skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By "smaller scale" I meant something smaller than a freighter. 5-20 MW is about what you would use for a freighter. A Liberty ship from WW2 generated 2MW of power.

I couldn't find the "complete power plant" you were talking about. 5 MW in a 0.5 TEU? That's 3m x 2.4m x 2.6m, which is rather small for a 5 MW plant. And rather large for something you want to drive about town in.

Especially since you still need to worry about cooling.

The closest numbers I could find was http://pesn.com/2011/01/12/9501741_Focus_Fusion_achieves_1-b... which said:

> According to the interview I did with inventor Eric Lerner back in 2005, which was featured at Slashdot, this technology could give birth to a non-polluting power plant the size of a local gas station that would quietly and safely power 4,000 homes

A "local gas station" is much bigger than 0.5 TEU, and a highly vague definition. Assuming a home consumes 2kW then that's producing 8 MW.

Any plans I can find are highly speculative. Where is the published journal article you're talking about? The only ones I can find report experimental measurements of a non-power-producing setup. Any extrapolation from that to a real-world power plant is as highly suspect as "sequencing the human genome will cure cancer within 5 years."

Anyone who sold you plans for a working 5 MW focus fusion generator is almost certainly in the same class as selling you a perpetual motion machine. The best would be "in our optimistic future, we think this might be possible", and not a serious estimate that you could use for planning purposes.
Two Startup Cliches I Hate the Most
"design and deployment problems" pretty much imply problems with the solution itself.
What I found most interesting about this article is that parents felt so strongly about having their kids nap outside, despite the fact that the scientific evidence presented in the article that this is actually better than napping indoors is mixed at best.

The article cites a survey of parents who say their kids nap better outdoors, (with a broken link), but surveys are far less convincing than experiments. In this case, parents should not use this survey as a reason to have their kids nap outside, because the survey is just a reflection of their own opinions. Following it would be like eating their own dog food.

As for more scientific evidence, according to the article "Paediatrician Margareta Blennow says reports from the Swedish Environmental protection agency show conflicting results."

So from the article, it doesn't appear that there is substantial scientific evidence that sleeping outdoors is any better for the children. Why do parents continue to do so anyway? I think it's just a cultural thing. I think many cultures have basically random opinions along the lines of "Doing X is better for your health". As long as X isn't actually very bad for you, people will continue to do X despite the lack of evidence that it's actually good for you.
This is really, really, really awesome.

I think I will add this to the URLs that I know on my head.
I was puzzled by your comment. Is this Brooks paper[1] the thinking that you're referring to?

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf
This machine runs the only ARM CPU I can find that has no GPU, and is intended to be run headless (this machine has a backup battery and 2 LAN ports). I'm not sure why few hackers are interested in this right now, but I believe over the next 3-4 years we will see more interest in always on, always connected, headless units that can run dameons that can be controlled with all the mobile devices that are currently getting all the air time.
Very similar. Provides some "linting": http://regexp.quaxio.com/
This is incredible - good job. What flavors of regex do you plan to support
The fuel could be reused and reduce the amount of of waste. I believe the reason it is not is the threat politicians have been lead to believe that it can also be used to build weapons.
Spending a day doing useless work is worse.
Here is my wish: a system that collect money from me (a few bucks a month, says), and spread that money to different projects according to how much I use/like them. That would be awesome.
5 reasons why threaded discussions stink
Virtual Boy pretty strongly illustrated that if you can't do this perfectly, you shouldn't do it at all.

Absolutely. But the Virtual Boy was clearly before its time. The hardware just wasn't ready.

Within the current constraints (including budget), making a "good enough" product is clearly not feasible.

I think that's clearly not true. The response from everyone who's tried the Oculus Rift has been that real VR has finally arrived. And the Oculus Rift is one guy's prototype; the resources of a company like Microsoft or Sony could drastically improve it in several dimensions. Specifically, they could source a higher-res, higher frame rate, lighter, lower-latency OLED display, and connect it to rendering hardware with all the latency-reducing features John Carmack just described. These features aren't necessarily expensive from a hardware POV; it's just that nobody's seen the need to implement them yet.
I'm right now under an H-1B visa...

I know it is not fair for americans to be unemployed because we foreigns are taking your positions; but you guys don't know what it feels to live in a third world country.

You can read all you want about poverty and violence, you can get shocked by the news and movies that touches that kind of topics. But you will hardly ever experience what it feels to live in real poverty. You don't know how it feels when your brothers or children are dying of starvation.

So I kept studying for years, stuck in a country were you can get killed anytime... became a freelance and later I was brought to the US under a H-1B visa. And guess what... it saved my life and my family's.

