skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know what the speculative execution notes in processor.h are talking about? The code seems to be trying to set up spec execution "barriers."

What does that mean? I thought speculative execution was a micro-architecture optimization (and the speculatively executed instructions won't be retired until the processor knows that it wants the side-effects).

In contrast, I've only seen barriers come up for x86 at the ISA-level (and even then, only for multiprocessors setups).
And the Mildura Police force.

Honestly -- the directions are fine. Turn by Turn seems useful (only had it a short while in AU).

The key issue for me is crappy information display. Most of the time -- major roads aren't shown while zoomed out. So If I want to glance at the maps to try an alternate route -- I can't.
I recently wrote a very simple economic simulator. Given X actors, each starting with $Y (for a total money supply of $(X * Y)). For each "tick," two actors are selected, a buyer and a seller. The buyer gives the seller a random amount of money (if the buyer didn't have that said amount, no transaction happened). That's it. No skill. No talent. No fraud. Just random transactions between a fixed number of actors and money.

Even after a few hundred transactions an interesting pattern emerged---a power law distribution of money, with the average amount of money per actor less than the starting amount of money (generally, about 66% of the starting amount). The results were similar regardless of the number of actors, the amount of starting money, and the amount per transaction (even a fixed amount exchanged per transaction would result in a similar result).

I think the result would the same for your hypothetical town.
Windows app store explicitly disallows open source, I believe. Android is the only one that does not.
Archivrfy
Archivrfy is the simplest and cheapest way for archiving and searching emails. You can see the landing page at http://archivrfy.simplelander.com/ We really appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
Gruber On AppleScript
How to resolve "not received the Lost Coast compensation package"
Here's how I did it: https://bitbucket.org/teoryn/image-approximation

For converting the polys to pixels I render it with OpenGL and then extract the resulting image. I use ppm for both input and output, they're just a plain text file, and any decent image editor can convert to or from them.
At the moment I've found a stack of index cards, with one task or feature per card, works best for me. You can sort through and prioritise, and write more detailed notes on the back. Also helps with motivation as the 'Done' pile builds up.
No, you don't. I can't code my ass from my elbow, but I know how the technology works, I know where to find the kind of technology I want in my product, and I can find the people who can put it together.

I guess the distinction I'm trying to put is that there's a distinction between "non-technical" and "non-programmer". I can't program, but I know all the technically pertinent details of my product that any VC or customer is going to care about. To some extent, I think it frankly works better that way than if I was doing the coding, because I know what's really important in the product, and won't miss the forest for the trees.

You don't need to know how to code to be able to handle the technical responsibilities of actually running a tech startup. You just need to know the technology itself.
True. We did a fair bit of experimenting with this (for both load balancing and failover) a few years back, and so long as you stay at 300sec or greater it works fine for well over 99% of all the traffic we tested with. Once you dropped below 300 seconds problems started appearing - from memory some older versions of Windows would default to 900secs, 3600secs, or 86400secs.

I haven't revisited that research for 3 or 4 years, but our findings then led to a policy of "if you're prepared to accept ~15mins of mixed availability (after you've identified a problem and hit the panic button) then DNS based failover works well enough. If you need significantly better response times than that, you need proper hardware/network based failover"
Hmm... No love for bald folk?
Has the nav on Mapquest gotten any better?

I had an iPhone 4S for a few weeks last year and tried the Mapquest app. I found that it was terrible when driving down a freeway. Every time I crossed an overpass, it would assume that I was on the cross street, and recalculate. Then it'd wise up to me being on the freeway again, and recalculate once more. Repeat a mile or two down the road at the next overpass.

I would have figured they'd have implemented some heuristic that considered the likelihood of me traveling 70mph in one direction only to immediately turn onto a cross street. But at the time, that seemed to not be the case.
Code Hero development continues
> 300 years is feasible from an engineering perspective while 300,000 years is not.

Besides engineering, communication of that facility's purpose is also important. You don't want a fancy storage facility becoming a tourist destination in 100k years either. Barring a massive collapse - loss of global knowledge and societal progress scenario (asteroid impact, super volcano, whatever), there's a great chance of some version of our modern languages surviving and being mostly readable to somebody on Earth born in 2312.

Conveying the waste storage site's inherent danger to that person 300 years from now is fairly easy task for our current society; just as we have lots of things from 1712 that still exist and are still mostly comprehensible.

We simply can't fathom how we'll communicate danger to someone ~15x further into the future than the entirety that our current civilization has even existed. Look at how much trouble we had deciphering hieroglyphics and that was only 6,000 years ago. It may not even be humans that come across it 300,000 years from now.
I don't know enough about the story here to have a strong or moralistic opinion, but from what I've read, this whole thing stinks.

