skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to be clear, the criticism is of Redis Cluster, which has been redesigned because the first design was so lax it was effectively unusable. The real issue, is that as of right now I have no idea what the exact semantics and failure conditions of Redis cluster are. I'm not clear that anyone really knows. Salvatore thinks he knows, but we can't be sure that he does.

With all this talk of practicality, what really makes distributed systems practical is when someone can do a formal analysis of them and conclude what possible states can occur in the system. This is not work that database users should do, it is work that database implementors should do. The failure to use a known consensus system is a failure to deliver a database I can understand.

I find this all a bit disappointing since I've been a huge fan of Redis since the early days. It's an amazing tool that I still have in production, but I get the feeling that it's utility will never expand to suit some of my larger needs. Bummer.
You're essentially describing the equivalent of online fascism, neo-Nazi down voting brigades sound suspiciously close to Meatspace Greece at Present.

Any system that mimics democracy, even with active moderators, will succumb to a large enough minority of trouble makers. If they really are a marginalized group that does not represent a significant percentage of the community - even with all the tricks and manual puppet accounts and all the real world parallels - they will remain marginalized. If things turn dark that easily one sadly suspects it has more to do with the flaw in the algorithm of the people rather than the system.

As for programmatically doing what you claim, that hasn't been demonstrated. I'm pretty sure spammers have even more incentive and resources and yet the volume of spam is manageable still.
The way I see it, is that sex work has a higher chance of involving harm, but it's not a guarantee. It's inherently risky (contact sex work, I mean) due to STI's and various other reasons; and often those who participate in it as a worker do so for reasons that we should be tackling (be it abuse while young, a lack of other career options, &c) as a society. If the people involved are not suffering or being exploited, then more power to them! In my research though, often those at most risk of harm in society end up there, and that's a bad thing, in my opinion.

I live in a country where prostitution is completely legal, and while that doesn't entirely remove all problems, it's certainly helped. Being in a western first world country also helps. it's not a simple topic, and your point is well made; we should think before we rush to judgements and conclusions, especially those based on "Puritan" morals and societies shunning of the industry as a whole.
It is more accurate to say that RabbitMQ supports both fire-and-forget and producer-waits. The exact behavior is specified by a combination of how you configure exchanges and queues, and per-message settings, and how you write your client code. For example, your application can decide that some of the messages it injects into a queue are to be durable and others not. It is quite flexible (though the docs are lacking when it comes to specific advice for various use cases).
What else would you expect when much of our Software architecture is from the 70s ? :)
I worked as a software engineer to pay for my heroin addiction (am now clean), and allowed myself to be exploited at some pretty terrible places.

I don't really have a point with that post, I just never drew the parallel before. I was very lucky I had skills that are wanted and pay well.
Universities can put their whole course online for free and still charge $30K per year because you are paying for credentials or something.

Community colleges are quite cheap. $46 per course in San Francisco.

Lots of programming courses. http://www.ccsf.edu/NEW/en/educational-programs/ccsf-catalog...

These people were not getting an MBA from Stanford.
That is what it's called. A site [1] with some examples. Donald Knuth developed the term and concept. It seems fairly popular in the haskell community, and to a lesser extent the scheme/racket communities.

[1] http://en.literateprograms.org/LiteratePrograms:Welcome
Why the FTC couldn’t fine a flashlight app for sharing user location data
How To Market Anything Online With Article Marketing
When you are feeling better about this can you return with a follow up article for the HN audience?

I have read the news reporting and I just don't understand how he came to be hit and for the result of that to be so terrible. Something in the reporting just does not add up and I could do with some normal person rather than a journalist to make sense of it for me.

I am a cyclist and I have a vested interest in knowing how to avoid deadly situations. In my experience to date accidents are always unexpected, however, with hindsight, so much could have been avoidable. Negligence is not always 100% one party or the other, even if it is 0.5% negligence on my side and 99.5% on the other side, there is still something in my control. There are easy wins like having a maintained bike, with lights, high-visibility clothing and no headphones being worn. There are also more subtle ones like confidence, not being deferential to motor cars and having pedal cleats correctly placed.

Was there anything that your friend could have done differently? Was there anything in the layout of the street that could have been different? What was the totally unexpected thing that other cyclists including myself need to add to their internal database of random hazards to look out for?

Given that this is police investigating police a considered and independent study of what actually happened could be of great use.
A quick google shows it's 10% more tax than you would have paid, when included with your other income.

If this withdrawal is your only income, and you keep the withdrawal below the tax-free limit (looks to be $9k), you won't pay any tax, and thus won't pay the 10% penalty either.
I love how the authors assume that companies with dysfunctional promotion strategies will be interested in an alternative mathematically-optimised solution.

"No sir, I didn't promote your nephew as you requested because our new mathematically-optimised promotion strategy indicated otherwise."

