skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All that's left is that pesky 32-bit CPU & MMU requirement. Well the AVR has no MMU and is 8-bit. To conquer this obstacle, I wrote an ARM emulator.

So technically it's Linux running on a 32-bit "macro", just one which happens to be implemented in some seriously inefficient manner.

There are some real ports of Linux for "limited" architectures, like uClinux (supporting few 32-bit micros, including some MMU-less ones) and ELKS (for 16-bit x86 CPUs).

This project is "only" a cool ARM emulator with software DRAM controller, which BTW proves again that Linux doesn't fit onto 8-bit micros.
"Cornering a market" in a commodity is a lot like a bit
coin 51% attack -- it gives a lot control over the price of the commodity.
But it does have one on Linux, which is what ships with this model. If you're developing or even just tinkering and things go haywire, SysRq is much more useful than the power button. But Dell clearly copy-pasted the design from existing models. Had they consulted with a developer, it would've had Meta and Line Feed on it as well. Perhaps even a compose key, før tḣöse fūññy chàráctèrs. (Because dead keys are annoying when you have to write more than one string literal in a day.)
Has an NSN, so it's military. Also, it doesn't look like it was ever used (and/or recently-manufactured. although if they use the pseudo-standard serial numbr scheme, then it was manufactured in 97).

The indicator light styles are kinds I have seen around in years on military a/c. That doesn't really mean much, though. Slightly interesting, nonetheless.
And don't forget that many of the top 100 are Apple, Adobe, and large magazines.
At me, and hit me? None.

Only one shot? Based on what I've read, you can never locate the source, especially since the sonic boom of a supersonic projectile is in a likely different direction.

But it did put a limit on what they could achieve. If they'd attempted a mass shooting and then to run away, if not immediately taken down I would have found cover and shot back. And probably wouldn't have been alone.

They went to great and successful lengths to be covert (didn't help that the guy leading the hunt was an idiot and they did the usual "it's got to be a white man" profiling vs. the Sudden Jihad Syndrome it turned out to be ... the police even stopped them once, but they obviously weren't enemies of the state...). You can't rule out the area being well armed as one of the reasons.

As for MA, they were armed, and since they had to get around the law to get that way almost certainly knew if they broke into a house or apartment the residents couldn't have fought back. My big fear during the manhunt was that the police would bust into a dwelling and find the suspect plus the dead bodies of the residents....
Yeah, forcing users to make a decision or navigate a cluttered UI are both ways in which options decrease value. So adding options can suck if people aren't going to exercise them (which is what I see with a lot of options that get added to software -- only a very tiny percentage of users ever tweak them.)

However the claim I was debating was that a second sign-in method would be bad because people would exercise it. The argument was basically that it's bad because it's increasing value for users in a way that decreases value for you. And I don't think adding a second sign-in method to a page that currently only has one button really causes a difficult or confusing decision or creates a cluttered UI.

I suppose I still do see your point, though, since I personally wouldn't go much beyond that -- "sign in with facebook or twitter or google or browserid or github or create an account or or or" sounds like a miserable experience.
I, for one, would love to hear the stories.
The new one (Synapse 2.0) does require a login. I don't think it's required though.
Explaining my software license to customers/users
The demo sold me off. Its too perfect. Great job, appreciate it!

Probably one of the best live demo's I've seen that shows all of your products and efforts. Kudos.
Why?

Developers are relying more and more on database systems to solve their scalability needs.

If you didn't have a database, you'd need to make sure to get the locking right even when doing completely different queries. A SQL database solves that problem by doing the concurrency control for you (possibly with locks, possibly not). That's what allows a developer to quickly and easily make a reasonably complex application that scales to many concurrent queries.

(Sure, it sounds easy to add in a couple locks, or use STM. But then you need to make all of that work efficiently and also enforce unique constraints or something, and it starts to get a little more complex. Pretty soon you'll want secondary indexes, and a buffer pool, and checkpoints, etc.)