Kickstarter is supposed to make it easy and lightweight to raise money for projects, but if a failed project can ruin your reputation, then that money is coming with some severe strings.

If he really is fraudulent, then he probably should be sued and he shouldn't get funded again, but I see a bad precedent and a chilling effect here.
Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97% share of compute market to 20%
Who Is This? (Sprint + Google Voice Is Hopeless)
Check out FastMail.
isn't it released in many ways that cannot really be harnessed directly eg: gamma radiation, x-rays, emf.

Yes, just like nuclear fission! All this radiation gets absorbed by surrounding matter, and its energy becomes heat. Powers a steam or gas turbine -- just another heat engine (tm).

With fusion reactors, the radiation absorber is a blanket of pipes filled with molten metal, several meters thick and several tens of meters in inner diameter. There's a critical second purpose to this: creating fusion fuel. The molten metal contains lithium, which on absorbing neutrons transmutes to tritium (hydrogen-3), which can be scrubbed out and recycled. Tritium is fusion fuel; fusion reactors must create it like this in self-sufficient quantities.

About the fraction of energy captured; it's very close to 100% (only neutrinos escape), with the subsequent conversion from heat to electricity being some 30-50% efficient.

http://www.iter-industry.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Pr__s... (particularly first few slides)

http://aries.ucsd.edu/raffray/publications/JNM/ICFRM_10_Raff...
You can post anything essentially for free. I can say right now, "I'm making the real Duke Nukem Forever, sorry it's taken so long but it'll be out Real Soon Now" and it doesn't cost me a goddamn thing. Hell, I can put out a press release to that effect for $50 and it'll go all over the drooling game sites. Doesn't make it true, doesn't mean I've done anything, it just means I posted an update.
Actually you can do both. To an approximation, you can clone yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEVA0WbmfAA

You can rewrite your neurons too. It's called learning.

Here's a thought experiment though, more in the direction you meant. Imagine you had a tool that let you rewire your own neurons however you wanted. Again, so what? There are something like 100 trillion synapses in an adult brain. What are the chances that you'll use this tool to actually improve your own intelligence (when evolution has been playing that game for millions of years) vs just giving yourself a lobotomy?

Now, how is it any different in the hands of an artificial intelligence that is no more intelligent than us?

All of this futurism just seems like bad assumptions stacked on top of more bad assumptions. I still think Pinker said it best:

"There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems."
> "And, for popular urban locations in the United States - it's a significant improvement."

Disagreed completely. Pretty much the only people who have had a net positive from iOS6 Maps are the people who drive, and thus are able to take advantage of turn-by-turn.

Here in NYC iOS6 Maps is nearly completely useless. Searching for locations by address frequently takes you hundreds of miles away - "24 Orchard" takes you to another state, for example, even if you are standing less than half a mile from the address. Searching for places by name has a worse than 50/50 chance of finding it, and frequently completely unrelated results come up instead. Even when Apple can get the addresses of places correct, it frequently has trouble getting them in the correct locations - I've seen many instances of correct addresses dropping the pin in wrong locations - usually a block or two away.

The disaster of iOS6 Maps goes well beyond the loss of transit directions - the data and search components are atrocious.

The problem with bad mapping is that it has a thresholding effect. The utility of your mapping service does not scale linearly with the quality of your data - once your data is wrong above a certain threshold of all usage, people stop trusting your maps entirely. I do not trust iOS6 Maps because I have no way of knowing if it got anything right, and its failure rate is high enough that I have to second guess everything it tells me. Which is to say, it has become useless.

iOS6 Maps is a disaster for major urban locations in the United States. I for one am waiting for the Google Maps app to drop like a kid on Christmas eve.
IE10.
Great, so we'll just sprinkle the magic data provider fairy dust on their maps, and oh wait, yeah, it's significantly more complicated than that.
I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem.

I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines.

Media was able to charge both a subscription fee to the consumer and an advertising fee because they had high barriers to entry and a captive audience. People fundamentally don't want ads in their media, but media companies have made so much money for so long charging on both ends that they forgot why they were able to do so - there was a high barrier to entry.

Now that technology has made the barriers to publishing $1,000 or less, there is a shift in business model. Either the media should be free and ad supported, or paid with no ads. There just isn't the same market for something that does both anymore. Their answer thus far seems to have been "just add more ads" or "put up a paywall in front of the ad-laden content".

Also, with fewer barriers to entry, there will be fewer big content companies, and a lot of smaller ones. The economics don't make sense yet for a big media company that is Newsstand only yet, but there will probably be a lot of smaller, scrappier publishers like The Magazine that pop up.