I've realized America is the kind of country that loves to exploit and get as much as possible from other countries (third world ones generally), and when it comes to give back some of that... well, you find this kind of reactions.
Comments are closed on the article and I wanted to thank David.

I'm one of those who freeze up like a deer in headlights when asked to do a quiz. But have a degree in CS, have made several enterprise level packages by myself, and have been programming for 31 years -- so am fairly confident that I can program.
"The risk of getting caught if you decided to try to commit credit card fraud was high enough that it was (mostly) an effective deterrent."

Unfortunately the risk isn't as high as the author intended. There are still many credit card launder groups that take advantage of in-person fake card transactions. The margin is so high that they would often purchase over a few thousand worth of items at Wal-mart or such (mostly gift cards) at a single time and the lack of care from cashiers just doesn't help with the deterrent factor.

Aside from the big boss, even the busboys would try to snatch up items for themselves from the store aside from the gift cards to give back to the big boss. This creates a healthy enough ecosystem that each part of the chain will have enough motivation to not cause the group to fall apart, because the margin is just too high.

The credit card itself builds too much on trust and is fundamentally broken. Trust is a rare quality in human and it is just not present in a criminal's eyes. Of course, the trust allows a credit card to be used simply without much additional overhead. If one day we collectively deem credit cards to be insecure enough maybe we'll consider trading off the easy usability for a more secure measure such as presenting your id when using credit card. Or perhaps we should all just wait for the future where we each have biometric chips embedded in us to scan at a credit card machine.
I agree with everything except for "just as easily". It's trivial to extract memory parallelism from separate instruction streams and heroic to impossible for a single stream. Think processing 1000 linked lists sequentially vs processing 4 groups of 250 lists each. Which OOO CPU will parallelize the processing of 4 lists given a program processing 1000 lists serially?

Even "rather wimpy" cores - single-issue cores branded as in-order - can issue "outstanding loads" (issue a request, keep executing until the result is needed). It's way way better than nothing but it's also very far from succeeding as consistently as separate instruction streams.
The last time I talked about Big-O notation was three days ago, when talking about whether or not inserting/deleting from a list should be done online or queued up:

Zarel: and for insertions, aren't they O(nm) for n insertions into a list of size m either way?
Cathy: inserting n elements into a list of size m when done with queueing requires at most m iterations
Cathy: when not done using a queue, it requires at most n*m iterations
Cathy: a factor of n is the difference
Cathy: of course, n might be pretty small, depending on how many insertions happen in the debounce wnidow
Cathy: n might be 10-15
Zarel: how do you insert n elements into a list of size m in m iterations?
Cathy: iterate over the list of m elements
Cathy: well, i guess you'd need to sort the list of n elements first
Zarel: oh, I see, I forgot about sorting the list
Zarel: so it'd be O(n+m)
Zarel: which is admittedly much faster for our purposes
Zarel: well, considering n is likely to be approximately 5, "much" might be an exaggeration
Cathy: in any case, i agree that inserting/deletion approach is the right way to do this
Zarel: incidentally if we wanted we could apply certain optimizations to improve an insertion from O(n)
Zarel: for instance, binary search
Cathy: it's not immediately obvious whether that is faster than the sorted queued
Zarel: actually, that's not a bad idea regardless
Cathy: but it's certainly faster than the naive single insertion
Zarel: I mean, O(n log m) is significantly faster than O(n+m)
Zarel: when n is ~5 and m is ~1500
Cathy: true, and it actually makes it clear that using a queue is unnecessary

I don't know of a better way to discuss optimizing an inner loop than to use big O notation.
Two-factor authentication is a good deterrent but is not available everywhere. For my card, for some sites, immediately after clicking "Buy" button, the bank will SMS me an expiring (within minutes) 6 digit code to my mobile phone, and I will have to enter the code to complete the transaction.
For now, until everyone lets their guard down...
Pickpockets depend on the fact that you won't realize what they've done until they're long gone. What you're talking about is more like the old 1980's-era-New York-type chain / purse grab, and that doesn't seem to happen as often any more because it's so blatant.
I think VR is fundamentally broken, because you're going to try to react to things in a way that doesn't work. With a head-mounted display, the game can react as you move your head. Great. But then you'll instinctively try to walk towards something and it won't work (or you'll hit the wall). Same with picking things up, etc.

It seems like it's deep in the uncanny valley of experience.
Is that really the whole device, or is the processing done elsewhere, like a phone or something? (I admit I only skim read the article)
Honestly I think the vast majority of people (even on HN) feel fairly stupid when you read something like that.

It's an utter blessing that there are people such as Carmack in the industry.
I don't have much experience with AWS other than S3, so I can't tell if the pricing point they are making is actually legit. Anyone with actual knowledge care to comment?