Yeah. That's sure to work.
I really wish I could find the original paper I read on the subject for you. I just went looking for it again and I didn't find it. It was something I read randomly in my travels, it was really long and really well researched with lots of data. I wish i bookmarked it. I found some more interesting stuff though.

http://www.issues.org/29.4/hal.html

this one has more of an "agenda" behind it

http://www.vdare.com/articles/national-data-stem-shortage-sh...
At this point, what is the rationale behind limiting .TLDs anyway? Is it simply a means to create artificial scarcity so that the companies who control .TLDs can make money? Or is there a legitimate technical reason?
LinkedIn is a virus.
He dropped the neural networks class he was slated to teach in the spring, as far as I know.

I wouldn't be surprised if, at this point, his work split 90% FB, 9% NYU Center for Data Science, 1% NYU CS.
At least as far as I can tell, the problem was that they required everyone to learn scheme, including the non-CS majors.
This is how the first software bug looked like
How many people use the different alternative ranking options do you, err, reckon, if you had to guess?

I figure all the different options to slice and dice are fun for information junkies but most users won't bother or even know about them.
I began programming in 1996. The biggest difference, to me, is:

#1 Google, which helps you quickly find answers from #2

#2 Online tutorials, communities such as Stack Overflow and blogs

As a self-learner, it's awesome now a days. It costs next to nothing to learn, to get involved with open source or a community, and most importantly, to create your own projects!

In 1996, I had one friend I could call to ask a question. Maybe I could save up some money to buy some crap book on Visual Basic or C. Computers were still expensive back then, and a server - geez, forget about it.
The fact that you think of programmers as a brotherhood tells me all I need to know, but I'd just like to add that the problem today is that there are an incredible number of mediocre programmers out there (many in this thread). I, for one, want it to get HARDER for mediocre products to make an easy living. The goal of teaching programming to children is to help kids decide if they even like programming. There are waaay too many kids in the US who have to wait until college to even learn programming formally.
I was expecting this to end with him getting robbed or worse. I'm somewhat relieved it was just a weird old guy.
My Grandmother Encrypted a Cheesecake
What are some good resources to understand Bayesian model averaging?
I'm curious, because I don't really know this system, if other scientists feel this way. I have some inkling that journals can often publish erroneous papers (maybe I got that idea from Nate Silver?), but that would be so very unfortunate for Science's reputation. I hope it's not that bad.
These actually increase the apparent contrast you see on the screen. They're especially helpful for LCD panels which have washed-out and uneven black which is very noticeable in a dark room. Having the colours match the picture seems largely a gimmick to me, but having a light surround makes the screen appear "darker". The exact effect it has is hard to measure, and attempts have been ongoing since the 50s. Here's a recent paper: http://www.scopecalc.com/image-contrast-and-surround-illumin...

There are SMPTE specs for exactly how much of what colour light should be used, and we follow them at work, but at home a string of LED fairy lights behind the screen helps a lot ;)
Jesus. that's a bit depressing
State surveillance of personal data: what is the society we wish to protect?
I would like to say that the Russian apartment bombings, although not officially proven to originate from the government, upon thorough investigation appear to have a very significant probability of being an actual brutal false flag. In addition to the available facts and possible motives, one can also consider that all serious journalists investigating this in Russia, and several KGB whistleblowers, have been assassinated.
There is a custom URL feature for plus accounts. Eg. https://google.com/+YourFullName. I guess, they are reserving the urls for unique names. I got mine https://google.com/+AlokMandavgane
This is a very cool idea and I hope it amounts to something. My only concern is that English text is pretty entrenched and working around it won't be easy at all. But small steps, like extensions to translate between the two, might be good enough. There is also the overhead to learn the new language (I don't think I could learn it as proficiently as I can currently read English and don't see the advantage personally.)
The design system and style guide behind Salesforce1
DOD Security Standards. Also known as the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On A Shelf.
Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - Ian's Tech Notes
People in general have an aversion to linking their personal FaceBook to apps in this space. Rightly or wrongly, they worry about it becoming known that they use services like that. It's an interesting phenomenon, and it wasn't all like that back a few years.
Building firearms for your own personal use is legal in the US if you are not a prohibited person. Technically you can even sell one if you decide you don't want it.

Check out this AK-47 made from a shovel http://bit.ly/1jGxsFu

I don't get why 3D printing is receiving special attention compared to CNC machining or ye olden Bridgeport. If you want to make a Liberator it wouldn't take a hacker much time to figure out a way to do it with a minimum of tools.

Think about it. It's just subtracting material from steel.
Are you coming from a theoretical math point-of-view or background? It's hard for me to say exactly why, but I feel your response is evidence of just that "huge philosophical difference" between traditional stats and machine learning.

To me, even the statement "if I have a linear model" makes very little sense from the perspective of ML. Contrast with "if I think I'm dealing with a situation where a linear model might offer a good fit".

Regarding "maximizing out of sample fit would be a good approach", I think ML is always and just-about-only concerned with maximizing out-of-sample fit, for if it wasn't, the solution would be a lookup table.

I'm not trying to imply that you're wrong, rather that I think the 'gulf' is real. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your point. For example, I feel that mjw's comment in this thread captures my view, which I think is more ML centered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878336

Is that comment also in accord with your view, and it's me that's on the wrong side of that gulf?
Here's my two cents:

We should not be encouraging people to learn to program so much as we should be encouraging people to learn how to construct an algorithm.

