skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the expression of unbounded recursion can be expressed like this:

#define EMPTY()
#define DEFER(id) id EMPTY()

#define FOREVER() \
? \
DEFER(FOREVER_INDIRECT) () ()
#define FOREVER_INDIRECT() FOREVER

This will print out `?` infinitely. Here is the machinery to evaluate the expression:

#define EVAL(...) A(A(A(__VA_ARGS__)))
#define A(...) B(B(B(__VA_ARGS__)))
#define B(...) C(C(C(__VA_ARGS__)))
#define C(...) D(D(D(__VA_ARGS__)))
#define D(...) E(E(E(__VA_ARGS__)))
#define E(...) __VA_ARGS__

EVAL(FOREVER())

Which will expand to something like this:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? FOREVER_INDIRECT () ()

Well at the end we see `FOREVER_INDIRECT () ()` which means the algorithm can expand further, so we could just apply more scans:

EVAL(EVAL(FOREVER()))

And we get more `?`. And we didn't have to change the expression of the algorithm just the machinery to evaluate it.

This is why I say the C preprocessor can act as Turing-complete, because the expression and machinery, while separate, is both in the language itself. This is different than BlooP, which the only possible way to express Turing completeness is through an external source(such as an input file).

Of course, for all practical purposes, the C preprocessor is near Turing-complete enough. The whole goal of the preprocessor is to output a file, we don't need it run indefinitely. We can express almost any useful algorithm, and if it reaches the recursion limit, we just simply apply more scans.
The Hackback Debate
> There is the cost of fuel

The cost of the raw material used to make fuel is absolutely trivial in all nuclear power plants. The market price of uranium would have to increase by more than three orders of magnitude to increase the cost of produced electricity by 10%. At that point, we have unlimited supplies in seawater.

The capital costs of power plants have trended up as safety and monitoring requirements have risen. Given sufficient automation, AI, and simpler and fundamentally more safe designs (which do not need as much active safety), these costs can probably be brought down.
All of the comments seem to be very USA-oriented, but if one wants to learn a lesson from this we should also discuss other POVs. Does anyone know how would a similar case be handled in EU? Or just using a fork after the cease-and-desist - does estoppel and so on exist there?
I am going to commit the middlebrow dismissal sin here (and compound it by not reading the actual paper; but, the abstract doesn't make this appear to be a paper worth spending undue amount of time on).

Evolution is a process that occurs over vast amounts of time. Trying to draw conclusions about the fate of human evolution based on developments of the last hundred years would be remarkably foolhardy. You might as well try to plot a bee's course based on the last microsecond of its movements.

Sure, people with genetic weaknesses that might have been quickly selected against 10,000 years ago are now able to live long & full lives, naturally leading -- for now -- to the continued spread of those genetic variations. However, humans are also right now unique on the planet for our ability to alter our own genetics; I have no doubt that within the next hundred years, within the very next evolutionary microsecond, we will have the technological ability to choose the course of our own evolution.

And I doubt very seriously that there will be much room for serious disease in that future.
Good point.

If the author used the article, they have access to it, as well as the bibliography of that article.
But have they been profitable even as a small company?
Near Space Footage (100.000ft above the earth)
A P2P-protocolized Twitter sounds pretty non-trivial to implement at scale due to the broadcast nature, compared to email. Seems like you'd have all the same issues Twitter did internally, without the VC-backed resources to throw at them.

How realistic is it?
Works great on the iPhone five. The ad is a bit annoying in that it covers the entire interface.
Craigslist is often called out as an form of "worse is better" in that having a crappy, 90s site design helps to keep regular Joes from being too intimidated to participate. It's OK to post your boring, crappy whatever because nothing there is "impressive" and everyone's having a fine time.
I would subscribe to a news organization that met these standards. Startup!
The entire school curriculum will now be reduced to just two separate domain alternatives: Lady Gaga or UFC. I think we're onto something here!
Since this is really just educated fiction, if you like this you'd probably enjoy most of the stuff written by Alastair Reynolds. Not "hard" scifi exactly, but maybe "firm".
Hmm. Stay away from words that carry connotations? That's what words do. Narrative journalism exists because we are storytellers, culturally if not innately.

Producing tools that help analyze and interpret media narratives is a good idea, but it's also a hard problem that doesn't show signs of being eased by crowdsourcing or noun/verb extraction. Fact-checking has already been completely politicized: What's bare fact to one person is obvious bias to another. You can certainly classify bias and hyperbole from your point of view. But even in peer-reviewed scientific publications you find bitter fights over "theory-loaded" paradigm biases.

Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well?

Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.
Well done. One question, though: Shouldn't the commands be a list instead of an object? I would think you would want to be sure to keep order for image processing. For instance, I don't want my image down-sized for the web until after all the processing is done to it.

The Ecmascript spec leaves the object attribute iteration order undefined (though it appears most implementations iterate in the order attributes are added).
Not accepting Github pull requests because they're not up to Kernel standards is not exactly proof of unforgivingness.
I'll write this before I read the article:

Assumptions: I think a lot of what we "know" is going to be wrong. It's just a thing which seems likely to me. Not in a "things fall up now" sort of way, though a little of that, since the laws of physics have been revised quite a bit, and I don't see that trend stopping. But more in a "We were pretty much crazy to think these things" way. You know about alchemy's position politically today, and how some of the church's actions were perceived? Some things which we consider important today are going to be treated like that.

History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective, I mean, not every individual.

Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the last 500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility, its been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.

Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be lots of strong local cultures again.

Government: Will be competent. And not vitriolic. I'm predicting a break from history again.

Population: Will be ignored. Won't be a problem.

Tech: People will get what they want here. Even if what they want is something they've never heard about. And if they don't want it, that will stop it. We got the atom bomb because we wanted to kill people. That will happen less. No flying cars, but maybe hover-boards. Lots of the stuff that we usually relegate to philosophy, or say that is impossible to know, and won't affect anything even if we know it will be known and become part of science. And we'll be better, way way way better, at biology and ecology.

Intelligent Aliens: Will be found, will be relevant to some people's careers, but won't be all that important. Not the main driver of events.

Planet: Will be better, much better. Things will turn around here. People will care about it. The majority doesn't really care about it now, except in a kind of abstract way as it relates to government. But they will care about it later.

Intelligent Aliens: Will be found within a hundred years, won't be important until at least 200 years in.
I hate replying to myself but I think this point is worth following up on re:space. Consider that by current estimates the global economy will be at a level of around a quadrillion dollars per year within the next 100 to 150 years. Now, let's say that developed countries put a priority of space science exploration and manned spaceflight at around 1 part per thousand of GDP, which is fairly close to what the G8 nations spend today. Assuming that the future world retains such a priority it would mean spending of a trillion dollars a year just a century or so out. Now think about that over centuries, hundreds of trillions of dollars of investment into space. I think that means that at a minimum you'll have self-sufficient off-Earth colonies with populations of millions. And that's without assuming breakthrough technologies.
Nobody asked about what "would" have happened. That's what I meant by goalpost-moving.
The question is, like the parent post said, for networking OpenBSD is actually better in my experience. This has little to do with user base, a startup that I was working on had a firewall cluster made of OpenBSD systems using CARP and pfsync we tried using Linux and conntrack, since the admins are Linux guys, but the OpenBSD solution was more stable for us.

In this regard I think OpenBSD worked better, for everything else, including workstations, Linux was well above anything that OpenBSD could offer.
I meant this specifically as a dig at this article. Personally, I've really enjoyed everything Randall Munroe has ever written; they're educational and relatively accurate, but they have a charm that a lot of writing lacks. Never read Hitchens or Feynman, but my understanding is that many technical people can also write quite well.
Appart from the fact that the analogy isn't nice

And trying to chisel a 75% discount out of everyone you buy from is?

Whatever society it is that you're talking about isn't for me, I guess. Sounds like a lot of work.
We're top-voting this comment, folks?

Really? That's how we want to encourage the next generation?

Age is entirely relevant. In having youth, OP is sitting on a one-shot mass of potential energy that can be channeled in a multitude of ways. Among other things, by including age, OP is perhaps asking to be encouraged that yes, this is a valid and worthy combination of talents and ambitions. That this work shows potential and can lead somewhere.

The prosperity of my country, and of the human race altogether, absolutely depends upon swelling the ranks of STEM professionals. Our future requires we encourage our youth down the very challenging road of developing their minds.

So when one of those indescribably valuable minds comes to town seeking the support of the elders, we say fuck yeah, good job. You're doing it right. How can I be helpful on your journey?

OP, I know nothing about Node, but I nonetheless encourage you to continue your quest. We need you to keep loving this, even though it's hard. Keep it up. You'll get to help define the future.
Ironic to see "bash" in your username.

