skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Downvote wasn't me. I agree with the sentiment regarding requirements.

However, I disagree with the bit regarding data redundancy and integrity. You can do it other ways, but that doesn't make it a good idea; it's a bit like Greenspun's Tenth Rule, but for data. ZFS, or something like it (and there isn't anything else like it), is the foundation of any modern setup where data is important.

Because it's not on Linux is a terrible reason. If your data is important, then you'll need to look elsewhere than Linux for the servers where the data sleeps. The importance of data requires it.

If data is relatively unimportant, then you're right. There are few domains where that's true nowadays though.
No, they do not reject unitarity. The theory is still unitary. However, unitarity is not built-in to the theory... the theory talks about some other ideas and structures, and it turns out that all the answers you compute respect unitarity -- like it should!
Does this mean AA is actually applied in games? Not quite sure what to make of it.
The author suggested that this was all their data - and thus the entire scope of the problem, rather than a test sample that, while inefficient, would show the interviewee's skill.
If you're into Node, I'm running a tech-driven independent music tv station from Latin America at estereobit.tv. I'm currently separating the back-end and front-ends, writing the server with Node, Mongo, and Express, the front-end with Ember.js. Could use some help with testing Ember right now, since 1.0 is out and it broke all my stuff.
Yeah this is plan B, although its a bit more expensive via amazon. It's the principle of the matter.
Batterie Pour Toshiba PA3594U-1BAS
nous avons lancé vbatterie.com pour aider à réduire le coût des batterie d'ordinateurs portables Toshiba PA3594U-1BAS de remplacement qui sont Compatible ,en proposant des batteries d'ordinateurs portables de première qualité aux prix incroyablement compétitifs, tout les batteries sont dans une plate-forme sécurisée et pratiqueil y a 10%-60% de réduction pour le commerce en ligne.
Sure, if you define it narrowly enough, then you can call almost every large company "in total control" of the niche in which they operate.
I don't want to start a language war here but as a phd student working on distributed systems, choice for "C" as a language for developing high throughput web applications has some rationale. For instance, when you read most of the articles in HS.com or C10K at least, web development at large-scale requires every performance bit out of machine. Indeed, some -caugh-google-caugh- still use C++ at backend (even not in the frontend) or we see twitter switched to JVM from RoR for performance.

For regular earthlings, RoR, Py, PHP and alike are still more feasible than C for "getting the job done".

But the article's point of view is a bit shallow in that sense, since it's looking a way of replacing conventional frameworks (RoR etc.) for C. If you gonna develop a high-perf application in C, you probably use more wide variety of specialized libraries for focused tasks(like json processing, I18N, handling SSL, developing nginx/HAproxy modules,extensions for load balancing, etc.) rather than using a single "C framework".
> So for Nexus to work, Verizon would have to upgrade their POS (Point of sale) system?

What makes you believe that? Others have reported simply buying an activated SIM and putting it in there, so I can't understand what would make you believe that they have to update their POS systems?
"With the iPhone 5C Apple [...] created [...] year-old technology, [...] sold at premium prices[...]. Not bad."

For Apple.
I think Gruber's point about "Apple not innovating anymore" is especially apt. One needn't look beyond the diff quality between iPhones (or iPad!) under Jobs. The diffs have held constant, if not increased, under Cook [1]. I think this tech crowd fancies itself rational and immune to mythologizing, but claiming things were once better in the face of the hard facts is doing just that.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6258275
LOL if they can identify how MUCH is used, why the heck can't they identify WHO is doing it and stop them? This is stupid.
> It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard).

It's hard in the way that counts: It's tedious and prone to precisely the kinds of errors humans make when a task is tedious. Worse, string manipulation is precisely where all of the potentially dangerous bugs can live in the average C program, especially if you're accepting data from untrusted sources.

> Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it.

Aside from the fact you can say the same about assembly, this is another reason to disfavor C: Reinventing the wheel. Over and over again.

I say all this as someone who actually likes C, and even somewhat enjoys doing string processing in C. I even know about strstr(3), which never seems to get mentioned. The main thing I know, however, is that it isn't worth it unless you live in a contrived circumstance.

Yes, you can go really fast by strapping yourself to that rocket, and if you remove the helmet you'll reduce your weight and go even faster. Nobody's doubting you. However, very few people want to stand downrange of you.
I think you are confusing "being influential" with "being in total control of the industry"
I'd love to see tools like MPI come back into mainstream. For instance, there's some work being done optimizing MPI in java for high performance computing but not nearly as much as what's being done for tools like Hadoop.
Personally, I prefer proximity unlock, I shouldn't have to touch the phone at all. This might be done with Bluetooth LE devices, the same way modern keyless entry works for cars.

