skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main benefits of running code in the Erlang VM are:

1. All network I/O is non-blocking, even if you write code in a blocking manner (i.e. no callback programming when writing scalable servers)

2. Erlang's processes are green threads, so you get massive concurrency for free (i.e. no cooperative thread programming when doing large-scale multi-tasking)

3. In an OTP environment, code will be executed as part of a supervision tree, so it will be very difficult to crash the interpreter (i.e. no strict need for error- and exception-handling code)

So while this interpreter will probably be quite slow for single-threaded tasks compared to the standard interpreter, there will be benefits if you want to run a lot of Lua code concurrently in a networked environment.
I'm a hypothetical poor person, so I must feed myself on cheap subsidized carbohydrates, which leave me feeling hungry, or eat an amount that sates me after working one to two normal jobs and taking care of zero to more children, which conveniently is an amount that will contribute to my obesity. Helpfully, my busy schedule lets me eat one big meal a day instead of several smaller meals.

The problem is that personal responsibility is disproportionately more expensive for poor people - they don't have the time or the money to do it right, and when they do manage an attempt, equal results will cost more time and much more % income.
"It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand."

This is a good point. I'll keep it in mind for the future. On less civil sites, it also at least makes someone work to invoke a string of identity-politics nonsense like "LOL LIBERTARIAN MOAR LIKE STRAIGHT RICH WHITE MAN AMIRITE?"
This is similar to a discussion we had a couple of months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364467

I'll repeat my response from that thread: it's not so much about in-game computations (as many posters already observed, coaches and staff already to a lot of the statistical calculations the author describes, it's just all written on paper and wristbands), it's about gambling, specifically making sure that all viewers get the same information at the same time so that particular gamblers aren't advantaged/disadvantaged. Otherwise you have situations where players may be inadvertently tweeting/messaging injury information or game strategies. That's all.
Why I want to learn Python and Ruby
I think hackers by nature weed out non-technical people pretty quickly. I love hackerdojo and noisebridge. I think this post is great in that it highlights what it really comes down to: a misunderstanding on the person as to what a hackerspace is.

It's about educating those that come in that people pride themselves on getting stuff done.

Also I don't want to discourage any non-coders visiting these hackerspaces. Please come by! But keep in mind that if you are after someone to do work for you, you'll fail pretty bad. If you are here to learn, then by all means, take a seat, I'll even help you out.
What they should really be afraid of is simulations of football becoming more interesting than recordings of the sport actually being played.

People already spend hours and hours playing NFL games... it's only a matter of time that a virtual league with probabilistic players and teams coupled with 'better than real' graphics entices more viewers than the actual sport. Imagine being able to see a great play from any angle, at any time -- the current NFL can't provide that.
Did LightSquared not know about GPS noise before bidding on the spectrum they received? Maybe LightSquared got their spectrum for cheap because there was so much noise and nobody else could find a use for it.
The article talks about extending suffering, not life. Few people who think they will live forever expect to do so wheezing with every breath.

Shakespeare's sonnets are artfully composed, and I'd say we've done a decent job of keeping them around and finding uses for them.
I don't think they allow, expect, or calculate an unbounded positive as t->infinity. I don't expect we'll get caught in a local minimum - we've done a decent job breaking out of them when the individuals involved haven't had nearly as much at stake...
Have any of these articles included hard numbers?

These slides say GPS received power is around -160dBm
http://www.ima.umn.edu/talks/workshops/8-16-18.2000/van-dier...

I see unsourced claims LightSquared signals would be around -70dBm, which is at least roughly consistent with LTE.

If so, that's a signal 1,000,000,000 stronger than the satellite-to-ground signals LightSquared's band was allocated for, immediately adjacent to the GPS band (10 or 20 Mhz apart, near 1.5Ghz).

Is there some reason it's not totally ridiculous to expect GPS receivers to be engineered for that kind of noise?
Meh, aren't them in communication all the time with people who watches the game 100km from there? Couldn't they print the papers generated all the weeks before?
Winer decides to turn off blog comments
This is the post that put him over the edge:

http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVeryDim.gif
If there were a computer algorithm proven to give even a slight advantage in play calling, I'm sure most NFL coaches would jump at the chance to use it. Using game theory and advanced statistics is already all the rage on most (American) football websites. While I'm sure most coaches don't follow such things, enough do that it would soon catch on. And if something successful catches on, NFL coaches have a proven track record of copying it.

Coaches, players and the like are now no longer needed. Okay, this last portion may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is proven, technology would, as in other industries, render the current status quo inept and inefficient. In conclusion, I plan to take the Robotics course from Udacity this month.

