skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is an amazing slide show!

Stuff I kind of sort of already knew, but numbers and charts really bringing home the magnitude of some of the changes, challenges, and opportunities in front of us.
Quantum Bogosort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort
Paul Irish -  A few good men are running for the W3C TAG
I agree with all the others who say this is a neat idea. I've reviewed several sites, but there doesn't seem to be any confirmation of this on my dashboard. There is a button to "Get review" but in reality I should already be inline for a few, right? The dashboard should say so somewhere.
I code around 16 hours a day

You're doing it wrong.
Indeed. And conversely, proving that the observed universe does not operate on a cubic space-time lattice would not prove that it is not a simulation of some sort--it would merely prove that it is not a simulation of that sort.
Depending on the SSD vendor, many drives expose performance counters to help you estimate wear level.
Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium
Unfortunately if it's the first semi-working code sample in a Google result, it will still end up in production somewhere no matter how crappy it is and how many warning labels are put on it.
The thing that I think is lost here is the core of Instagram. Systrom has stated repeatedly that the filters aren't the secret sauce of Instagram. It's the speed of upload, distribution model (able to send to several networks simultaneously), and user interface. I don't think simply adding filters is going to do much for Twitter. Think Facebook Camera (which I believe has filters as well). When you say filtered pictures, no one thinks of Facebook Camera, even though it has filters built in. Not really sure what Twitter's trying to accomplish with this one.
Btrfs and Ext4 work fine with tuning (enabling TRIM, partition alignment, etc.[1][2]).

Samsung is working on a log-structured file system designed with SSDs in mind called F2FS[3]. There is also NILFS (also log-structured) which has been around for awhile[4].

I would stick with Ext4+TRIM for now on a personal laptop.

1: http://superuser.com/questions/228657/which-linux-filesystem...

2: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS

4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639762
hi AK. maybe consider blogging about this? this is a well written but superficial analysis. scott aaronson insists on his blog that a proof should explain why it succeeds against "known barriers" eg razborov/rudich Natural Proofs. but this is really an optional requirement of a proof. moreover the actual barrier to "natural proofs" is very subtle and basically insists that a proof, if it exists, should have a certain "intrinsic complexity" in its constructions, and that many such constructions in the literature for class separations do not have this "intrinsic complexity". but new researchers are just suggesting that this only requires some new "intrinsic complexity" function that hasnt been seen before; but that such functions do exist, they just dont seem to be used in proofs that we know of. eminent authorities in the field such as Lipton have argued that the near 20yr old Natural Proofs may be overdramatized as a real barrier.

here is liptons blog on the subj:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/whos-afraid-of-natu...

here is chow in AMS:

"Nevertheless, it is my personal opinion that the optimistic approach is the right one; that is, the Razborov–Rudich result should be regarded as a hint, and not a barrier, to separating complex- ity classes. The only real barrier is our lack of imagination."

http://www.ams.org/notices/201111/rtx111101586p.pdf
Depends, for one thing one how frequently you intend to use it. Consider variable names, it is often said that it is desirable to have nice, long explanatory names. But again it depends. For variables that have big scopes, it is indeed important to have descriptive names, but those that disappear after the line, its ok to use i,j,k. In fact short names in such cases increase comprehension rather than impede it. The reverse holds as well.

> Certainly, the learn curve is much steep for Unix
> utilities than, say, Python

I am not certain about that at all. Yes they may have trucload of options, but I have never had to memorize them. Many disagree that these tools really dont strictly adhere to the "do one thing but do it well" philosophy they do that to a satisfying degree of approximation. Coreutils, textutils, find and xargs can go a really really long way.
Do you think they omitted the r in search on purpose ? (on the left, written ⊥)
I love when hackers try to play psychiatrist.
s/museums where people will go/engrams that posthumans will load/
It sounds like we could learn quite a bit from you!
The one nice thing about our boxes is that it effectively limits the number of sku's during the fulfillment step. Rather than 5 skus per box, we have 1 box SKU. It looks like you guys fulfill customer orders, which seems like a lot of added complexity.

We haven't had a chance to really ideate around kitting yet, but I've seen how a couple big 3rd party fulfillment houses do it. My major takeaway was that you need to slap barcodes on everything.

I'd love to learn more about what you guys do and what some of the challenges have been. You can reach me at plusbryan at gmail.
Yes, to some extent genes are mobile and do get shuffled around, but if this hypothesis were true, it would be obvious. Whole genomes don't just merge on the time scales we're talking here. If this hypothesis were true, there would be clear genomic anomalies indicating it (e.g. biases of genes used at the same developmental stage tending to cluster in similar genomic regions); no such anomalies have been found.
Cascading Failures with Chef
I think they're assuming that the simulators don't have infinite resources, so eventually we'll find a 'wall' in the simulation.