Again, it's not about The Magazine having some formula right, or its publishing platform being so amazing. It's that the business model and economics of publishing have changed and The Magazine is a lot closer to that reality than traditional publishing companies. One could make the same argument about Redbox and Netflix compared to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
THQ Humble Bundle ends at $5,097,373 (THQ President contributes $10K)
Ghostery's Alert Bubble does not report any trackers on this Hacker News page, yet every time I reload this page, my HTTP monitor (Charles Proxy) logs a ping to ghostery.com:

http://l.ghostery.com/api/page/?d=news.ycombinator.com%2Fitem&l=304&s=0&ua=firefox&rnd=7639974
http://l.ghostery.com/api/page/?d=news.ycombinator.com%2Fitem&l=426&s=0&ua=firefox&rnd=5747246
http://l.ghostery.com/api/page/?d=news.ycombinator.com%2Fitem&l=346&s=0&ua=firefox&rnd=8989043

Why does Evidon need to know about pages that have no trackers? The FAQ says the domains serving trackers will be identified, not the complete URL path (minus query string parameters) for pages that have no trackers.
Show HN: An open API for storing JSON data
Atul gawande which is a surgeon coined the word cowboy in a new yorker article and in a lecture before new doctors.

There's some research that shows that decision support systems improve medicine. Too tired to look it up.
Not at all.

Founders (usually) give updates to their investors. They report the progress, ask for help, explain the issues. When things go wrong, usually investors are the first ones to offer help - providing experience, contacts, or sometimes more money. It's their money that is at stake, after all.

That's exactly the opposite of failed projects on Kickstarter. Usually (and I'm generalizing here; just using my own sample of 60-70 projects I sponsored, with 5% failure rate or so) the authors simply stop providing updates.

They realize they were overly ambitious, or underestimated the costs, or had issues with the team, or simply don't have the competence needed to execute within the time/budget available. Updates become more sparse, and eventually stops. The crowd starts to smell blood and gets angry, digs personal information about the founder, and things get nasty really quick. Just like it happened with the OP, or OpenVizla, or several other pseudo-failed projects.

I still think we need one good public failure, with all the drama associated, to clarify to everybody - authors & backers - some very wrong misconceptions about crowdsourcing. Yes, projects CAN fail, and as a backer you have to accept that risk, or wait to buy the product at Amazon.

But no, authors cannot simply disappear, run ashamed of their own failure. It doesn't matter if you underestimated the effort, or worked really hard over the weekends, or lost your day job, or life got in the way. Nothing will matter, unless you explain, clearly, to your backers. They may get pissed off, but it's better than the alternative.

Authors have to understand that if the ship sinks, you'll have to man up and stay till the end. So be prepared; this is not a free ride, with zero risks.

Another thing that would be very positive is to have public financial disclosure. Authors should be required to submit a financial plan explaining how the money will be used - and another one mid-project explain how the money was spent. I'm sure it'd be eye opening, in both ways (people would see how expensive it is to make, say, a game, and authors would think twice before spending every penny).
>False dilemma. The choices are not "either get a good degree from a strong school, or make $10/hour forever".

You're right that it's not yet that stark. Nonetheless, while we need a system which encourages, motivates, and rewards the people who succeed, we also need a system which doesn't abandon the people who don't make the cut. We can't just simply say "well, everyone had a shot" and leave it at that. There are millions of Americans who are working poor, and tens of millions more who are still struggling to get by in the land of plenty.

>I'm not sure what your point is here.

My point is that just because there are ways out for people who are unusually intelligent and unusually diligent doesn't solve the societal inequity, because not everyone can take advantage of those outs unless they suddenly get a lot smarter en masse. Again, even if we perfect meritocracy and all the incentives, we can't ignore the people who don't have IQs over 115 or whatever[1]

[1] - or if IQ is an inadequate measurement, whatever measurement you have for merit.
That's very good of Google to release the new maps app before the end of the holiday shopping season. If I were an Android executive at Google, I'd be fuming that they're providing a workaround to the broken software of their biggest competitor going into such an important season for selling phones.
I did something similar around 2008: (but in Lisp!): https://github.com/smanek/ga

Had to write my own bitmap processing library, since couldn't find anything fast enough off the shelf :-D Handled alpha blending, file i/o, etc (checkout the bitmap.lisp and color.lisp files in the repo).

Here's a video of it 'evolving' a picture of John McCarthy (best individual from each generation): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VFZ_ON0A8

And here it is doing the Mona Lisa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ZPSbImvFE
On blocking content @ school, IMHO kids should not be using the internet at all in school, unless it's a class specifically tailored for that topic. Kids are not going to know a valid source of information from someone's blog or a corporate advertisement site.

There is already curated sources (such a libraries and digital library catalogs) that should be the go to source for all research anyway, academic or otherwise. Blocking other content within a school network is a trivial whitelist process, if there is internet access at all. Cell phone policies are already in place at schools as well.