As an avid follower of this sport, I've found that a large part of success as a team is to be found in coaching the fundamentals. Just like in school, a good teacher can make all the difference in terms of outcome, even for a gifted player/student.
Half of the duty "solicitors" are cops. You don't have to actually be a solicitor in the UK. You just have to pass a test. So retired cops take the test and earn themselves beer money (on top of their pension) to work with their mates.
Yes, it deals with everything involved in "parsing" which covers all aspects of starting from a text document and converting it into a tree structure that can be used either for code generation or for manipulating the code.

Lexing isn't all that different than parsing anyway. Both involve the recognition of "tokens" based on a stream of data. In the case of a lexer, the "tokens" are usually the characters taken character by character. For parsing, the "tokens" are identifiers, values, operators, etc.
Beijing, China 2030 A.D.
Agreed. Smaller logo, bigger video, and keep it all well above the fold
Jeepers, that's like the 27th time someone has posted a memory-tampering trick to HN in the last week.

You don't remember? You must have used one.

Incidentally, some of this research was already written into a forthcoming chapter of Methods, and people are going to think "Oh he just got that off that HN article", and they're going to be wrong. 'Twas just an amusing coincidence.
While not sports related; this is one example of an genetic algorithm that improves with discarding failures: http://www.boxcar2d.com/index.html
Protip: don't host HTTP things on ports other than 80 and 443. This site has its CSS and Javascript files hosted on other ports which are blocked for me.
This leads to a wonderful idea: is it possible to make Bash syntax-highlight the Bash code you type at the prompt? I'm guessing the answer is currently "no".
Well to start with, they went to MacWorld and previewed the app there. I don't follow the space much, but I think the company was somewhat well-known already for Mac apps.
As an example of why this is so important, consider a classic case: Amazon's May 1997 database snafu, documented by Jeremiah Wilton at http://www.bluegecko.net/news-events/new-whitepaper-the-dba-...

Frequent automated restoration and testing of database backups would have avoided the downtime. Amazon would have noticed the Oracle bug soon after the extents change, and would have had a chance to identify and work around it before taking down the production database for routine maintenance.

Furthermore, by using their backup DEC storage array for the routine backup restoration tests, they would have identified their new DEC storage array as faulty before they put it into production use.
This is the comment that put him over the edge apparently:

http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVery...
I was thinking about doing the same thing, but then I've decided to keep them open, but just for 15 days after the publication date of the post. That way it is easier to moderate, and I can still have some valuable comments from the real followers of my blog. Just my two cents.
not being an expert in this field, one hazard that comes to mind is that a key look up could turn into a tree traversal problem, which defeats the purpose of having a cache in the first place..
Content-type for JSON is application/json

For JSONP, you might consider application/javascript (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111302/best-content-type-...)
When adding features to something, I tend to be a big fan of "when in Rome"[1]. If these were extensions to Python (or Ruby or JavaScript) then I would totally be for using '[' with arrays. As a C guy though, I would rather have seen them use '{' for NSArray and '[' for NSDictionary. Regardless, I'm glad to see this stuff added.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/when_in_Rome,_do_as_the_Romans...
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Haha, I guess I wasn't clear enough there; my bad.

In my defense, I was not saying "since we achieved all these awesome things, we'll surely eventually avoid the heat death of the universe". Instead, I was claiming that right now, we're probably still to ignorant to know that with confidence. Perhaps we will find a way to escape into a different universe.

Thanks for the reminder (and good username!)
It's not just a rage on "American" football websites, but the real football too.

Moneyball has found itself jammed deep into soccer the last few years with varying degrees of success.
I liked the NYT article a lot more. I'd rather read one article for 10 minutes than 10 articles in the same amount of time.

In the end, I think the market agrees: people pay real money to read the New York Times, but nobody pays real money to read Forbes blogs.
Your strategy makes sense. He's also deleted all the comments today that were based on this story here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912
Well, the requirement for GPS was that they be able to filter out adjacent low power level signals (signals from space).

LightSquared is now arguing that changing the requirement to be able to filter out high power (terrestrial) signals is reasonable, and it is reasonable to retroactively apply that requirement against the millions of existing GPS receivers that were designed to meet a different requirement and thus will have to be discarded.

I would have a lot less heartache over the requirements change if LightSquared would be willing to bear the cost of their proposed change of requirements, rather than forcing me to bear the costs. This means they would need to replace my GPS receivers (a car navigation unit, a boat navigation unit, three cell phones, and an iPad). A quick mental summation is about $2,500, and that is pretty cheap compared to a lot of people out there.
I've always wondered what would happen in an extreme situation like the author describes. I can't imagine the type of game that would lead to. I figure at the end of the day it would come down to the human aspect of it: can the team execute their high-probability play vs. the expected high-probability defense?

