char[] is preferred over String for passwords in Java
Why fewer developers might be better for your team
This is quite a common teleological argument known as the Watchmake Analogy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy

Instead of going over the common ground, I wish to present to you some examples of Computer Science (and other areas) finding the exact opposite (that is complex systems often have no defined controller or designer) is true.

Time after time, Computer Scientists, Physicists, Mathematicians and Biologists modeling behaviors of fractals, bacteria, flocking birds, ants, fluid, fish and even people have learned that systems with very simplistic rules can produce insanely complex behavior.

NASA famously developed a program that would design antennas with great success: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/04_55AR.... , these antennas worked extremely well, but were created by a computer following a few "simple" rules, but the results were outstanding. There is an entire branch of Computer Science dedicated to researching Evolutionary Algorithms(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm ), these algorithms produce solutions.

Now if I was to say to you that I was going to start a company with a few workers, each worker could do what they wanted at any time and in 5 years I expected to have to giant skyscraper (which would be constantly cleaned - remember I am not telling anyone to clean!), thousands or millions of workers and a constant supply chain. You would probably call me crazy (mostly for not having any plan at all!), yet almost this exact situation happens all across the world, every single day and has been doing so for millions of years.

Ants. Ants as you may know live in colonies, and generally produce huge underground nests. They are often able to find the shortest path to food and building supplies, the nests are kept free of obstacles and defended to the death. Yet, there is no central controller (the "queen" is a misnomer, all she does is give birth) that indicates where the tunnels go, noone is telling an ant what to do at any other time. The system evolves naturally out of very simple genetic rules and is based on communication between peer ants. Deborah Gordon gave a brilliant TED talk on the subject of how clever ants (or at least collections of ants) can be : http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html

(Note: I am not advocating trying to form a company as described above!)

A few books for those who want to research further into this fascinating area:

http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Beauty-Nature-Exploratio... - The Computational Beauty of Nature - Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation

http://www.amazon.com/Turtles-Termites-Traffic-Jams-Explorat... - Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds - The book that started me in this field

And some Google (other search engines are available) search terms:

- Fractals
- Ants / Termites/ Turtles Behaviour
- Flocking Algorithms
- Cellular Automata
It's too sharp on a black background with black text. On a high-end display it's just too.. rich a colour. I'd use pastels personally.
I'm not sure whether this is applicable but my main objection with this article is that the numbers don't add up. How many Ph.D. candidates do you know who are granted a budget of $10k+ to do their research? Surely something else must have been going on to shrink the expenses to a more acceptable amount.

Then again, according to the wikipedia page the original BackRub was conceived when the web was only 10 million pages large, $2000 is considerably more acceptable for a Ph.D. project.
Is it possible to find "wanted" people without breaching privacy laws?
I'm with you, this smells of feature creep. I don't see a big benefit over serializing the result set on the client. This is literally a one-liner if you're using an ORM or something like PEP 249.

The new constraint allowing you to ensure the string stored is valid JSON sounds useful though.
Jquery UI bootstrap
Experiencing user pain yourself is “The Great Teacher”
As a software developer my brain is one thing I certainly don't trust, the brains of others I trust even less. That's exactly why we put things like tests and code reviews in place. Still despite our best efforts our software is full of defects.

From the non-software perspective human brains make big mistakes all the time. Consider car accidents, gross errors in judgement, etc.
Facebook knows my True Name, therefore I'm so careful there that I don't say anything controversial or substantive at all. It just gets a bit of cheerful pap, and mostly I don't use it at all. HN get what I'm really thinking about precisely because it's pseudonymous.
Love StackExchange network, they deserve their success!
Wasn't the line item veto passed into law but ruled unconstitutional during the Clinton administration? In any case, this argument is predicated on the idea that we can trust the president, which is an idea the most recent couple of presidencies should have disabused us of.
(16384 ; Infinity]
(8192 ; 16384]
(4096 ; 8192]
(2048 ; 4096]
(1024 ; 2048]
(512 ; 1024]
(256 ; 512]
(128 ; 256]
I don't care about HN karma
Often when other countries take the US's lead it's for an advantage, or by force (see Bush-Blair and the recent Spanish thing). I'd be interested to know what the international pressure people are doing now or after Sopa is abandoned, if they still try to get other countries to do something similar.
I get an error when I try 'shop': http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=shop

Otherwise, very nicely done. I tried several searches and had a few reasonable-ish domains come back.
I think it was Rich Hickey who said something like: "What is true of every bug ever found in a program? It passed all the compiler's type checks!"
We already had one, I thought.
TL;DR: angersock seems jaded, he expected a blog post and got an MVP plug / blatant marketing post.

Honestly, I think it's a reaction to "Minimum Viable Product" overkill on HN.

The first 10 times it's OK. The next 50 times it gets less interesting. Once you're into three figures it really starts to grate. So you start to the MVP style posts. Which means those making MVP posts have to turn to a different strategy: the "interesting headline" blog post, to drive traffic to their site.

Oh, and I think that the older people here (and at 31 I'm probably one of them) are turned off by really blatant marketing..
No. If I need to find an expert, there are better ways than using this site.
On many keyboards, there's an arrow pointing to the left on the backspace key, which may be where the convention comes from.
6 reasons why Pinterest rocks (...even if you're a dude)
I like this. It's really cool. One idea that could be really beneficial is if you crawl auction sites/domain selling sites, and create a subcategory for domains that are for trying to be sold. You've got the registared domains already, but it would be so helpful to see which of those are "available to be had" so to speak.
Few customers compare dedicated server providers purely on server spec and price. If that was genuinely all you were looking at then colocation would almost certainly be a better option.
They also want extra services like backups, firewalls, ddos protection,control panel software, extra ip's and so on. Most people want support beyond the minimum which would be
hardware replacement and network connectivity only. In an ideal world hosting companies would sell a server and then the customer would take complete control of the server and hate the idea
of the host logging on to their box. In reality most dedicated server customers are people who have busy sites that have outgrown traditional shared hosting but are not sever administrators.
They want a host they can call up to do small jobs for them and pay for more involved work. Were the lines are drawn on this extra support varies dramatically between providers but
will make most real world difference to the majority of customers.
The anglosphere yet reigns supreme
He's not a minimalist, he's a vagabond.
Another point is the return of the payment in the Android Market, many users just want to test the app, which was more difficult in the App Store.
Feed Om Nom Candy In The Addictive Game Cut The Rope
I wouldn't stress it too much. Sustainability extremists will make you feel guilty for eating a diet of wild berries -- you're pillaging the bird's food.

It sounds like a pretty cool adventure that you're having. My first reaction was "15 possessions and no pan?", but I can understand that in context of the travelling that you're doing.
This $0.99 iPhone app magically combines group photos to give the perfect shot
When Breakthroughs Begin at Home
Thanks for explaining what I meant in simpler terms.