"With ﬁnite resources at their disposal, our descendants will likely make use of eﬀective theory methods,
as is done today, to simulate every-increasing complexity, by, for instance, using meshes
that adapt to the relevant physical length scales, or by using ﬂuid dynamics to determine
the behavior of ﬂuids, which are constrained to rigorously reproduce the fundamental laws
of nature."

It's possible that if we were simulated, the simulators aren't actually trying to hide the nature of our universe from us. It's also possible even though the simulation started with a 'simple' framework that they could have hidden better if desired, that by becoming a self aware information system we can no longer be switched off / restarted without violating their ethical constraints. So it's possible that the limits a simulation actually are detectable.

Of course as someone said, if the simulators were actively monitoring your thoughts with the intent of stopping you from finding the boundaries then there truly would be nothing you could do.
I don't particularly like Amazon's site either, I think it's cluttered, but it has improved a bit. It's still not the prettiest thing, but what it does right, though, is it makes it very, very easy to buy things. And that's all it needs to do.

But you're right about not always choosing the "less bad" when there are other options you may not be considering.
> Ultimately it's the investor that evaluates and takes a risk on the model, not the founder.

Apparently your time is worth zero. It turns out that there are other valuations for people's time.
Well since there are no real numbers cited we have no way of fact checking them.

Slide #24 of this presentation offers a more telling picture of where Wintel is headed: http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-internet-...

(Spoiler, it isn't pretty)
That's fine. But if you take two people... and one is much more committed to becoming a better fighter, the committed guy will log more fight time.

The exact mechanism by which one becomes good is really a tangent to the original article and my the comment you are responding to.
Honestly, I think it's a little of column A and a little of column B. While sometimes it can be useful and faster to bust out a one line bash shortcut, I think the HN community is also a bit guilty of over-romanticizing Unix/Bash/<Insert non-visual & somewhat geeky tool/language>.
Poor article with poor code, and poor responses from the author in the article's own comments. The comment from 'isaacs' is better thought out than the article itself.

As isaacs points out, the first part of the article about "else if" is much ado about very little. And why the sideways hint that there is something wrong with "else if"?

The second part is lazy and inconsistent refactoring. Why go through the exercise of removing the <= 100 test and never notice that there's also a redundant <= 10 test in all three examples?

If you know JavaScript at all, this article is a waste of your time.
In 100 years people will be in zoos / wildlife refuges.
The reason GSP is in the top 1% (more realistically the top 5 on earth) is that he works so hard at it. Despite his natural gifts, he wouldn't be able to compete at a high level without training... which he did because of his willpower.
In order to use the filters, one will have to use the Twitter app, and not 3rd party apps. I always found part of the incentive to use Instagram is the social network. I wonder if Twitter use will go up for some with the ability to alter the filters directly in the app. Regardless, this move is a defensive move that puts Twitter on par with the abilities of Instagram. It makes Twitter, not a leader, but a follower. Will Twitter take ideas from other social networks, when it feels threatened?
here chow elaborates further/in depth on the "natural" condition in the Razborov Rudich proof & finds some evidence for "nearby" functions that potentially could be used to defy the Razborov-Rudich natural proofs barrier:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.1385v3.pdf

"By definition, a natural combinatorial property satisfies two conditions, constructivity and largeness. Our main re- sult is that if the largeness condition is weakened slightly, then not only does the Razborov–Rudich proof break down, but such “almost-natural” (and useful) properties provably exist."
> A theorist who develops an experimental test that could prove we do not live in a simulation should be lauded.

That sounds like they would be proving a negative, which is impossible to do.
Note: For the moment, I will assume that the NP != NC and above results are correct enough to consider the validity of the latter portion of the paper.

As far as I can tell (from my initial reading), the author (and many many commenters here) seem(s) to be confusing polynomial time (P) with polynomial circuit size (P/poly). These are completely different complexity classes in style and probably in power, too. Last time I checked, there was not a good characterization of P in terms of circuit complexity (the attempt at doing so is P/poly). So, logically, comparing P and NP is not even possible without additional knowledge about P. The exception to this being showing that X != NP where P <= X <= NP.

For reference: P <= BPP <= NP

We know that BPP (a randomized version of P) is (non-strictly) contained in P/poly. We also know that proving P = BPP (which is conjectured to be true by most) requires these classes require superpolynomial lower bounds for Boolean|Arithmetic circuit size. As far as I know, proving an exponential lower bound for an NP-complete problem doesn't immediately rule that P != NP since P !=> only polynomial size circuit size (the circuit size only relates to the size of the advice function). P might not contain problems that require exponential circuit size, but this fact is not stated, proven, nor reference by the author here.

Simply put: The author assumes that P != NP follows immediately from Theorem 6.1. This is not as obvious as they might think it is; many additional details are needed.