Postgres even added in an efficient version of True Serializability[1], which eliminates SQL race conditions.

So, can this all be extended to help with parallel execution of a single query? Yes. Some systems have had parallel query for a while, and cluster systems are also a different form of parallelism.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/transaction-iso.ht...
I know 9.3 is the next version. With 9.5, I meant to indicate parallel query execution won't happen for a long time, not likely in 9.4, but perhaps in 9.5.
They are different drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine
I wish it had gotten Flickr-ed. Flickr grew 2-3 orders of magnitude under Yahoo and is still the dominant site for photos you might want to look at again.
At a much higher cost. A company with a dozen customers can drop the worst of them without taking a major hit. An employee with one employer has to risk everything. Especially since companies are often communities, so community membership is at risk too.
Thank you so much. We'll be adding some screenshots from the reporting module etc too, to make it more apparent. You should try the real product too sometime :-)
Googlebot interprets javascript. In that case you shouldn't use pushState but fragment URLs[1].

I should have said it is assumed that the URL exists on the server and points to the same resource/content; otherwise setting URLs using pushState makes no sense. GitHub is a good example of how it should be done, not an exception.

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
> Ficticiously I can tell you that if I had servers located in that area and something happened where they couldn't be fixed remotely and were down (for an unrelated reason) I'd be pretty upset if the tech people or remote hands weren't at their job.

If I were the guy who was supposed to be working on your servers, I suspect I'd be much more concerned about the apprehension of a suspected terrorist (or murderer, if you prefer that term) than I would be with a customer's disapproval of a lock-down decision I had no control over. I don't see myself losing much sleep over the fact that you were "pretty upset".
What's the cost analysis of successful terrorist attacks? Remember, we're talking cost/benefit here. One verses the other.

9/11 was in the trillions (i.e. property loss, insurance pay outs, market collapses, wars.) The markets this week were dropping in response to Boston, that's on the order of billions. Count all the cancelled events during the week (not talking about Friday's public safety) and people not going out and conducting commerce and you're in the millions.

Compare that to the cost of say 20 lives? He had home made bombs on his person the last the police had seen him. His brother had a suicide vest. What if the MBTA was running and he blew up a bus full of souls? Worth $100M? I bet the negative market reaction would have been far greater than that.

Still, a crucial flaw in these calculations is that most of the "lost" business will be made up. People will go out and do more than their share of commerce today. There are sandwiches on Friday that won't be sold and floors that were not cleaned, but big ticket items were only demurred and will be serviced, produced, or purchased in due time.
Reminder about Delhi and Bangalore HN meetup 
This is just to remind you guys that there is a meetup in Delhi and Bangalore (India) for HN users. This was decided 3 days ago.

Relevant threads and More Info
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563261
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563491
If one party controls half of any currency, the system is already broken.
They could port their existing codebase over using GWT like we did with GwtQuake :)
I don't think you even have to argue that the lockdown "worked" in that sense. Who cares if it didn't "work"? Even aside from that, it reduced the probability of all sorts of unforeseen complications that would have made things worse for everyone. I think the burden here lies on the people who infer "the lockdown didn't immediately and directly cause the apprehension of the person, therefore it was an unspeakable tragedy against our liberties".
I always like the later one, as a punk-ish way to express a free and permissive license. Glad someone mentioned it. :)
Ask HN: what is your HN spiritual leader?
Hi,

I am curious what is your HN spiritual leader?

Best,
Wiktor
>If we call it just three million people

Which would be ludicrously inflated. Belmont, Waltham, Newton, Cambridge, Watertown and the Allston/Brighton neighborhoods of Boston -- which was the original cities/neighborhoods suggested to stay at home -- is 375,000 people. When you add the rest of Boston in (8AM Friday), you're at about 900,000 - 950,000 people. 5 million would be nearly the entire state population.

