skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(If you want to continue this conversation offline, you can reach me by e-mail —see my profile and my website.)

Okaay.

By "simplicity", I mean something like the inverse of Kolmogorov complexity. I know it's not very well defined, but given a Turing complete language, there is a proof that a given program is the shortest of its equivalence class —if it is.

I said "simplest", not "easy to grasp for a human brain", or even "simple". It's just that "poof magic we have simple mathematical rules on which the universe runs" is a simpler hypothesis than anything else I have heard from (such as the God Hypothesis). There's also a certain… elegance in positing that every set of mathematical rules are actualized. That way, we don't have to pick a particular rule, making the master program even simpler.

On Quantum Mechanics, okay, I guess you're right. Just remember that while amplitudes are out there in the world, probabilities are in the mind.

Do you think plausible that we could, in principle, find a mathematical model that perfectly describes the universe? To me, the answer is obviously "yes", even though I'm not certain that we could find this model in practice. Now, assuming our universe does run on math, it is quite impossible to test for different kinds of ontological existence. Do we live in a simulation? If the simulation isn't buggy, we don't stand a chance at root escalation, and we can't tell. Does the mathematical rules exist, like "poof magic", or do they need some exterior force or entity to be actualized? Again, we can't tell, because there's just no way out of our universe.

> For example, we might expect things to be constructed from pure Platonic solids, we might expect the subatomic realm to be less fuzzy, etc.

Maybe not. The actual laws of physics may be even simpler than that, despite the complexity that arise from them. We'll see when we find them. Occam's razor doesn't favour surface simplicity, it favours simplicity at the deepest level.

> The fact that something is not surprising is not evidence.

Indeed. It is prior information, which is just as important as evidence. Without prior information, you don't stand a chance at interpreting evidence. Data can't speak for itself.

> To be more likely to believe something that seems unsurprising to you implies that you're choosing beliefs based on personal bias.

Or, it could mean that I tailor my surprise to my actual probability of the thing being true, based on the information I have. Heck, I have emotions, I might as well use them. By the way, didn't you notice that you're not surprised all the time? That emotion isn't as irrational as a Straw Vulcan would believe.

I'm not sure what "personal bias" you speak of, but there's no escaping the fact that different people have access to different prior information. They will inevitably make different probability estimates, even if they are perfect Bayesians.

You should read Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. It's an excellent book.
What should have been on his todo list: turn off caps lock
Wow, it's like you're digging around in my memories (watch where you step!). I remember talking my mom into buying me the C=64 Programmer's Reference Guide... it changed my life.
So censored by one network then, not all the UK.
Question: I had the impression that when you had several threads on a Java app this would result in several VMs, is this currently so, was so or it's my mistake and it was never like that?
Tiffany Outlet,Tiffany And Co Outlet
What measure do you propose we use to compare mainland China with Taiwan?
Seems like a lot of people like the Gmail interface.
The thing is, if you're not a programmer, you'll have a hard time judging the quality of a programmer and may end up hiring incompetent one. Even a newbie freelancer like me have seen it happen quite frequently. I often hired to clean up the mess left by those bad hires (almost all of them was hired by non-programmer).

You should try posting the job on curated/specialised marketplace such as http://getlambda.com/ and http://gun.io/ . Your chance of hiring great programmer will be higher there.
http://jster.net/
It's certainly a worry, but the Minecraft example shows that there might be games that are creative and intelligent. Naturally I hope to get my son interested in programming, too. But I suppose I can't take it for granted that he will be. Also if I push it too hard it might put him off of it. Tricky...
Perhaps one could give the kids zero budget and games so that they'd have to figure out how to root the tablet and pirate games :-) (kidding, I wouldn't actually condone that).
Seems more like he was making a joke.
Then the question comes: Do they really save money, or does it just appear like they do?

Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.
What's wrong with having a poor view of societies with high infant mortality?
Work with better people?

At my last job (less applicable now as I WFH), it was acceptable practice to give a "hold on" to everyone you'd run into on a daily basis. Maybe not the CEO, but the VP of Engineering would wait a sec if you needed to get something done Right There.
He shook his head immediately after this "admission" and reassured us that he, in fact, had not been asked this.

This was taken out of context after he made a joke spawning from a question posed via the audience.

(Source: I was there)
Brad Delong an economist at UC Berkeley once gave a good prsentation on the comparison between communist and market economies.

http://delong.typepad.com/files/20091103-115.pdf
It is common for me to not talk to a single coworker about work throughout the day. Meetings are rare, always scheduled ahead of time, and always short.