Admittedly, I have not rigorously studied or concluded anything from the flattening process the author proposes. I honestly don't believe I have to. Skimming over it, I don't see any way that P is characterized in terms of polynomial circuit sizes (which probably is an assumption as powerful as P!=NP) here. I also do not see any mention of P/poly, which I believe the author is attempting to use.

For a paper approaching the P vs NP issue using circuit complexity, I would expect this much. Because of the lack of even a mention of BPP, P/poly, and others, I would be highly surprised if many of these results in the paper hold at all. Though, hopefully, I might be wrong.

EDIT: Accidentally used circuit depth when I was really thinking of size.
"What the Skynet botnet creator realized, is that he could build a much stronger infrastructure at no cost just by utilizing Tor as the internal communication protocol, and by using the Hidden Services functionality that Tor provides."

This is not good, as this kills sinkholing the C&C. Add to that the ease by which this can be obfuscated from AV detection (it's already 15Megs of random data), and you'll have some storms brewing on the horizon.

Looking at the net as the weather, i have to say very recently it's been pretty stormy out. My mail server's been getting hit badly by spam that it hasn't in the past been hit by.

I wonder if the Tor developers could provide any insight on this. If i were them i'd be facepalming like "This is why we can't have nice things."
(This comment is going to sound ill-tempered and persnickety, and I apologize in advance for it; but I am genuinely curious about the question)

What's the big deal with Vi Hart?
I've seen a few of her youtube videos, and I guess it's cute– and I can understand why they are so popular, as they include many elements of successful internet videos (girl talking + manufactured whimsy quirky humor + the superficial "i love science lol omg" syndrome), but I don't get why they would elicit such a response amongst actual mathematicians, as they don't really bring much of educational/mathematical value to the table.
I certainly don't get why they would warrant her being sought out so much by the Khan Academy, and what she must be doing there all day.

(again sorry for the bitterness of this comment; please explain and prove me wrong, as I genuinely don't get her popularity)
The mystery between DMT and brain chemistry is also a valid area to understand such an idea. DMT is a naturally occurring substance that's in the human body, animals and various plants. The mystery is that it is almost identical to serotonin and tryptophan.

But it is not like any other drug. It's almost unfair to call it a drug. Under its effects, reality looks radically different. You can see the math and inherent aspects within physical reality. With your eyes closed, the experience is even more profound.

Of course, it's likely just an artificial experience, a chemical delusion. But it an amazingly mystical experience, that can be duplicated over and over. It's unlike any other psychedelic and is the only scientific way I'm aware of that induces a "real" mystical/spiritual experience.
It's worth watching the then head of OS X talk about private API's at WWDC a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd97us27eSg

It's definitely a different philosophy from Microsoft's, but it's not like they don't take their API's very seriously.
"its not clear that he's confident enough yet to invite more active discussion on his effort from the theory community". that is highly debatable; arguably that was his intent in creating the public blog and putting all the papers fully accessable on it-- to engage the online community, which somewhat regrettably hasnt happened much in the ~5 months its been online-- that site seems to be "undiscovered" until recently. furthermore, the author insists in his latest blog entry on aug 26th and in recent comments (within the last few days) that he sees no flaws in the proof & welcomes further feedback.
Ask HN: How should we prepare for an external review of our dev practices
We're a ruby/rails agency that uses TDD, Agile, version control via Git, unit tests and Pivotal Tracker for managing stories.<p>Our client has just received a big funding grant and an external Information Management PHD consultant has been engaged to 'review our development processes'.<p>Following our initial meeting where they asked for copies of our GANTT charts and we mentioned Kanban and they said 'What's a Kanban?'. We're really nervous that we will be assessed against some archaic project management principals and that all our agile and modern development best practices won't be appreciated or reflected in the review mainly due to naivety by the reviewer.<p>What should we do?<p>Do you have or know of any resources/facts/stats which could help us make the case for our agile and modern ruby/rails development practices?

[edit: Edited the title to be more of a question.]
This strikes me as equivalent to researchers hundreds of years ago saying "well if our universe is a clockwork simulation then we should be able to detect the gears turning by this method".

Certainly interesting ... I'm not sure that we could currently understand a single principle of a system capable of simulating our universe.
What would be the purpose of a simulation with so much pain and suffering. Where children get raped, flayed, abused, etc... And don't give me any of that matrix crap, that was only to make a flawed concept make just enough sense that you didn't fully think it through until the next bullet time scene. I'm certainly not on the outside paying for this. I have a degenerative bone disease that's caused me to have 6 major surgeries in 6 years. If this is a simulation, when I get out, I'm going to kill the son of a bitch that put me in here.
> What are your thoughts on implementing reversible patterns?

I'm thinking something like this

(defprotocol Pattern
(extract [this input] "=> bindings")
(replace [this input bindings] "=> new-input"))

This should obey some rule like:

(submap? (extract p (replace p input bindings)) bindings)

That would make the data-grammar/generic-traversal experiments much nicer and also cleanly delineates patterns from views. It may also help when I try to do things like generative testing.