Moreover, I still went grocery shopping on Friday -- I live in one of the most northeastern parts of the city (Charlestown), which was about 5 miles away from the active dragnet. There were people about. Some businesses were open, as was the case in East Boston and many other neighborhoods.

The real work closures were on account of orders by property management companies. Private security firms, from what I heard from several folks, are who refused entry into their buildings in the Financial District to any one, probably on account of limiting their potential liability. Even then, most folks I knew had received reverse-calls from their employer even before MBTA service was suspended (which wasn't until 5:30AM).

>"Four victims brutally killed" goes by other names in other cities. In Detroit, for example, they call it "Tuesday".

I'm not sure about fatalities, but Boston called it Tuesday as well. There were 6 shooting across Boston on the evening of Tuesday the 16th (which is a very abnormal amount for the city). Most are thought to be gang-related. No one thought anything of it. Even when I listened to the police scanner starting around 10:45PM on Thursday evening, I simply assumed that it was a rash of gang-related or usual criminal activity (especially being a convenience store robbery).

However, gangs don't usually tote around the equivalent of giant fragmentation grenades. There are plenty of guns in Boston, but folks using explosives aren't like gun owners (legal possession or not) -- they're psychopaths. By the time Tamerlan was recovered, law enforcement was aware the guy was wearing an explosive vest and they had already used a fair number of IEDs that evening. I doubt it was a call that commissioner Davis and governor Patrick wanted to make, but there was probably a very legitimate concern that more mass casualty events were a possibility. It was clearly a very defensive action -- after all, after 7 hours they still had a suspect who had managed to evade hundreds of police.

Another factor for the decision may have been that both attacks were on curiously popular dates for attacks: The bombings were on Patriots Day (on which Columbine, and Virginia Tech shootings also occurred), and the 19th is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombings and the Waco, Texas Standoff. Terrorists loves them some symbolism.
Also if you use the TLDR plugin it will "submit" the link. (assuming you aren't on an HTTPS connection or Logged in to a site)
"Developer" ultrabook but still with an uncomfortable left slanted keyboard layout. When will we see a programmer friendly laptop with a symmetric keyboard layout like the TypeMatrix or TECK?

There is no redeeming quality to the left slanted keyboard layout unless you are making typewriters in the 19th century: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/better-keyboards
Dunkin' Donuts stores in Watertown open between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM. The MBTA suspended transit at 5:30 AM. Ergo, the stores were already staffed and/or open when the lockdown went into effect.

For those employees, "shelter in place" meant staying in the store. Which in many cases had already opened for the morning. It's not a huge leap from that to staying open.
Second this. And this probably also speaks a lot for Linux - okay, he emulated a supported system, but given the problems that one sometimes experience when trying to run the same application on different machines with slightly different hardware or software installed, I find it quite amazing that Linux actually boots on this device.
Of course you don't want to cower in fear and act terrorized. Yet, sending the message that any steps necessary to catch terrorists will be taken within reason is a powerful deterrent. You can't just fade into the shadows. The entire city will contribute to finding and neutralizing the threat.
Check out the Postgres-XC project (http://postgres-xc.org), which does do parallel execution of a single query.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZqKLrrMBPE#t=96s

Police chief saying: "We're asking everyone to shelter in place, no vehicle traffic is going to be allowed to travel in or out of Watertown, until further notice, no businesses are going to be allowed to be opened."

There was coverage of a few incidents of bystanders in cars or taxis being swarmed by cops but I haven't been able to google up any specific reporting on those incidents at the moment. Without trawling through all the live coverage it might be hard to track down.
In order to satisfy the basic matrix transformation properties

dot = lambda M, v: vector(sum(M[i][j] * v[j] for j in range(len(v))
for i in range(len(M)))

as well as the basic left-to-right, top-to-bottom ordering "M00 M01\nM10 M11", the columns, not the rows, would add up to one. Such a matrix is called a "stochastic matrix" or "Markov matrix".

