skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Impressive, it really works!
Why do they allow this? They want to be indexed by google? What is the logic behind, because if you go by their website you have a terrible experience, if you go by google (with googles ads) you have a better one!
3 days? I only see "Sunday Evening" [1], which is just one day...

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23803011/amber-a...
Calculators don't work by moving pebbles around, but they're called calculators anyway (from Latin calculus, literally "pebble"). On the same note, is the point of movies the fact that they're moving images? Yet the name derives from this.

TL;DR: Do you want a logical language? Try Lojban, not English ;)
Well, I would say one large reason that micro-transactions haven't taken off is they are so bloody difficult to implement. Basically you are always dependent on someone's payment network, which usually is not geared towards supporting micro-payments. Take Paypal's fee structure for micro-payments, $0.10 + 10% -- basically kills the idea in the womb.

Also, the idea of paying one penny to read an article might not make sense if it is user initiated, but it could very easily happen if you had an "drip" effect from a connected faucet (i.e. account of virtual currency). I'd be more than happy to pay $.05 for each NYTimes article I actually read, but I have no desire to pay a monthly fee for the Times. If I could have one account that worked across a bunch of different websites and automatically implemented the "drip," I'd consider that a major improvement.

Personally my bet is on other virtual currencies as opposed to Bitcoin (i.e. my own), since the Blockchain stuff ends up being your enemy rather than your friend.
I'm just now moving away from Squeryl (slick was far too immature) to go back to Hibernate. I found the relational approach far too cumbersome, and unpleasant to use if my classes didn't exactly correspond to my database tables.
Yeah, I always seem to forget the exact details of Nagle (probably because every project I've worked on just turns it off). Write-write-read is the killer, I guess-- just doing a small write followed by a small read, or vice versa, should not be affected by Nagle. So the results I got make sense.

Re: MacOS, I do know that some of the Go developers use Macs as their primary desktops. So I don't think they neglect it, but given that they're targeting the server space, it makes sense to optimize Linux more.

I still haven't seen any really good explanation of these results. I don't buy the argument that the JVM is providing the advantage here. The main thing that the JVM is able to do is dynamically recompile code, and this shouldn't be a CPU-bound task.
How Google is benefitting from search confusion
That quote from John Archibald Wheeler [a doctoral advisor of Feynman] ... just beautiful:

"""

[...] it is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. (John Archibald Wheeler 1998: 340)

It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. 'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe. (John Archibald Wheeler 1990: 5)
That's a fair point, I think most courts would consider it an acceptable buyout within reasonable doubt, largely because of the rest of the huge competition in this market and the previous owners accepting the deal.
Dear god, this. At least 10 occasions in the last 48 hours for extremely minor outages. Switch to self-hosted!!
Precompiled for what platform? We're kind of past the stage "everything is Wintel x86" nowadays: a lot of JIT compilation derives its power from platform-specific optimizations.
Mass use of shipping container in 1970s alone has changed more lives than all those inventions from 1930 to 1970 combined.
From the article: "German companies believe the US now poses almost as big a risk as China when it comes to industrial espionage and data theft, a survey has revealed.

The startling finding of a survey of 400 companies conducted in mid-July underscores the shift in German public and business opinion caused by revelations about US surveillance activities.

Some 26 per cent of German managers, IT and security professionals described the US as a high-risk place for industrial espionage and data theft, according to the survey commissioned by EY, the consultancy.

This was second only to the 28 per cent of respondents who view China as a particularly high-risk country for industrial espionage. Russia was ranked third, with 12 per cent saying it posed a significant risk.

When they were asked the same question two years ago only 6 per cent of German companies described the US as a high-risk centre for industrial espionage and data theft."

Link to the German press release by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) announcing the findings: http://www.ey.com/DE/de/Newsroom/News-releases/20130802-Date...
Weird title, and paywall. Flagged.
Chatlin's constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant), linked by Digital physics, is also very interesting. It is the probability that a random program will halt. When we get into 'random program' all kinds of interesting questions come up.

For me, I immediately think of:

What instruction set are we considering?
Is the instruction set bounded by human language?

Human language does not have the same extent as thought -- or does it?
Is the indescribable as cardinal as the unthinkable?

What is the Chatlin's constant for average human thought process.. ie. a subset of our brain programming?

Man, what an interesting subject.
Why comment, then?
It's not really outdated; more or less that the use of the word will change.