C'mon dude. 15-year-old kids don't normally write modules like this. I'm happy he's writing good code at his age. A lot of us starting programming when we were younger. I'll proudly encourage others to do that and then be there congratulating them when they accomplish that.
As a lawyer, you have professional obligations to protect your client's confidential information. Storing it in a public cloud services provides unfettered govt access if they choose to. I hope u heard about the petraeus Incident.
I just tried them now and got the blurred answers. Maybe you have a Quora account you're signed into?
Seriously, I'm down voted to obscurity because I don't see the relevance in some asshole picking a fight with a 15 year old kid? Releasing your own node module (or any code fo that matter) is something most developers never do, they are consumers of these packages, never contributors. You can look at the stats, it's pathetic. But a kid who can't legally dive a car releases a module. That's great, and whatever head up the ass mentality that brought hacker news to dump on this kid is simply ignorance if not pure jealousy. Way to go kid, don't let these dipshits discourage you. You're a better developer than the two late twenties, college graduates, that I have working for me.
Probably not. People are bad at random: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-...
I find it ironic to see the usual "follow me on twitter" at the end of the post. Yeah, people will bitch @twitter but nothing will change.

Also, Twitter has 1500 employees. That's absurd.
Any host is going to have restrictions, but Imgur will not take your image down for bandwidth reasons.
Are you claiming that no one has ever possessed a local monopoly on a resource that produced negative consumer effects?

Such monopolies either (a) aren't really monopolies, despite people whining that they are; (b) don't last; or (c) have to be backed with collective force of some sort.

Pretty laughable claim and clearly false on hundreds of thousands of counts.

Then I'm sure you'll have no problem naming a few, in between the guffaws.
I'm kind of shy about my music :-)
> "That any open-source components you’re using are fine for commercial use. These days, a lot of great software is being written under the MIT or Apache Licenses, but check. Twice."

You can also use GPL, LGPL software. It is okay to use these licenses for commercial use, in web applications. but, you cannot distribute your app as a proprietary software. Basically you can also consider using GPL licenses.
Desktop would be a waste of energy. Already too crowded of a market, and the single point of success would be hardware support.
Congrats on your first iPhone app! It's designed very nicely. Some feedback on the website, if you don't mind:

1) The profile image of the iPhone is a bit unnecessary. It takes away from the app you're trying to showcase. The skewed view of the app interface just looks... off.

2) What's a drinkup? Perhaps some explanation would help. To me, it sounds freakin awesome. But maybe it's only for a secret society which I don't belong to... ?
One way I've managed to get past it is thinking how politely listening to them is wasting their time - time they need to make a real sale instead of me stringing them along.

And for the ones who push past that, well, annoying/ignoring the intentions of person you're selling to is sort of a jerk thing to do, so that mitigates the guilt a bit.
I don't know if such a port exists, but I do know that I wouldn't want one. Dalvik's performance characteristics are scary-bad and there are plenty of incompatibilities with Java libraries that do any sort of weaving or code generation (so you still can't use Groovy, Rhino, etc.).
Interesting this works better on my Galaxy Nexus than on my four year old MacBook. Chrome on my Nexus rules...
Shouldn't a threshold for "good job, you're doing it right" be a bit higher, than an iPhone game or an image processing module?

Like launching your code into space? Or solving a major machine learning challenge?
Induction motors used in vehicles are basically always three-phase machines driven by a variable-frequency inverter.
I'm not---and never have been---a journalist, but this piece is assuming that journalists are, by and large, happy with the state of reportage today. Yes, it would be great if you could exhaustively fact check every piece, or carefully and skeptically examine every assumption and statement a source makes, but when your editor is breathing down your neck because the presses are running, and you still haven't turned in your article, standards slip. I suspect that many (though not all) of these points are things that get taught over and over in journalism school, but there are eventually quality and quantity trade-offs, and if there's little incentive for the extra quantum of quality, then it's only rational that quality would win out.
AOT to Native code just removes the JIT time. Any overhead of actually running the Java runtime and running initialization code is still there.
Was anybody able to run jruby on rails with drip?
Probably depends on how you were picking them. If you were using something like DiceWare to pick letters from an English document, then yeah, you would nail the frequency. But if you were picking letters at random in your head, I would be very surprised if you got anything more than a very roughest of distributions. Anything more than "lots of e's, few q's" would surprise me.

Humans rather suck at picking random numbers. We skew towards picking numbers that seem "more random", whatever that means (which would probably work in your favour for picking random letters with an English frequency, though I'm not too sure), but we also avoid "randomly" generating streaks of numbers, because we feel those are "less random".

If you put two teams in a room, one flipping a fair coin (and writing down the results), and the other pretending to flip a coin but just faking the results, it is usually very trivial to pick out which team actually flipped the coin. They are going to have surprisingly long streaks of heads or tails.