I wonder what kind of race this would lead to in F1? If drivers were replaced by an apparatus that would drive the car and maximum driver assists and all telemetry measurements were allowed to be used would the races be boring or even more exciting?
(1) Add job listings to submission page

(2) $
Exactly correct.

There is a particular camera feed (called All-22) that monitors all 22 players at the same time. This particular camera feed is only available to teams, not outside data-collection agencies.
Web development company
SASA is a leading offshore software development company headquarter in India having 10+ years experience, specialized web development, PHP Development, custom software application, software product development.
I'm relatively young (25) and I still get goosebumps whenever I see online courses on cutting edge technologies offered by universities for free. What an amazing time to be alive.
OPML is just the start, it should also pull followers from your twitter account and projects you follow on github. I can't see myself importing them by hand, too much work and no easy benefit in sight to warrant this work.
Consideration for not using HTTP status codes was that they are not working very well with JSONP-type integration. This is when page JavaScript adds "call" script object to DOM and then expects call back when it's loaded. To pass error information in this case we need HTTP server to return 200.
I am a customer of ventraip but only for my budget sites. They have built a very good dashboard which allows you to do most of what you would need.

If you try to do something is that is not built into the dashboard it becomes extremly difficult and their customer service is often of no help. Having had to transfer one of my domains from there economy plan to a business plan. I had to cancel the economy plan first to disconnect the domain and then add it to the new server.

If i had no been technically proficient and been aware that i needed to take a cpanel backup before deleting the account so as to be able to restore it, i would have been in the same position as this gentleman.

Ventraip really causes shockwaves in the Australia hosting industry because the competition is overprices and inefficient. There system worked well while only technically capable people used them but once you have beginners using your system you better make it fool proof. I hope they learn a lot from this debacle.
I got through 20% of Learn Python the Hard Way, stopped for a number of months, and have now delved into a few of the linked lectures. Learn Python the Hard Way is already much more intuitive and simple to pick up (in a good way).
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

However, I think the lectures are complementary. :D
What tools do hackers/techies/developers use most?
I hope any of the developers/techies who read Hacker News will take 5 minutes to
help me with this survey. We are trying to capture a picture of what the areas development community is using in terms of technologies. When we have the results we will release them out to the community. Also, if you can
pass it along, it would be appreciated. You/they will be entered to win an iPad!

> https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DJX2M89

Thanks for your help!
Zuckerberg at Knicks (Basketball) Game
also an example of why you shouldn't be a moron. the host instructed him to cancel his service before he was migrated over to a new server, and he did? what the hell was he thinking?

not saying the host is innocent here, but the 'victim' is really only a victim of his own stupidity.
Most societies had a better connection to death than modern era societies. Death was seen as a necessary part of life and signs of mortality were presented to encourage people to do better in their lives. Death is inevitable. Even if you somehow gain true immortality our sun will burn out, our galaxy will split apart, our universe will accelerate towards c and render time meaningless.

You cannot escape true death. Nothing you could say, do or know will ever change the fact that your life will end. You need to come to terms with that before the inevitable happens. Once you are aware that you will die it becomes easier to really live.
Sometimes "normal health/coping" is not possible, or inexorably difficult. PTSD example:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

So, you could argue that in some cases it is "shortened," and in many cases for severe trauma, it is not shortened at all. Rather, it opens healing/coping as an actual possibility.

Especially for trauma which induces self or extro-destructive behavior, the "long-road" to "normal healing/coping" could be dangerous.
Robot F1 could be very exciting. Faster races, lighter cars (probably could drop like <400kg if they opened up the rules), less need for safety regulations, etc.
Curiously enough, none of the Samsung's printer show the tracking dots as per the list at https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d....

Not sure if that means they do not track or they use some other means to track ?
this is all fascinating, BUT this is not "teleporting" per say. I would rather think true teleporting will be backing you into some small ball and shooting you trough a pipe fast enough so you end up on the other side of Earth in 10 seconds. What you saying here is creating a digital-copy and "reprinting" in a different place after sending via internet :) Yes, the copy of you would be created but your conscious wouldnt "skip" or "travel" to the new body because... why? you still here! Killing source wouldnt make your mind switching to the new body because that body is just a DNA copy of you. What would happen is the "perfect" copy of you would be created somewhere else in space. From that nano-second on, there would be two of "you" but both would think different from a first neuron connected in your brains. I think that would be no different than having twin-brother that thinks similar to you (or in our example: exactly the same) but of course your clone within a time would be gathering different experience from environment and the more time pass the more different conclusion would be drawn between you and "him".