This may seem like a bit extremist position to take, especially considering all the good content that is out there, but when is a grade school student really going to have time to go internet surfing between normal school activities? Curated content sources such as professional encyclopedias, periodicals and text books offer more than enough content for children to sink their teeth into, no matter how ravenous their appetite is.
Arguably it's a significant improvement for popular urban locations - if you always drive and never use mass transit. Something that isn't true of most residents of many popular urban locations.
5 Things an Apple TV Must Do
Mujahideen has entered the English vocabulary quite a while ago, so don't worry about not finding a good translation, everyone knows it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahideen
There must be a host of legitimate uses for the same data. The obvious ones:
1) Verifiy or correct the date/timestamps on recordings.
2) Geo-locate based on hum signature. Could apply to recordings or "live" conversations (e.g. skype).
3) Synchronising recordings.
Great, so we'll just sprinkle the magic data provider fairy dust on their maps, and oh wait, yeah, it's significantly more complicated than that.

Look, don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of being able to catch up. I was part of a small group of folks that took GCC's compiler technology from late 80's to state of the art in the mid 2000's by cherry picking the best of the best from research of the past 20 years. It worked. In 5-6 years, we were able to get within 1-2% of the best compilers at normal opt levels.

But it still took 5-6 years. Getting good takes time. There is no magic fairy dust. The secret to getting the last 25% of the way there in anything is hard work and lots of tuning. There is no magic bullet that will suddenly fix everything.
> The magic threshold is at about 150 dpi

Is it really so low? That's 20 dots per 10 points; surely you'd notice if a glyph was supposed to be symmetric, but it actually had 10 pixels on one side and 9 on the other. Also, Metafont does hinting, and Knuth must have intended to print taocp at a higher resolution than that.
Yes, but this can be addressed with better budgeting, and possibly an exploratory phase or doing a huge project in steps made of small projects. The point being it isn't inherent to the nature of Kickstarter projects, that only a few succeed.
"Either way, there is currently a gaping void on the Web for people to share higher-resolution beautiful photos."

500px seems to do that quite well.

http://500px.com/
Can't be Symbian, can't be Linux/Ubuntu, as those never picked up a large chunk of market share.... Possibly Blackberry?

Large jump with Apple might be Tiger?

The data does seem highly dubious though....
How to find someone technical to build your idea (or not)
I met Alex personally and visited him at his apartment. He gave me a demo of Code Hero. A lot of things worked. A whole lot of things didn't work, and if I could understand if a programmer would feel embarrassed for the code to be released that way. I've also had occasion to overhear discussion about the project. From what I've seen, there was a tremendous failure of project management. From what I understand, there was no form of automated testing. There were team members who didn't work well with others, and the team's overall capability (or lack of) resulted in frequent broken builds.

In short, I don't think there was any malice at work here.
Google launches Shazam competitor for Android
No, the GPL does not allow for further restrictions. The App Store doesn't care.
IN the case of pilots , few factors combined together to build this culture:

1. Checklists were introduced when flying was very young,with very few trained pilots.

2. Pilots want to live, so they use checklists.

3. Pilots don't have a choice. All airlines companies enforce checklists. Probably it's an FAA requirement.

4. Checklists are a part of training.
Single color silk screened on Chinese shirts would be $5-7. For the sake of argument let's say $7 per USB drive, although I suspect that's quite high. Then add in money for packaging and package design, let's call that $6 each for ease of math. That's $20.

That leaves $22 for the download and time spent prepping, signing, and shipping everything.
LA Announces Tech Corridor Along Expo Line
There are numerous different reasons. Thorium proponents often gloss over a lot of the difficulties of the system, leading to a false sense of how easy it would be to make such reactors. One of the biggest problems is that a Thorium reactor is actually a U-233 reactor, which is bred from the Thorium, and U-233 is not so easy to work with. It emits a huge amount of gamma radiation, which is highly penetrating and dangerous for human life.

To work with U-235 or Plutonium you only need a glove box, but to work with U-233 you cannot have humans physically close to the material, you need waldos and closed circuit cameras and so forth. This naturally increases the cost of working with the fuel. But wait, it gets worse. As I said, gamma radiation is highly penetrating and heavily ionizing, which means that it damages delicate materials quite easily. Especially seals, made out of rubber or silicone or what-have-you, and electronics. This makes fuel cycle handling hugely challenging and also makes reactor construction rather challenging as well.

Now, likely we could overcome these problems but they are nevertheless huge problems.

One of the big reasons why Uranium/Plutonium reactors have caught on is because you can use 1950s technology to build reactors and process fuel. That's not the case with Thorium/U-233.
Also, if your version of tail doesn't support the -r option, you can reverse the order of the lines using the tac command.