I don't have any evidence to necessarily suggest it, but I suspect this anti-streak tendency will tend to be strong enough to interfere with any correct frequencies which may otherwise appear. ("Oh my, this is far too many e's in a row..")
The problem with space mining when you look a the periodic table there is just not a lot of useful and rare elements. And all space mining is just extracting those elements so you need to have a gap that's worth the effort to go and collect even after LEO. When it comes to space mining think: Diamonds are carbon which is cheap. Even gold mostly just sits around, there is little point in increasing supply when so little of it is used. So yea, you might go and collect a few asteroids for some platinum etc but crossing the 1/10,000th of word GDP takes more than just a few useful elements.

PS: Outside of Fission or Fusion nothing ever actually runs out. Worst case, start mining dumps and river beds etc.
If you don't want to subsidize health, go live in Somolia.

Opposition to government-subsidized healthcare is not anarchism.

So yes, it is silly, to put it nicely.
Amazing story! Love this.
I think I'm with Hendi on this one, I'm not a heavy reader of LWM but I check it every now and then and go through stories I think may interest me. Overall, I would say it has some fairly decent writing but if you have alternatives you think are better I would very much like to know about them.
Show HN: Decora (beta) - Online Interior Design for Small Projects
Not to be the PC crowd here, but the author is a little bit flippant about modern history. The Holocaust didn't just 'suck', nor did the Battle of the Somme. Furthermore, in his brusque dismissal of contemporary Middle Eastern culture as primitive, he misses out on the fact that Islamic extremism is a very modern issue ( < 40 years old ), and definitely does not define the region as a whole.

It's fine and well to speculate wildly about technological advances, but the future of the human race is ultimately about humans. If you're going to ignore the human aspect, do it completely. Don't trivialize millions of deaths in the race to talk about how cool nuclear fusion will be.
The game uses the Turbulenz Engine which includes a WebGL graphics framework (which is equivalent to Three.js) - http://biz.turbulenz.com/developers#turbulenz-engine
forking tends not to work very well if you're running multiple threads, as Java tends to do.
"Stealing" as applied to physical property involves two elements: it must be unauthorised by the owner, and it deprives the owner of the thing.

So I wouldn't define your password as stolen, just "known". As soon as the perp used it to take money from your account, then stealing has occurred.

"Stealing" is a very loaded word, which is why big media is desperate to frame their business problems using it. And in this case, I doubt many people would consider those who used NVD3 were guilty of stealing, given that a) they had been authorised to use it (as far as they knew), and b) they haven't deprived Novus of anything.
What about read-write times?

At some stage, storage density is not per-se the only issue. Speed, energy efficiency, error rates etc. are now to the fore in alot of places.
Yes what I mean is that if just the technology is trivially reproducible, if you have the network effects on your side (everybody is using XYZ), you take the leadership as long as you don't annoy users over a certain limit. In the attempt to make money it is easy to go over the limit...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

Also, https://www.fsf.org/resources/jobs which I guess is priced too high ($250) to get many listings, or people don't know about it.
Two months old (a significant amount of time in this market) and no one caught "MacBook Air Pro Retina" ?
Somebody who wants to manufacture a bogus reason to criticize Microsoft, which is apparently a common thing to want to do on HackerNews.
Fly, You Tools
I'm no expert but I think the answer is "No", due to other problems.

Distances are closer in Globular Clusters. Alas, those are "metal poor", so the only planets are gas giants like Jupiter.

Distances are closer in Open Galactic Clusters like the Pleiades. Unfortunately those cluster tend to disperse. By the time a space faring civilization has evolved, the stars are no longer close.

Distances are closer in the Galactic Core. Unfortunately that is a high radiation environment due to Sagitarius A* (the mega-black hole at the center of the galaxy_ and all the nebulae the hole is dragging in.

Short answer: places where the distance between stars is closer are unlikely to have space faring civilizations.

Of course there is always Zeta Reticuli A and B.
Expanding your code reading horizons
Do I need the app for this to run on iPhone4? I tried pulling up the site but it didn't work.
Google Nexus 4 Actually Has an LTE Chip
There's not much downside from antagonizing Hollywood in particular, but there are plenty of non-Hollywood copyright interests, some of whom traditionally swing GOP, such as segments of the recording industry (e.g. Nashville). Though it's quite possible they're losing some of their influence within the party, especially since the departure of Sonny Bono from Congress.
Scientists don’t fall in love with an experiment. Neither should entrepreneurs.
tl;dr: Google using partial information to find the rest.
Isn't this the point where you congratulate the interviewee on the breadth of their off the top of their head Ruby knowledge ... and then ask them to do it by hand?

Surely the latter won't be a surprise; if I answered like that I'd do it with a grin and a "Well, I could do it like this [write out the above], but I suspect you want something more like this [then write an implementation of the method]."
I think companies should stick with .com domains. They are the gold standard. That's just my opinion.
Ideas that don't make money