They're still computers, but computers are now just the engines running a huge array of devices. After all, I think the computer is going to be the next motor.

For clarity I think it's better to call "PCs" desktops or laptops for the time being.
FYI, such laws already exist - in EU, most of the consumer losses in such frauds have to be compensated by the bank. It's not always pleasant but it motivates banks to take effective measurements against identity theft. Many of USA identity theft horror stories could never happen here; as soon as their own cash is threatened, banks can be much mire diligent.
By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive.

Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me? All of them?

Also, it reminds me a bit of Swampman problem : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman

If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people.

Would it make them smart or just filled with hard coded knowledge? I would expect that in this case the goal would be to create a system that is able to acquire common sense knowledge on its own from a given environment and reason from it. What we might consider as common sense in our daily lives might not be fully applicable in different situations.
From the standpoint of Metaphysics it makes sense and provides a solution for the problem: What is a cause? If B follows A, and in another world B follows not A, then we can say that A is the cause of B.

This theory does not claim to be Science as it uses a different model to find answers.
Not that I am aware of. But it is safe to assume that no one doubts the effectiveness of emergency care or most basic procedures in general. However, everything beyond that is likely on average not helpful and might be even harmful.
It also makes little sense to call most phones "phones." They're also cameras, camcorders, MP3 players, maps, browsers, etc.

As devices converge it may someday no longer make sense to have more than one device with serious processing power. I'm not sure I care much what we'll call it at that point.
There are ten thousand things I "should" know as a programmer. And I use regular expressions about once per year, which is long enough for them to become unreadable between usages, and require me to spend a chunk of time looking up syntax for even the simplest of them.
Leaky paywalls are a pretty common design. You can read some articles if you just register too.

Does Google have a direct I'm feeling lucky query param so you can link the Google route directly?
Even if most users had subscriptions, it shouldn't be linked to. The other day I was thinking the same thing about The Sun. It got a high placement on Google's search results, yet had no content to display, I hope search engines drop it from their results as it's currently useless.
Just a thought. If physical information is stored as bits in a computer. And the universe is essentially that memory plus a compute unit,

Is consciousness the derivative of information with respect to the difference of information (ie. a clock cycle -- time?)
What would you call them in that case? The whole "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" campaign means that consumers now see PCs as "Microsoft computers" (and the rest of us generally use it interchangeably with "computer"); you would need a new encompassing term for the ol' tower on your desktop type of cat voyeurism device.

As time goes on the etymology of words generally becomes questionable: I don't think "computer" being inappropriate is a good reason to drop it.

That being said "desktop" is what I use, I rarely use "computer" these days.
If that's the case, why does the name change? IMHO that was in order for the old ownership to provide some dignity to the old Post (which broke many world-wide level news over the years, i.e. Watergate) from thew new ownership, in case J. Bezos turns the venerated newspaper into a trash magazine.
I'm from Germany and here the people use the word "computer" or "PC". Some people even say "Rechner" which is a rather crude german translation of "computer", which is also used in "Taschenrechner"/"pocket calculator".

But only for desktop computers.

For the rest, most people use their concrete names like "notebook", "netbook", "laptop", "tablet", "smartphone", "server", etc.
What I would really like them to make hackable is the protocol. Anyone knows what the chromecast is using? It'd be awesome to create "Chromecast" servers that can receive video and browser tabs wirelessly.
Thanks for pointing that out. Deleting this one.
> the default settings have been tweaked by domain experts
> over decades to be reasonably good for the general case.

Yes, but look at default configurations such as those of Apache and Mysql - you'll find that the default settings have been finely honed for environments that were common ten years ago... Even settings need updating - optima are moving targets.
There is a way to convert Java straight to LLVM. I would guess the developer is already aware of that though

https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/java/trunk/docs/java-front...
It's not about fear of failing. I wouldn't do it again unless I was convinced the venture would be successful (and I think there's a significantly increased chance of that, based on what I learnt during the failed startup and since).

What I'm saying is that having equal co-founders gives you the ability to share the workload, emotional strain and get through the pain barrier.