Are you hiring? Are the pay and benefits competitive?
Anecdotally, my sister (just graduated college) and my uncle (an investor in Palo Alto) both use blackberries. Perhaps your peer group encourages conformity to within-group phone norms? :p

In seriousness, I think it's very likely that my sister has one specifically because my uncle does; it's very easy for one community to learn to do things one way and another to learn another way.
We should probably assume all the major and important companies in our everyday technologies have been asked to do it. Microsoft was asked to put one at least in Bitlocker, too:

http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-microsoft-bitlocker-backd...

It doesn't necessarily mean that they all agreed, but we should assume the closed source ones did it (since we can't verify now anyway), while the open source ones should be audited much more carefully from now on.
The post is interesting but it's fundamentally about 4chan culture (and I'd say there have been more important changes in the past). I don't think it will make sense without being at least a little familiar with that culture - you'd be better off visiting the actual boards and getting a feel for the place first.
One Question Can Predict the Future of Your Company (2011)
To elaborate: Black students in Texas outperform black students in Wisconsin, hispanic students in Texas outperform hispanic students in Wisconsin, and white students in Texas outperform white students in Wisconsin.

Overall test scores are higher in Wisconsin only because white students in both states are the highest scoring group, and Wisconsin schools have a higher proportion of white students than Texas schools.

To the extend that any of this can be copied, it would probably be better for Wisconsin to improve the test scores of its ethnic groups to Texan levels, rather than for Texas to emulate Wisconsin's lilly-whiteness.
This will bring new meaning to the "we are legion" motto.
> Torvalds responded 'no' while shaking his head 'yes'

This is a bit of a pet peeve. For those who can't tell the difference between nod and shake:

A nod of the head is a gesture in which the head is tilted in alternating up and down arcs along the sagittal plane. In many cultures, it is most commonly, but not universally, used to indicate agreement, acceptance, or acknowledgment. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nod_(gesture)]

The Head Shake is a gesture in which the head is turned left and right along the transverse plane repeatedly in quick succession. In many cultures, it is most commonly, but not universally, used to indicate disagreement, denial, or rejection. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_shake]
Which has been happening since pretty much forever, and thankfully isn't the majority case (though still all too common).
This sounds somewhat like RethinkDB, although I don't believe RethinkDB has dynamic resharding.

Other than the dynamic resharding part, how do zBase and RethinkDB compare to each other?
Sounds like a terrible policy for concentration. On the surface management might think they are getting better results (more interaction) but it is probably at the cost of individual productivity.
BMW's higher profit margins than Hyundai is not good or bad for consumers; are BMW owners getting the same car for the money they pay? Can Hyundai compete with BMW in the lux market? I don't think BMW owners feel f*cked over by BMW because BMW makes more money per car than Hyundai does.

As long as we aren't forced to buy Apple products, i.e. we have a free market, Apple's huge profits don't matter to consumers. Perhaps Apple has a monopoly on smartphones that don't suck balls, but until the DOJ sees it necessary to break them up for it, I reserve judgement.

BTW, I happily use a Nokia 920, not an iPhone, but I'm tired of these Apple cultists economics-ignorant conspiracy theories. The cult argument is usually used by people who just can't understand free markets.
Indeed, and first flew in 1964. Note that the follow-on MiG-31 was considerably slower despite sharing the general aerodynamic platform.

Since then Vmax has been declining, as the aerodynamics and mechanical complications ( e.g variable intake ramps ) of higher-Mach flight were determined to be less useful than transonic manouevrability and sustained supercruising.

The exception to this trend has been the superfighter category ( F-111, F-14, F-15, F-22, Su-27 ) which have maintained the same ~ M2.5 Vmax due to their specific role. Yes, even the F-111 was meant to be a fleet fighter.

But none have pushed up past the heady M3.0 level that was routinely broken by a series of prototypes in the 1960s.
It was never like that. Threads have their own stack, but that's about it. They can access anything anywhere. Hence the current focus on concurrency using immutable message passing mechanisms on the JVM (actors etc.)
Meh, I think taking hand-written notes and typing them up later will be as fast as this and also be more searchable.

For meeting minutes that I need to take handwritten notes, I always put them in org-mode.
I was glad to see Apple make the changes to MapKit necessary to make this happen and am double glad to see MapBox taking advantage of it!
Is malware crapware?
Game workloads don't require ad hoc queries, typically - you're usually just stuffing a save state into the database every few seconds, and you route everything that you might need to query through analytics (except maybe billing, which you'd probably handle another way). Zynga pushes analytics data into their biggish (a few hundred nodes IIRC) Vertica cluster, which is far better for that sort of thing than most random access databases.

In any case most game state data wouldn't be very useful on its own, you typically want to look at event streams and histories of certain values, not snapshots of the current state.
Or, to be more specific, what are the differences between thread handling under Linux and Windows regarding to the JVM?