If my phone is within a meter or two of my keychain, or I'm in my car, then it is unlocked. This is especially important if you want to use it while driving via voice and don't want to have to unlock after each interaction.

Ditto for Moto-X style notifications. I shouldn't have to press the home button to see that tweet that just came in, in fact, I should be able to ask the phone to read it to me, through my headphones.

The fingerprint scanner is definitely a step up from 2-N touches (swipe to unlock + passcode), 1 touch is better than 2*, but zero touches is even better in some circumstances. Never having to think about needing to unlock.
I think there's a lot of exciting research going on in the context of integrable systems (~Bethe Ansatz) and N=2 quantum field theories. However, some people are also working on integrability in N=4 theories, which might be relevant to the ideas in this article. It's a thought some people (including Arkani-Hamed) have expressed, but it's too early to tell.
> It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind

Thia is exactly the main problem with C.

You need to rely on tolling outside the language to be able to write safer code.

While languages like Ada and Modula-2 and their descendents, offer the same hardware capabilities as C with stronger type checking.
Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. In general, for production it is disallowed (with exception of YouTube). They learned with YouTube that Python doesn't scale well to hundreds or thousands of developers. Even Mondrian, the code review system started by Guido and written in python, was replaced by something more scalable.
This is really cool. I didn't understand most of it, even though I'm taking QFT right now. Shows you how deep the subject goes.

On another note, if I see the word "illusion" or "illusory" one more time in these science blogs, I'm going to have a fit. This must be the meaningless new buzzword of the day. 1) Spacetime is not an "illusion" 2) Gravity is not an "illusion" 3) <insert sciency word> is not an "illusion". That doesn't even make sense.
"Jackass-finity" -- Gruber sure does have a way with words, I think that at least is undeniable. What a great neologism in the midst of a great argument.
'rm -rf *'
Thanks. That put my thoughts on screen rather succinctly for me.
> The attraction of C to this mindset is that it can be transliterated (vs translated) into machine code. This transliteration is so straight forward that if you know C and are familiar with the basics of the instruction set you can do it by hand.

Except modern processor architectures are no longer a one-to-one correspondence between Assembly code and C.
That's a solid analogy. Thank you.
If you want to buy, say furniture, a big barrier of web shopping is that you cannot automatically reason about their dimensions, because they are not exact enough (and even more seriously, they are usually available only as free text).

The 3D scanning technology would enable products that are add-ons to objects where the original manufacturer did not see value in adding an interface. If I can scan my car interior, I can attach my GPS to nearly any surface "perfectly". This gives aftermarket products very nice finish with a much lower cost.
Regarding 'no more innovation at Apple', this comment from 12 years ago is apt: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22940&cid=2467238
Interactive Patch Staging with git add -p
I really enjoy Gruber's holistic reviews of Apple's new devices. He doesn't attempt to be Anandtech (whose reviews I found thoroughly engrossing and well written), but rather he paints a picture of how the device feels and how it fits into Apple's larger strategy, which I find equally important.

One interesting thing I've discovered about Gruber's columns is that you often have to read between the lines and get accustomed to how he presents his narrative. Praise for Apple is freely handed out, weaknesses are noted, and praise for other companies is guarded (when said company is in competition with Apple). For example, he notes the weaknesses of Siri in a generally positive sentence, and states that "Google Now is faster." I think he would agree that Google Now is not only faster, but also provides better results with better comprehension, and really the only downside is that you can't access it with a long-hold on the home button. That's not something I'd expect Gruber to say. However, once I recognized how he couches his concerns, I've found that he has some of the most insightful, nuanced and thoroughly processed views about Apple overall.
And here's a (long!) recent review about developments in this area over the past few years -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1697
If only this were true. And yes, it's cutely naive and tunnel-visioned to think so. However, I've been in teams where the drag on the ticket was very much a developer. When that happens, you need processes and experienced people in place to fairly manage their performance, help them into contributing more effectively, and if they don't improve, get rid of them.

A gaggle of developers are not going to be able to do this. Hell, 50% don't even have the social skills to say hello to each other in the morning.
He forgot the use case for C web development. Small embedded systems. Not everything is CRUD.
I think what they mean is that the force we call gravity is an illusion that we experience because we perceive spacetime as flat. In a curved spacetime, you don't need to posit a force to explain motion due to a nearby mass - the mass curves spacetime, and objects move along geodesics in the curved spacetime. So while it would be incorrect to say "gravity is an illusion" I think it makes sense to say "the force of gravity is an illusion".
>Apple is being distroyed [sic] by the rumors that are being created. When they announce that they are going to have a new product, everyone thinks it's going to blow their worlds. Rumors start flooding in about even the most outragous products ( I even heard a few "sources" mention teleportion) This is getting plain stupid.

> Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them do the impossible?

Great line!

The hype around Apple products fuels both sides of the fence.
You can even imagine previewing the furniture "live" in your apartment. I've been thinking about this for a while and Ikea made the first step with their 2014 catalogue. Ikea's version is pretty limited though, but that's a first step.
> For instance, selling phones with features stripped from them (bootloader unlock capabilities on HTC One, for instance)

Every phone from the Galaxy S3 onward on Verizon has had a bootloader unable to be unlocked per Verizon's request to the OEM. Galaxy S3 on Verizon was also the only S3 to have a bootloader that could not be unlocked the day of release (it could be later on through various hacks). They have no phones I find interesting unfortunately and I'll be leaving them I think once my contract runs out or my Galaxy Nexus gets too old. Plus, if I want to keep my unlimited data in the case they do happen to get the next Nexus, I would have to pay a 150% or so markup buying it off contract versus buying the GSM version from Google and using T-Mobile.
A derivative work is one that extends upon an original work. Thats an simple definition of a derivative work, but doesn't include any clear examples.

The FSF gives the example that linking causes a derivative work, and incorporates that line of thinking into the LGPL. The reason behind it is that a linked work existence is based upon an original work, and can not exist without it. As such, linking is an easy example where the line into derivative work has been crossed.

In the end, it will be up to the courts to decide what is or isn't a derivative work in software. The statutory definition is incomplete and the concept of derivative work is thus interpreted with reference to explanatory case law. Each time a music company wins a lawsuit against remixes, derivative work extends its grasp. Each time a game like WoW wins a lawsuit against bot software, one more step is taken.

In light of the precedential cases, I consider the FSF example of linking to be quite conservative definition of derivation. It might not be true every time and for every possible use of linking, but it should be true enough in the general case. Is there a strong argument against that interpretation?
The one piece of information from here that is new about the TouchID -

"And what is stored in that secure location are not fingerprint images, but cryptographically hashed values, unique both to your finger’s biometric data and the device itself on which you scanned it. Even if someone does figure out how to obtain the fingerprint data from the secure storage on your iPhone, that fingerprint data should prove useless anywhere but on the unique Touch ID sensor on the iPhone itself"

Always thought it will be done this way. But "security experts" just assumed it will be stored on disk in "consumable" form and warned not to use it ever.
Someone who robs a bank is a primal animal who deserves to be raped in the shower?
Zero Day Review
Copying linked lists with random pointers
Gruber gets my goat like very few other writers do.

Not because he's wrong, because he's usually right.

Not because he's shallow, because he's usually very deep and insightful.

Not because he's rude, because he's polite even when dismissing other's stupid observations.

It's in spite of all this.

I think it's because I know before reading a Gruber piece what its conclusion will be, namely "Apple did something great, amazing and innovative. Here's how and why."

There's no surprise in his conclusions. If it's about an Apple product or decision, I know what the ending will be.

P.S. Sure there may be a few times when Gruber has criticized Apple, but to me they feel statistically insignificant.
Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs.

Of course, the best option would be to replace them by other languages with native compilers.

However at the level these languages are used, it will only happen when OS vendors push new languages for their OS.

So it will never happen in UNIX land or Mac OS X land.

In Windows land, Microsoft is pushing for C++ and C++/CX, maybe C# if they ever decide to offer a full native compiler, like the Bartok one.

The embedded market OS vendors are all about Ada, C and C++. A few do offer Basic, Pascal and Oberon, but are very small niche.

So there isn't any OS vendor left that would push new system programming languages for their OS.

For business programming, there are already plenty languages to chose from.
I can't recall the last time I used Siri on my iPhone, or anyone else I know, for that matter; however, I've used Google Now on an almost daily basis on my Nexus 7. Execution is key.
I've got an idea how to pick a color for the bike shed: match the color of my iPhone 5c. Thank you, Apple, for resolving that problem once and for all.
The grammatical errors exist regardless of whether I speak one, three, or a hundred languages fluently. Better to ask the number of projects I have documented...