Meta: The lack of discussion here is why people use link-bait titles.
By this logic the candidate should pay half of travel and hotel too.
If I could save .5% a transactin by looking at thr transaction cost on the card and then physically clicking ok I would probably do so. The problem is I have no choice one way or another.
We live in the snowy mountain town of Park City, Utah and our kids have a long recess break during school where they play outside no matter how cold and snowy it is. The only time they have to stay inside if if it's warm enough to rain. So there are places in the US where people aren't neurotic about kids being cold. But we're big into winter sports and being outside here.
I immediately thought about this one: http://www.regexper.com/
I think he meant it the other way around. Having their API token would allow the attacker to have access to all of Twitter/Tumblr/Pinterest's information that's accessible via the Zendesk API.
This is just Spotify not finding a user with username=[your email address] and looking for that user on Facebook.

I did a test by creating an account with the email benjamintesterton@mailinator.com (not linked to a Facebook account) and username benjamintesterton. When I tried logging in with the email, it failed, but with just the username worked.

If logging in with the email did work, it would mean that Spotify authenticated you with their server and then abused your credential re-use to hack your Facebook account. However, this appears not to be the case.

They should just check email=[input] OR username=[input], but that may be backwards-incompatible and break the functionality of people who use their Facebook credentials to login.
It's funny though that Facebook frequently asks you for your password to your e-mail account.

For very similar kind of thing.
That's what I was discussing with my friend a few days ago. He had an interview with Google last month and it took him a month or two to prepare for that. he did not pass the interview, but he got an interview with Amazon this month. He was busy with other things and he could not study for the interview. He mentioned that he cannot remember most of the things he prepared and read for the last interview. I am forgetful too, and I guess 90% of people forget details about algorithms and how to answer a puzzle very fast if they don't use it everyday.

So the question is what is the value of a skill or knowledge that fades away after a month or two? I know people who got hired by Google or other big companies that forgot all the information they acquired before the interview. Cause most of it is useless for the actual job. Many logic questions or puzzles are well known and people tend to know the answer before the interview.

If I had to interview someone; I would assign him a project from the company that is part the of the job he is going to do, leave him alone in a room with a computer for a time period I expect someone to finish that specific project. Finally, I come back to see the out come.

It is good for the applicant, as there is no pressure on him (except some time constraints maybe which is not a big deal), I do not put him on the spot and he does not have to deal with his boss while answering to a question. He does not have to dig unrelated information before the interview, and he can show off his programming skills if he has any.

It is good for the company, as I do not have to spend a day interviewing and prepare for that, I will know right away from the code if the guy is a good fit or not, I can see his programming skills, I know ahead of time how long in average it takes for an internal person to do the job, so I can measure his performance relatively. I do not even have to evaluate the code in front of him, I can invite multiple candidates at the same time, put them in separate rooms. Get the results, evaluate them and invite them for the second round if I liked their code.
Heh, that's pretty cool. How does it compare to the average elevator?
So if I understand your argument, it is basically "how can you possibly say that the arbitrary morals of 'fair dealing' is more correct than 'screwing everyone over'? Bizarre. Shut up."

Is that right? Or is there more to it than a simple derailing tactic?
Oh, good idea. I may add in the ability to select scale (or select it based on frequency of contributions / username checksum or something).
The Sports Car, The Laptop And The Science Behind The Golden Proportion
I didn't claim to disprove Amdahl's law - I argued with an assumption based on "Amdahl's law" that I put in quotes, exactly because there's a leap from real Amdahl's law to something that doesn't follow from it in that line of reasoning.

What you "salvaged" is not bad though :) And - ARM might be getting there if a licensee takes big.LITTLE to that direction as I pointed out.
I've thought about this "problem" and decided there's no problem. You're solving a non-problem if you try to solve credit card fraud.

The reason we don't deal with credit card fraud is that there are no consequences for being a victim, for any definition of victim. If the victims had consequences, then there would be demand for action. But there is none. Further, because there are no consequences, the cost to solve credit card fraud isn't worth it.

Edit: This is a true statement. I feel capable to comment on this topic and have spent time working with this industry. I've dealt with abuse and fraud for years on many sides of the transaction (there are more than two). If you think you have a retort, please think carefully if you really understand what I just wrote above. There are no consequences for the victims. No matter how you define victim.

Edit 2: You deserve better explanations. I'll work on a blog post. But one case of a financially tight victim having to call the bank, etc. isn't enough. In the aggregate, nobody is inconvenienced. There are no consequences. If merchants had consequences, they'd stop accepting credit cards, but in the aggregate, that's a non-starter. Issuers similarly have no consequences. There's no arbitrage for improvement either.
One other thing I've been thinking about. At least among the PhDs I've met, many of them are NOT scientists. That is, they play at science for a while, but it's no great tragedy that they aren't being employed in the academic pursuits. One thing I do wonder is how many scientist-PhDs doing solid work are actually going unfunded, and how many of them are guys and gals researching the CS equivalent of how many angels can stand on the head of a pin.
I couldn't agree more - it's less a tutorial and more a slideshow of 10 queries and the results.