Not quite sure how that would work for (or ...) and (not ...) patterns, so it still needs more hammock time.
That's a pretty silly statement. Surely you can prove that 1+1!=3, which is the negative of 1+1=3. You can also prove that pi is not a rational number, 1/2 is not an integer, etc. There's a post on the front page about attempting to prove P!=NP.
Depending where you live there are alternative shelters. The alternatives are not for everyone, and they are usually not "easy", but there are advantages and disadvantages to not owning (a house) and to not renting.
20,000 personnel records stolen from Australian Defence Force
Aviary's filters are actually quite bad (I've done a bunch of research on this because we open sourced a live filter camera picker for iOS) so I'm not sure what Twitter is trying to accomplish with this either.

That being said, I think good filters are quite powerful. Instagram's filter offering is much better than most free filter apps. While not the secret sauce anymore, originally I do believe it was a huge part of it. If you look at Facebook Camera and compare the quality of the filters, maybe you'll see what I mean.
Thanks; I wondered why this would be unique to SSDs.
"rapidly stabilizing"
I am wearing only two socks. Both socks are black.

Is it impossible for me to prove that I'm not wearing red socks?
Your "support" was a bare opinion about what kind of flow of control is easiest to read. To me that is just a restatement of your opinion and not support.

By contrast in two responses, two different flows of control were presented where early exits make for more readable code. (Guard conditions and the loop-and-a-half problem.) Furthermore my personal experience disagrees with you, as does the reasoning of a fairly well thought out article that I referred you to. Which also presented pointers to research indicating that it is easier for students to produce correct code for some common problems if they have the possibility of correct code. Granted, students are generally less competent than professional programmers. However if you're concerned about varying skill on your team, why would you choose to make it harder for the poorer programmers to correctly solve problems?

Out of curiosity, what would it take for you to reconsider your style guides?
It's a known bug[0]; they should change the font-size of the h4 to 19px and then becomes a little better.

[0]http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692
A highly integrated distribution platform for Facebook's (current/future) distributed ad network? (Facebook's Adsense)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiserfs#Criticism
>I think you're looking for "straw man" as I didn't attack you personally

No, I meant what I said. Really? It's hard not to perceive it any other way.

>Concert venues and software contractors do create jobs, but they very rarely spawn into the giant companies we see represented by the RIAA

Such as youtube, soundcloud, itunes, amazon and google, right?
I too would like to jump on this bandwagon of thanking you for Bootstrap. Cheers fat.
have not dug into the paper, but basically if it can be shown that NP cannot be computed with Poly-size circuits, then P!=NP, ie a weaker consequence of the stronger NP!=P/Poly. that is one of the basic conjectures of circuit theory, a stronger statement than P!=NP. the author may be talking about P-size circuits without mentioning the P/Poly class by name-- that would show some unfamiliarity with standard complexity theory, but is not a huge crime, and it is conceivably not necessary to actually refer to P/Poly in circuit proof referring to that class, although of course it would be better... P/Poly was originally defined w.r.t an Oracle, and arguably the equivalent characterization of that same class as "P-size nonuniform circuits" is actually much simpler & intuitive & natural....
example? I mean, assuming one wants to live within society and not as an "outlaw" wanderer, I'm having a difficult time thinking of how you can avoid buying or paying for shelter.
A number of things make me more inclined to look at writeups on using the command line, and command-line tools, than those on higher-level languages like Python.

First, many of the things I want to automate are most naturally done at the command line. For these, I already know the commands I want to run, and just need to script the logic that glues them together. Second, I mostly want small scripts I can send to colleagues, and not have to worry about whether or not they have Python (or whatever) installed.

I do write scripts in Python and Ruby, but they tend to be longer, since they reflect tasks where the data have to be pulled apart and put back together in multiple ways (for example, a dependency-generator for some custom makefiles I maintain). This sort of task favors building up structures in memory, over pipelines, and I use the appropriate tool accordingly.

As for the question whether any of these tools are the most important skills a programmer could have, no, I don't think so. As a programmer, your most important skills are in the language you use all the time, the language your "deliverable" is written in. Most people probably don't use the unix tools as their primary programming platform. But those tools support and extend the environment in which we get our "real" programming done.

To borrow the woodworking analogy from (I believe) the Pragmatic Programmers, all those articles about the Unix tools are probably the equivalent of articles on keeping your chisels and saws sharp. No, the file you use to keep your chisel sharp isn't your most important tool; your chisel or saw is your most important tool. But the craft of keeping your most important tool sharp can be fun and rewarding in itself.

By the way, speed is never an issue with any of the scripts I'm likely to run. But if it was, I doubt Python would be faster, since those scripts involve a lot of calls on system resources.