Note I comment exclusively on the author's presentation, not thrir personal behavior: obviously they are not lazy. I have no obligation to contribute, no: ncome from or personal interest in this project. I contribute to the projects which benefit me and people who I care about.
The uninformed complaints about the use of a 64-bit ISA in ARMv8 have been rather irritating, given we didn't know how it would play out in practice. It seems that the performance increase of the 5S is pretty spectacular; the iPhone 5 is already FAST.
The problem with fingerprints is you can only change your password 10 times and faking them at readers has been easy since at least 2001(Including the ones doing heat detection and ridge depth checking).
The Skinner Box is a well-known and understood psychological data point. The problem is that if you undercut the joy of pressing the reward button, all the reinforcement conditioning goes into teaching your audience that your game is Not Fun, rather than teaching them that "just one more run" will grant them the thing they want.

The problem with the AH and its accompanying miniscule drop rates is that it quantified things too solidly. You can't do "just one more run" with the hope of getting your item. You know that your chances of getting your item on your own are virtually nil, and you can calculate that you need to do 634 more runs to earn the currency needed to buy the item you're looking for.

People get addicted to gambling because of the endorphin rush you get when you win big. Blizzard killed the "win big" and reduced it to going to a 9-5 job to earn a paycheck to eventually buy that big screen TV you want.
Clickable Youtube thumbnails instead of watch?v=?
Just to make it clear. raid-5/6 mdadm arrays does the right thing when repairing/checking/scrubbing data. It writes the correct data if one of the drives has a corrupted block.

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_Administration

How often does this happen? According to what I have been reading, without ECC RAM and without ZFS, your machines get roughly one corrupt bit per day. In other words, that could be a few corrupt files per week.

This is complete nonsense without more data to back it up.
Even with the device provisioning and tower handoffs now being done within the SIM card in LTE enabled devices on Verizon, they still require consent to get any sort of CDMA signal (which until VoLTE rolls out, includes making phone calls). At least with LTE and SIMs finally on Verizon since 2010, you can activate any device by simply popping in your SIM card, though only if the device already is allowed on their network, since it does checks to verify the MEI[1] number.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Equipment_Identifier
Thank you, this was very helpful!
I know exactly how you feel, but I'm pretty sure people using smarthphones nowadays practically stopped caring about battery life as it's close to non-existent anyway since you have to plug in your device every single day.

Personally I couldn't live like that (nor can you probably, if I interpret the tone of your post correctly), partly because I don't want to be enslaved to charging partly because I would forget it anyway, so the only option left is to either buy a phone that's not so 'smart' hence doesn't starve the battery in a day or get a smartphone and don't use it's smart features. As far as I can see, there's just no way around it. Which is an utter shame of course. As a comparision: I've always been a portable audio fan and in that area there seems to actually have been an increase in battery life while for the phone market it seems to be the other way around. I have a semi-professional portable player/recorder and using two standard AA batteries it serves me well playing audio for over a month. Or actually so long I never counted, but will be easily over 40 hours. It's a joy to use compared to any phone I ever owned, except the fixed on on my desk :]
We use Hadoop/Hive/EMR for a sub-TB dataset for exactly this reason. The flip side is that I've found the ecosystem to be pretty flakey (specifically Hive). Debugging code you wrote yourself is pretty different to working your way through failures on a distributed system.
> C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up.

This is an implementation issue.

Nothing prevents a compiler vendor to offer the same capabilities to their language compilers.

Vectorization is not part of ANSI/ISO C or ANSI/ISO C++.

For the time being, do you want vectorization in Go? Write a tiny assembler routine. Done.

JVM? They are working on making it part of the reference JVM http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/.

.NET? While Microsoft does not offer anything, Mono has SIMD support since 2008, http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Nov-03.html
Without a loot reset, it would likely leave much of the playerbase feeling like they've been hung out to dry. Coupling it to the expansion is the right move here.
> and objects move along geodesics

You say that like it's so obvious. But why do they move in the first place?
Language detection in tweets improved (Microsoft research)
That says more about Apple than it does Gruber.
It's a little bit different, though, because the government is already enforcing spectrum controls. It's not like you can go out and start your own wireless network on in Verizon's band - the government won't allow it.
If you ever worked in the enterprise environment of Fortune 500 companies, they are actually quite understandable.
There is a reason that the largest Internet companies are still running their infrastructure on Java and C++. It scales and operations people know how to manage it.

Rails is the classic example of optimizing for developer ease of use instead of performance. Which probably makes sense for startups, but scaling is a pain in the ass.

Openresty is great for infrastructure level solutions,
e.g. request routing and authentication. It is used by
some of the largest Internet companies in China.

The benchmarks at
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
are a reminder of how poorly some popular frameworks perform. And how poorly cloud performs vs relatively cheap dedicated hardware.
yay!

-bowerbird
So RF readers are inexpensive, does it make fingerprint scanner easier to defeat?
Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Ada...?
Google Glass enters an Operating Theatre
Any language with native code compilers will do.