You are correct that the rows do not have to add up to one, just the columns do, for stochastic matrices.

Quantum gates do demand one special restriction; they must be unitary. A unitary matrix satisfies:

transpose(U) = inverse(U)

This is not as simple as "rows sum to 1" or anything of the sort; as the article says, you can create several examples of 2x2 matrices which have sqrt(1/2) factors in all components.
And warm coffee especially. It was a wee bit chilly yesterday evening.
Rootstrikers Conference to Restore the Republic Livestream
So what would this actually be used for on a (military) plane?
When you have built a great product, you don't have worry about anything. Good words will follow you.

BTW, I run a consulting firm based in India and will introduce to all our clients. Come take our money. :)
For a rational agent, a decision is good or bad based on it's preferences, which are described mathematically as part of the definition of the rational agent. So I don't believe it's tautological.

I do agree with your statement that intelligence is difficult to describe. And for the record I never claimed the rational agent approach will achieve "true machine intelligence". Frankly, I don't even know what "true" machine intelligence is or would be. What I am very interested in however is how to create an AI that is capable of fooling a person into thinking it's intelligent, in other words an AI that can pass the Turing test. For that purpose I find the concept of a rational agent to be very helpful, in that it provides a solid foundation to work from.

I'm also not worried about Godel's theorem at all. The statements that are undecidable are very obscure and basically never come into play in human decision making. I think Godel's result has very little practical application, if it has any at all; I certainly don't think it's relevant for AI. I agree that choosing a logical framework to work in presents many problems, but I don't agree that you have to disprove Godel's theorem to create an AI that can think outside the box.
That's impressive!

I remember when "getting linux working on a laptop" was thought to be tricky.[1]

ELKS was a linux distribution for old small machines. It was supposed to run on an 8086, and use just 512 KB (not MB) for ram. (http://web.archive.org/web/19990117003949/http://www.uk.linu...)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset)

Wow, still sort of live. (http://elks.sourceforge.net/)

[1] Here's a 2003 FAQ which gives some nice details of the problems people faced then. (http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Laptop-HOWTO.html)
"It would be a good idea if github enforced some convention to make sure the free repo's they provide for open source really are licensed under an OSI approved license."

I wholeheartedly agree. Every once in a while you stumble upon a landmine: https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8
The real world has Planck's constant. Exponents can be increased indefinitely, and eventually re numbered, like the New Israeli Skekel = 1000 old Israeli Shekel.
Yeah that's what I thought too, a lot of spreekillings are about attention.

I also think they were waiting to show their big toys out on the street. Armored vehicles for a 19 year old without military training and equipment?
I agree, it's hands down the ugliest typeface on a laptop keyboard I've seen. I wonder if they actually put any attention to it or it so just happened.
I don't think you were following the "all the people you're supposed to", then. In this particular case, Reddit did an awesome job of staying up to date (and correcting misinformation).

EDIT: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th...
Yes, all BTC transactions are approved by majority vote of miners.
Got one - it's bare bones Android OS.
And they were so close to perfection with this one. A decent, programmer friendly keyboard with concave key surfaces and a pointing stick - and I would've bought it straight away.

Unfortunately those two are a deal-breaker for me so I'll stick to my T420 and suffer the bad screen.
It is not exactly Linux on an 8-bit micro; it's Linux on an ARM emulator on an 8-bit micro. Still good to see an use for ancient memory modules :)
I'm not making the claim that "everything would have gone better"; this subthread adresses the tradeoffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5581940

I, at least, am not saying they're incompetent, but there's no denying they made a mistake (size of the cordon), in 20/20 hindsight 2 mistakes (keeping all the eyeballs outside the cordon inside).

ADDED: They made a mistake, but no innocents were seriously injured to our knowledge and the suspect was captured alive. Massachusettes subjects are not quite as disarmed as I gather Indian civilians are, but any terrorists thinking about attempting 2008 Mumbai style attacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks) should notice the immediately availble police resources....