Not only that, but I found the documentation extremely lacking (almost nonexistent) when I was attempting to do the additional queries. When I was confused, there was nowhere to see the 'right answer' for the query and an explanation of why, I just had to guess at the syntax until I got it right.
I think the other thing is that most online credit fraud doesn't come intercepting credentials over wires but by dupe sites that imitate real realtors. I think two factor authentication might help with that, if it has to verify both sender and recipient on some mutual third party server of the credit card provider, but that costs them money, which gets back to the root problem, it doesn't cost the companies that would implement these schema anything now, and any change does cost them, and the market is rigged so you can't introduce competition.

I think it is much more likely bitcoin takes off as a real currency for exchange and people just start using banks that facilitates transparent conversion between the two when buying stuff online. It doesn't help with using a credit card online from a CC company, but it does skip them entirely.
Can you expand on "or what is Haskell, and why there is nothing special in it" ?
Regex is one of my weak points that I've always wanted to fix. I think this just might be the tool that accomplishes that.
By reading the article, seems they have a few games websites and so are consolidating them. I would say there are less advertising dollars going to these kinds of sites compared to paying to get on the front page of Steam for example.
No mention of SET? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Electronic_Transaction
Fusion reactors at that scale would revolutionize naval operations.

Right now the carrier is nuclear-powered and can cruise at high speed for as long as it wants. But in practice it can't because the rest of the carrier group runs on oil, and can't keep up. It would change things a lot if the whole group could keep up with the carrier.

This is probably why the Navy has been funding polywell research.
Comparing strings and reversing linked lists do absolutely measure this capability.

This depends entirely on the quality if the test. I suspect for many of these ad-hoc tests thrown together for an interview, the quality will be low and the overlap with other tests high, meaning they can easily be passed by someone who googled 'top 100 programming interview questions' and read through them.

Comparing strings or reversing linked lists are not actually things that most programmers would/should ever do themselves or even nowadays bother to learn or remember outside of a CS course, because the code has already been written in every standard library, but they are things that programmers might still be required to learn in order to pass interview tests, and you would thus be testing at many your candidates on whether they had memorised a few of the problems likely to come up, not on if they could work them out on the spot.
I learnt not to try and do/invent everything myself (initially, at least - 'til I felt I sort-of knew what I was doing).

I learnt that there are rules and means, with good reason.

I copied - not absolutely, not directly.

I learnt to value the feedback of people who I trusted.

I learnt to ignore the urge to please everyone, all the time.

Oh, and the client's not always right. They're always right to have their view, but they're not necessarily right about what that means. That's what they're paying me for.
Property has not always existed and it's not a fundamental "aspect of human psychology". If you said possession, I'd probably agree with you but you could say the same thing about sharing and cooperation.
That is correct. It says quite clearly "Facebook Email or Spotify Username". It's the user's mistake for using their Facebook account instead of the account they just created.
I believe one of the common fears is pedophilia.
It's funny how these days, those systems and variations of those systems (COSMOS for example) are STILL used. Talk about legacy systems. Not more than 10 years ago, people were still breaking into them.
Some banks will let you generate single-use credit card numbers (e.g., Chase). So you have one CC # for the power company, a different one for Netflix, and so forth. Then if e.g., Netflix gets hacked you can just cancel that one card number. You can also generate cards with hard spending limits, cards that only work for a specific merchant, etc. And of course you can delete them anytime. Its a pretty good system.

That said, I agree with the author. Signature based debit should have long since been replaced by something more secure (e.g., Chip and PIN), yet its much higher fee structure creates a perverse incentive to maintain its use.
A complex society relies on people avoiding stepping on one anothers' toes. You can't always rely on the Refer[r]er header to block access to resources, either.

Just don't freaking do it. It pisses people off to no productive end (as opposed to personal scraping, whitehat access, etc., which also piss people off, but serve a useful purpose).

Also, copyright provides more rights to creators than just restricting copies and distribution. There are also public performance rights, which I would argue are violated by embedding another site's resources into your own site without permission.
very nice visualization. for a similar interactive regexp debugger in perl, see Regexp::Debugger: https://metacpan.org/module/Regexp::Debugger
If the true costs of fraud are 5-10 basis points, suggesting that we eliminate fraud by replacing that with a 50 basis point drain on the system seems unlikely to succeed.