Threads in Linux (in general) are separate process that share memory space, in Windows it's different and they're "threads" being scheduled under a parent process.
It's worth noting that PG has defended this practice when YC Companies do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

The apps that get installed are "crapware." This one seems a matter of opinion. A lot of the world's most popular apps and sites seem like junk to us. But the users are choosing to install these things.

If you want to stop this kind of thing you need to get angry at the people who fund it and make money from it. That includes Paul Graham and Y Combinator.

More about the YC funded InstallMonetizer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806 Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows (467 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086043 InstallMonetizer quietly starts editing website, privacy policy
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059454 Y Combinator-Backed InstallMonetizer Is A Selective Ad Network For Desktop
I disagree, nokia didn't consider iphone a threat until it was too late. They said it themselves:

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-nokia-wasnt-able-to-fight...
Hey look at all that hard work those people that got fired put in! Yay Zynga!
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I wear glasses and I have yet to find a pair of sufficiently isolating headphones that doesn't become painfully uncomfortable after 1 hour. And I've tried various high-end solutions.
>"Linus Torvalds Admits He's Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux"

No he didn't. He said yes and no at the same time to comic effect.

He never admits or indeed denies anything.
This article is over 4 years old, and comments were disabled on the page, thus no additional content. Why is it noteworthy now?
No, but it's the same filtering setup as they're planning on applying to all the networks, so there's little difference in the grand scheme of things.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BUhIcj8CAAAfQEX.jpg:large
I'm at Microsoft and I had lunch with Niels Ferguson the other day. He's still in the Windows division, overseeing the crypto implementation in Windows. His opinion expressed here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/si_team/archive/2006/03/02/542590.as... hasn't changed.

EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to cperceiva directly at tis time. Perhaps I've commented too much in the last few hours? Anyway...

It's a fair question. I don't actually know all of the checks which are in place around the security critical parts of the code, but I have been by the care, ability, and professionalism of the people I've met who work on it.

It always seems to come down to having people we can trust cooperating in an environment of trust-and-verify, i.e., audit and review. My gut feeling is that the core crypto libraries, including the code securing Bitlocker encryption, are probably one of the worst places for a rogue insider to try to hide a bugdoor.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean a backdoor exists.

Take a look at some of the Underhanded C Contest entrants, some of them are so perfectly evil, and plausibly deniable to boot.

http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=22
Yeah, I feel weird about emailing/ iming people in the same room as me when something could be solved with a 30 second or so conversation.
Aw, come on. I've got an inanimate bar of tungsten on my desk that's more dangerous than a hypothetical drone swarm. 'Overwhelm largish targets', what, like people are 'overwhelmed' by flocks of pigeons?

You're just in love with the technology.
You could check out Mobile Brain Bank http://mobilebrainbank.org/ .
Here in London they show at least one ad for a game before the movie. London is also littered with billboards for this and other games...
Except Gran Turismo 6 (with completely rebuilt graphics and physics) is coming out this year. Metal Gear Solid V & Ground Zeroes are currently in development for the PS3, among other systems. Also we will still be getting multi-platform stuff for some time (Battlefield 4).

So it's too early to "close out the PS3" IMHO.
What's the difference? In both cases, threads have their own stacks but share the rest of their address space. Is there a distinction other than terminology?
The only off-topic thing is My Little Ponies?! OMFG what has this world come to?
This makes the current setup look so innocent. Probably we should enjoy till it lasts.
Completely misleading. Flagged.
The problem isn't that it's easy to set to no. The problem is that it's defaulted to yes

That means I can't just click next, next, next, install, finish without getting "infected", and the guys making these installers knows this - and takes advantage of it to make extra money.

Legally, it's sketchy at best - the EU has a law (I believe it's a law, at least, someone back me up?) against it defaulting to yes.

Morally, it's plain wrong and taking advantage of the innocent.
In the UK, some people complain that because immigrants are sending their money home, it is not being spent in the UK hence not helping the economy as much as them, for they are proper good consumerists.

Free movement of money in the EU and all that...
Similar to: http://erlangonxen.org/ ?

Is there benefit to having an OS that runs on the hypervisor rather than being able to compile apps right in kernels that will run right on the hypervisor?
Actually, no. I never read HackerNews of my own free will. What happens is, there is a team in the PR division that scans all the comments for anti-Google bias. Then company wide, Matt Cutts, and sometimes Larry Page, sends out an all hands email, and asks all Googlers to visit HN and vote down the comments, and post rebuttals. Stock Bonuses are given for the best rebuttals, and if you get someone hellbanned, you get to fly on Larry's private jet, although I've heard they have killed that perk now that the cheap jet fuel deal from NASA fell through. Ah well.
How much do you trust the least trustworthy person who has write access to your code?