Always good to look at the bottom lines.
Hubble telescope takes stunning new nebula photo for 23rd birthday
That's why you analyze inbound links, too.
I really love the demo. Great job, guys!

This is an example of how to immediately show to the potential customer how a tool can be applied on their product.
That post barely has any content. Enough!? to qualify for the HN homepage?
Boston bombing: Reddit learns how 'witch hunts can start'
I'd be pretty upset if the tech people or remote hands weren't at their job

Chances are the "tech people or remote hands" were on the job. Again, this wasn't martial law, folks that had reason to be out and about were out and about. If a colo felt it was important for staff to be on hand, there were likely staff on hand.
I don't think shooting in the air is really an issue in the US. I do feel bad for insecure souls that need to believe America is an underdeveloped nation. Or were you joking about that?
"it reduced the probability of all sorts of unforeseen complications"

Oh, you don't have to look very far to see potential "complications", e.g. http://12160.info/forum/topics/two-women-shot-in-manhunt-for...
I agree really strongly with 99% of this. I make a fairly niche command-line application, and I'm convinced that it would have exactly zero users if I didn't put as much time into documenting it as I do.

I think the GitHub stats make this point fairly well:

Pushed 79 commits to h2s/ppl Apr 14 - Apr 20
Pushed 34 commits to h2s/ppladdressbook.org Apr 14 - Apr 20

That's almost a documentation commit for every other commit to the application itself. It's a lot of work, but seriously, what's the fucking point otherwise?

I also agree about abandonware. I keep encountering this, and it's pretty tiresome. Somebody built some well-received little tool a year or five ago, and for a time they loved it. Now they're bored of it, and they make just enough of a token effort to sustain the project to temporarily fool you into using it. I even have a different project of my own that's starting to creep into this territory. Hopefully I will not make a hypocrite of myself when the time comes.

The only thing I don't agree with particularly is this.

> Make sure the title starts with ANN or [ANN] to
> indicate that it is an announcement, e.g.
> ANN Welle 1.5.0 is released

This seems an oddly specific recommendation to be making. We're doing Hungarian Notation for project blog post titles now?

Anyways, that minor thing aside, I think this is an absolutely excellent primer for anybody considering starting an open source project. If, while reading this, you find yourself thinking "How silly, ain't nobody got time fo' dat", then you're probably starting out your project with quite a low ceiling on its potential usefulness.
You make my day! Thanks Davide.
They caught him outside of the search area after the lockdown was lifted. They got lucky.
'r' to refresh was the key I used most on Google Reader after 'j' and 'k', and I'm surprised to see that TheOldReader and CommaFeed both lack this feature.
I respect the honesty of this post, but I didn't like that dig at The Four Hour Work Week!

4HWW is about putting systems in place that remove you and thus allow your company to scale. Until you remove yourself you don't have a real business. Of course when you walk away it dies.

Ironically, that seems to be the existential problem Refer.ly had/has - its only compelling content is the founder's blog.
If there was ever a way to drag all the self-deluded over-protected entitled iron-balled Rambo types who claim Batman level crime, anti-terror and anti-IED fighting expertise out into the light to provide some of the most ignorant and frankly stupid commentary I've probably ever seen, typed safe from their keyboards, this event was it.
Members of the Massachusetts National Guard were on hand during the Marathon, and assisted during the subsequent lockdown and manhunt, at the request of the Boston Police. Cite: http://www.army.mil/article/101170/

(Note: I do not disagree with the Guard's involvement; just correcting the misstatement that military were not involved.)
I might buy a mouse because of the deal, and if the quality is as good as you say, I'll be back in the future for more. But as of now, mice are commodity to me--the coupon helps push me into trying out a "luxury mouse". It's risky but perhaps not ineffective customer acquisition.