It's obviously not impossible to build a huge business as a single co-founder, but it's unlikely that I'd want to do it again!
Ooh, Matrix multiplication? Would I get to use Strassen's sub-cubic algorithm? I've been looking for an excuse to use it.
What was his game though? To make the overall class grade better. To prove that a "lone wolf" is worse than the "mob"? The outcome from an educational view seems to be that everyone won. The loner could be a statistical outlier.
Guide to Writing Backbone Apps at Coursera
That may well be, as I'm not a physicist or mathematician. I take issue with the claim that the universe and the interactions therein can be described mathematically. That seems to imply that you can explain it to a human mathematically. Without context, concept, and relationship, how could this be?
I guess you miss a lot when JS is disabled by default :P
AppEngine is stable, but the feature set moves quite slowly. It's the opposite of Google Drive, it seems. It's the opposite of Google Drive, in that respect.
it sounds like you have never led a team before
> What is some of the best writing you've ever seen that is structured as a list?

http://www.weitz.de/cl-ppcre/
Precisely. It's almost certain that we don't have free will. I would define free will as the mere appearance that thought processes are governed by self in a non-local time frame. I would gander that a simulated brain might have less of this illusory 'free will.'
Holycrap, exokernel is the most brilliant idea I've heard today. I don't have to mess with sk_buffer anymore!
NoFlo Dev Environment
The Sun has 'no content'??

What about the pictures? :-)
Desktop:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6159712
Theres a talk from ScalaDays last year (I think) where the answer is basically "its not"
I note that the memory pressure question got swept under the rug there :-)

That's ok. It's not a revelation to anybody here (I hope) the enormous cost in memory overhead you have to pay for acceptable performance from the JVM. That "top quality GC" basically requires a 2X overhead (on top of your actual cache payload) to perform with reliable low latency and high throughput.
I wish I could upvote you more than once. Actually, I was about to post something really similar.

Thanks. Github, Gmail, Google Docs, anything: more often than not, the moment I click the link they're working perfectly.
Mathematics is just another flavor of language. English, French, Math...what's to doubt? Math just requires some extra context in the form of natural speech because it is a more narrow subset. It isn't limited, just less coherent when variables are used without prior definition.

It's amusing that you find it hard for the universe to be described mathematically when physics does just that.

I should note that digital physics does not imply that physics are purely mathematical..they can be procedural -- ie. akin to a C program. When you get down to it though..whatever is doing the higher level computation, the processor, could be accomplishing the instruction set using purely boolean logic.
http://www.dzone.com/links/videopresentation_compiling_scala... for a video on the project, explaining the rationale etc by the author.
Surprising that Yemen is unsafe for US citizens when the US bombs people there on a daily basis with drones.
Linkbait title, why not use the original from the BBC?:

"US warns citizens to leave Yemen amid terror alert"
"Talking about security of the CAN - one should think that adding more security means that more powerful ECUs will be required, which means more weight and more power consumption, which means more fuel consumption. Is it worth it?"

Seriously? Even if we added high end embedded processors (e.g. 1 GHz ARM) it would hardly be noticeably in the car's total weight. Of course automotive manufacturers will need to think more about security. CAN is a pretty crappy protocol to start with (security wise at least) ...
Moz have a weird view of how to obtain success, because due to their fame they're guaranteed to succeed every time they put up a post. Take any practical tips they give with a hefty helping of salt.

They are very good at the theory, it's just they don't live on the same planet as everyone else.
Online game firms need to do more to prevent addiction say researchers
I have my conclusions for quite long time.)
Performance was always enough of a consideration that even BE's original implementation had both int32 and double types internally, though black-box unobservable (as in the black box, everything appears as a double).
From what I hear, the mainstream media in Europe generally doesn't really push Greenwald's stories.

There is really no valid justification for these circumstances. It leads me to assume/believe that European media is also controlled by those in power.
It's beautiful but if I didn't already know what the Q logo stood for I'd be very confused as to what it exactly it refers to.

More specifically, I think the squareness of the Q would tell me that it has something to do with a square but I wouldn't be able to make the mental leap from "square" to "squared".

For instance in the posters where you have a person inside the "Q" and say "He's a 'Q'." it makes me read "He's a square" which isn't a very nice thing to say about someone.
Lighten up, he just posted a suggestion and request that maybe Github being down isn't something that people need to rush here to post the minute a web request times out. If he succeeds in lowering the rate of people posting this useless information than it's a net win.
rape 1 |rāp|
noun
[...]
2 the wanton destruction or spoiling of a place or area: the rape of
the Russian countryside.

Source: New Oxford American Dictionary

edit: styling, source
Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem.

IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.
Scala has Actors, which are as pure CSP as you can get (Go's CSP has shared mutable state, Actors do not).
Very solid work. I love the integration with all the different aspects of branding, from the name tags to the website. It's a very strong and well thought out concept. I hope someone at Squared sees it.
So even if Scala is ahead in this (flawed) benchmark, that's not how you write a TCP server in Scala, because you want to do it non-blocking. Not doing it based on asynchronous I/O means that in a real-world scenario the server will choke under the weight of slow connections, not to mention be susceptible to really cheap DoS attacks like Slowloris [1].

Seriously, it goes beyond the underlying I/O API that you're using. If anywhere in the code you're reading from an InputStream or you're writing to an OutputStream that's connected to an open socket, then that's a blocking call that can crush your server. Right now, every Java Servlets container that's not compatible with the latest Servlets API 3.1 can be brought down with Slowloris, even if under the hood they are using NIO.

Option A for writing a server in Scala is Netty [2].

Option B for writing a server in Scala is the new I/O layer in Akka [3].

[1] http://ha.ckers.org/slowloris/

[2] http://netty.io/

[3] http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/scala/io.html
"encourage all players to take regular breaks of at least five minutes every 45-60 minutes"

I have to do that because of RSI risk, and I can tell you, that completely kills the flow of the game. The whole point of an MMORPG is to not worry about real life for a bit. If the game kicks you out every so often, you simply stop playing.
hmm, i tried running that against the go client but the client wouldn't connect.

dial tcp 127.0.0.1:1201: connection refused

i changed 'localhost' to '127.0.0.1' and now I see a whole lot of

dial tcp 127.0.0.1:1201: connection reset by peer

some connections were successful though.
The sequel is that the machines then fight against each other which makes a lot of sense. Mr Smith and all. There will probably always be a struggle to replicate and for resources. It's not specific to humans.
Thanks. The "He's a square" metaphor is intentional. As the initiative is called 'Squared', students are referred to as 'Squares' - it's a playful pun and isn't derogatory, but I completely understand your point.
Have chucked the simulation code up on github: https://github.com/richardfergie/split-test-simulator

Current things that I think are wrong with it:

* Successive tests should not be independent; picking the wrong option should have repercussions beyond the next test

* The distribution of conversion rates from which samples are drawn was picked because it is convenient not because it is correct

* Takes no account of resource issues around creating new variations e.g. it is unlikely that people can create a new variation every day but some strategies assume they can.

Please let me know your thoughts
There have been two interesting stories recently that make subtle undertones (aimed at the public psyche), that suggest that mass surveillance has positive outcomes.

The first was the FH Hosting / Tor takedown. The second is the Yemen / al-Quaida threat.

I think there is a determined and clever psyche-war going on, all coming out of Maryland:

- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/05/us-embassy-clos...

- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/embassy...

- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-...

Spin-doctoring at its best.
Why You Secretly Love Commercials
I wonder, how is this different from the venerable VM/CMS approach?
Agreed. Not the language itself, but the way the runtime operates. One simply does not build reliable and fundamental abstractions over non-optimal enough abstractions and expect things to work long-term.
Sounds like you have a specific kind of object pool implementation in mind? Invalid object refs don't have to break the memory safety, cf. weakrefs.

An object pool can also be implemented without unsafe bulding blocks or other language support, as a pool of objects that are manually recycled after the pool lifetime is up. Then a bug could let you confuse a previous generation object witha current-gen one, but would not break memory-safety either.
The LLVM FAQ states, however:

> There is an incomplete version of a Java front end available in the java module. There is no documentation on this yet so you'll need to download the code, compile it, and try it.
Yes, but how do you get inbound traffic to the interesting stuff you wrote? In other words, the problem is being discovered.
Correction: Please stop upvoting outage posts.
Ask HN: What app(s)/site(s) do you use to help manage your time?
HI guys,

Just wondered what services you use to help manage time? I Have used Toggl a bit which is cool to see how much time I've spent on a project. As far as organising myself goes I use Evernote and I use Instapaper to read things.

I just wondered what other app(s), site(s) help you with time. Either, how they help you organise yourself, save time, make you more efficient etc.

thanks!
Yes, you offered them as an alternative to meat. You didn't offer ice cream or mashed potatoes.

Nobody denies there are tasty non-meat things out there, but we're discussing meat and its alternatives.
$20,000 In 1 Month at 20
>
This should not be an issue with modern C++ compilers. If two template instantiations generate the same or similar code, they will be merged and useless code is removed by dead code elimination.

FWIW, MSVC does this, maybe Intel's as well, but other toolchains do not.