My biggest concern isn't that Microsoft or Apple or Red Hat might agree to include a back door in their software; but rather that individual developers might be bribed to "accidentally" introduce exploitable bugs.
Sorry, O2 is censoring "political material" in the UK? Are you kidding?
> Saying that I chose $20, and there's a 50% chance of there
> being $10 in the remaining envelope, and a 50% chance of there
> being $40, takes into account 3 amounts: $10, $20 and $40.

Right, but that's after you have opened the envelope.

> However if you're presented with 2 envelopes, there are only
> 2 amounts to begin with.

I don't see why you think this is an issue, or relevant.

> The only way you could assign a probability to what the second
> envelope contained would be if you started with 3 amounts then
> chose 2.

That doesn't make sense. Suppose I flip a coin, and choose an envelope at random. Without opening it, suppose I designate the value it holds as Z. Now I know with probability 50% that the other envelope contains Z/2, and with 50% the other envelope contains 2Z.

> For example I have a 5c coin, a 10c and a 20c coin. I pick the
> 10c coin and flip it: heads I pair it with the 5c coin and tails
> I pair it with the 20c coin, then I put each under a cup and
> invite you to choose.

> Now if you lift the cup and see 10c you know there is a 50% chance
> the other cup has 5c and a 50% chance it has 20c. You can take into
> account 3 amounts (ie. the one you chose and 2 possible remaining
> values) because the question starts off with 3 amounts.

This seems (a) completely different, and (b) unenlightening. It's completely different because I seem to know what all the options were for what you did and the amounts involved.

> If your knowledge of the system commences with "here are 2 cups"
> you have no extra information -- you only have 2 amounts. The
> higher and the lower. You will pick the higher one 50% of the time
> on the first go, and 50% of the time if you switch.

Yes. So now, without lifting the cup, let's consider some statistics. Let's call the unknown amount under the cup I've chosen Z. The other cup must contain Z/2 (with probably 50%, as you say) or 2Z (also with probability 50%). If I switch, my expected return is then 5Z/4, which is larger than Z. Hence, if given the option, I should switch, even though I don't know what the amount is that I've chosen.

That is the paradox, which you still appear not to have resolved.
It's probably worth mentioning that OpenBSD similarly had some controversy a little while back. Allegedly, someone working in the IPSEC portion of the code may have been asked to do the same according to an email received by Theo :

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462
Just like a good alliance of powers = Allies :)
It's completely true for me as well. I think knowing that someone might interrupt me at any time (which is true both at work and at home, most of the time) doesn't allow me to fully concentrate as well as I can in a place like a coffee shop or a library.
> antisocial

Nope, just introvert.

If you don't know what an introvert is, here is a quick guide: http://i.imgur.com/f2BmB2x.jpg

I also recommend reading the book "Quiet" by Susan Cain. Even if you're more on the extroverted side of the spectrum, you will learn a lot about introversion and extroversion and how to deal with introverted people. (And even if you don't realize it, many of the people you know, whether they're friends, family or co-workers are introverts and have to deal with living in an extroverted world.)
Hopefully Google/Calico will align their efforts with those of the SENS Foundation. I suspect they will. Having recently hired another such visionary in Ray Kurzweil I'm sure they are aware of De Grey's body of work. In fact Aubrey De Grey may well be partly to thank for Calico's very existence.
Then how about adjusting the cooldowns back to how they were? 4chan is still supposed to be a collection of imageboards, and the new cooldowns make image posting extremely time-consuming with large amounts of images (which can be very much on-topic and valued content). Shitposters are not suddenly going to stop shitposting just because they have to wait longer between posts, so ultimately this just seems to make life for legitimate posters worse.
Flash was mostly working fine in Ubuntu I think even 4-5 years ago.
> "Not finishing college" or "low-level technician" should never be reasons to put down someone.

You are completely right, education or job are not the reason to put down anyone. I wanted to point out that if someone approaches you with the biggest inventions in the century but has no credentials, you would be skeptical, wouldn't you? However, you are right, I could said that point much better.
If this is important, why couldn't Opera itself minimify the code when an extension is added?
Emacs+Gnus
I don't remember the last time I installed DivX.
Not just this generation either. I remember being amazed at Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong 64, or, going even further back, Chrono Trigger.
I have an office of 4, which is bearable. I have gone for a few interviews recently, and open plan seems to be the norm. It seems difficult to find a productive working environment.

I was way more productive when there were just two of us in the same office. That was when the organisation was just starting out.
Logging in the OWIN World with Microsoft.Owin: Introduction
That's interesting, thank you. I don't use my phone much to make calls, but I do send a reasonably large number of iMessages/SMS, and I couldn't quite see a solution to the SMS problem, but I might have another look this year.
A badge of honor many will strive for.

Related, one of the funniest bans I've ever seen.

http://puu.sh/4uXij.jpg
Has GTA V been announced for PS4/Xbox One?