Its still incredibly amazing question: what IS conscious. where is it stored and how can it be transferred. what will happen if you make a copy of it? can you make a copy?
Okay, total sysadmin noob here: how do you usually test restoration? If I was to test HDD image restoration on my laptop, for example, and it didn't work, I would be doubly up a creek, because not only is my disk hosed, but I've just proven I can't restore it. On our home server it's not quite as bad, but there's only so much you can do with dry runs. I suppose if it's just the files you're interested in, it's not as hard, but much more of a pain if you mess up your OS.
In 2002 i made a SEO'd affiliate site. It took like an hour to make the site but it made me $500k over a year!
Mozart of Chess: Magnus Carlsen
When you've paid your $2 for the Times, you've committed to the paper, and you have a big broadsheet (although smaller than it was), so you can scan a lot of complex headlines and ledes pretty efficiently.

When you're online, every other website is competing for your time and attention, screen real estate is limited, and good chance you're using an aggregator like HN, reddit etc.

Online, publishers have to go for linkbait Twitter headlines. If the Times doesn't find a way to do it, this is what will happen, and everyone will read their stuff via Huffington Post or Business Insider.
I'm interested by what seems to attract people to a VM/runtime enough to re-implement another language on top of it while preferring a new language to whatever the VM's flagship is. Sticking just to Joxa and the more common ones showing up here, the claimed motivations[0] seem to be:

Joxa - fault tolerance; concurrency/scaling; "tool set in which to build DSLs"; (A Lisp on Erlang VM)

MagLev - native code & data persistence scaling to very large stores; distributed cache; heavily optimized JIT (Ruby on Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM - http://maglev.github.com/)

Clojure - multithreading; Java library access; portability/scaling (A Lisp on JVM - http://clojure.org/)

JRuby - performance; multithreading; Java library access (Ruby on JVM - http://jruby.org/)

Jython - performance; Java library access/extension; optional static compilation (Python on JVM - http://www.jython.org/)

Parrot/Rakudo - Such an oddball case (and not a reimplementation) that I'm reluctant to toss it in here, but the Parrot VM is explicitly designed for multiple languages (Perl6 - http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/)

All three VMs have been around for quite a long time and been the focus of huge engineering efforts, but none of the re-implementations seem to have displaced the originals or the VM's default language[1], so my question is whether there's any re-implimentation that did? The obverse (replacing the old VM/compiler for a language with a new one) isn't uncommon what with all the browsers that have done it, the huge changes in the JVM, etc. and usually those end up being complete swaps, so is there one decisive factor that makes the difference?

[0] Ignoring the obvious, worthy, and most importantly fun factor of "because it would be cool" [1]
[1] Arguably in the case of the Lisps there's no original to displace.
[2] JSLinux, anyone?
Cell phone recycling
When we read the history of the cell phone in the United States we can see that within 25 years the cell phone count went from near zero to more than 300 million cell phones currently active on the networks
From the 2nd page of the article, quoting from the "Technical Working Group" (which supposedly included representatives from both LightSquared and the GPS industry):

"the interfering signal at a distance of 500 feet from the [cell] tower [was] up to 800 billion times more powerful than the distant GPS signals being received from space,"

and a mile away power levels were "400 million times those of the GPS signals."

That's a difference of ~87 to 120 dB, which seems consistent with the 90 dB difference you cite.

(edited: s/LightSpeed/LightSquared/)
Get an extra 5gb of Dropbox Space by backing up your photos
According to the article, the interference is 86dB above the GPS signal (400mn.×). Wikipedia gives figures of 60-80dB. The LightSquared band is from 50MHz to 16MHz below the GPS L1 band, which as a percentage of 1.5GHz is from 1% to 3%. This is not very far away, and 86dB is a lot. I don't think it's reasonable to expect any equipment to have that kind of selectivity; after all, high-Q filters are not only expensive, they are often also heavy and bulky.

Also there is an upper bound on filter sharpness given by the latency constraints (GPS needs accurate timing, and a brick wall filter has infinite latency) but that bound's probably not even being approached here; I don't have hard data on GPS signal latency requirements nor a simple formula relating rejection to latency.
It's not surprising that this has now made it international.

If you read into the history, the guy clearly did not follow basic instructions. Backups are not part of the service he bought; yet the host backed up anyway. The host informed him that backups were disabled on this account because it was over quota and he did nothing to resolve the situation. He took no backups of his own.

He only lost his data because he failed to follow instructions or respond to emails and subsequently cancelled his shared hosting account before the data had been migrated over to a new VPS service.

I think the hosting company were in the right here.

Here's the forum thread for those that are interested: http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572
What's Your Mental Model Of Innovation?