That's the first thing you need to learn. Kind of like learning how to properly construct a sentence. You need to understand how to express a problem in a step-wise fashion.

There's a lot of talk in the technology industry about diversity. Adding more women, etc, but on a whole we need career diversity. Coders, writers, artists, actors, mathematicians, welders, plumbers, cooks, chemists, managers, politicians, and so on. Society takes more than just coders. So let's just encourage kids to get involved in finding a way to contribute that they might enjoy or at least find interesting.
VirtualBox is getting better, but it's still no match for vmware's performance(especially file share).
Agreed. Above and beyond that too, humans are naturally paranoid animals, and bad at seeing probabilities when assessing personal risk.

If a child that looks like yours is abducted, it makes you more paranoid that your child will be abducted; even if that other child was halfway around the world; even if that child was abducted by a relative; etc., etc. Despite the fact that abductions are rare, and that they're even more rarely done by strangers, blah blah, the brain gloms onto the perceived danger and isn't very good at letting go of it.
None of Linked-In's magic is helpful. Something I just realized today about those annoying unsolicited endorsements: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/do_linkedin_endorseme....
New Bitcoin / Crypto Currency Enthusiast Chat App For iPhone
That would be interesting. I used to be involved with NIPS in the late 1990s, but have crossed paths with LeCun on and off since then. He's an amazing talent, with tremendous breadth.
My point is that it shows up everywhere, just in different forms. Sparse coding has a penalty for large basises. Gaussian process regression tunes the density of its representation using Bayesian model Selection. SVMs have a slack parameter which dictates how many errors you'll tolerate to reduce the number of hyperplanes.
Some are indeed just video loops. They don't do very well though, it's not just the naked body that's needed, it's the interaction that matters more.
Unnecessary political trolling is unnecessary.
It isn't particularly strange to prepend the word with the manufacturing technique. Forged knives, hand carved chess sets, etc.
I suspect we'll find out more, but it doesn't seem he could've done anything different other than not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As much as we want to make sense of tragedies, sometimes there's no sense to be found.
What does he mean when he says that it's not possible to write a C program that can write other C programs?

Seems like there are counterexamples here:
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

Furthermore, it's possible to encode another programs' code into a single print statement, thereby writing one piece of code with another. As that's trivial, I suspect he meant something else. What was it? :).
I felt the same way about lisp and always reached for the same acronym when I was in college at UT. 7 years later I'm a huge fan of lisp (CL/Clojure/Scheme) and enjoy writing Clojure whenever I get the chance.

It's hard to appreciate the elegance of the language before experiencing years of pain working with others. I have similar feelings about learning Haskell (and not appreciating it) in college.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878369
By contrast, I recall the story of a guy who had the choice between C and Lisp for his programming class, and chose Lisp because he couldn't figure out C.

IIRC Richard Stallman also has a story about secretaries at MIT using Lisp for basically the same reason.
Not to mention "America's obesity epidemic" in reality means "most people have a little bit of extra flab" (based on BMI), not giant super obese people who can't get through their front doors. Most "obese" people are not in any way physically impeded from swimming.
Show HN: vim-easyclip 2.1 - "Cut" operator for Vim
Derek -- This is a nice piece in a difficult time. I am childhood friends with one of Milt's sons and know his family appreciates all the love being sent their way. Thank you for sharing with everyone.
Unfortunately I think many people get "Lost In Stupid Parenthesis" because they either refuse to use or are not supplied with the proper tools. Lisp programs are of such an elegant structure form that they lend them selves to highly structured editing tools.

I use CL in my day job and would find it highly painful if I did not have all the editing tools I use. Basic things like auto closing parenthesis; this makes the whole I need to balance my parenthesis issue disappear, coupled with transforming existing symbolic expression.
I concur - a few months ago I used the mobile Web site on an iPhone. I was idly scrolling around the "People You May Know" list while distracted. I noticed that if you merely scrolled the page by swiping and your finger happened to start on top of someone's profile, it would immediately invite that person to connect without any confirmation.

It was a pretty horrifying realisation that I'd become one of those random inviters - now I have much more sympathy to people I've never heard of inviting me to connect! I refuse to use the mobile site again, so I haven't checked if it's been fixed.
I'd love to see a gas tax that is progressive based on population density within 10-20 miles of the gas station. They greater the population density, the higher the tax. Rural gas stations pay the least tax per gallon and city gas stations pay extremely high tax per gallon.
I don't think that was the problem, but it was a problem. I still contend the inability of the instructors to do their job was the problem. If the TAs had been prepared to teach scheme, and not come out of a year with a background in pseudocode (based on Pascal for CS 1311/1321/1511/too many other numbers) and Java (CS 1312/1322/1512/too many more numbers), but instead had a background in functional programming and scheme in particular, they might have been able to help their students out. That transition period from the pseudocode based intro to computing to the scheme/SICP based course should have been more gradual. Which leaves the ultimate failure on the part of the faculty who decided on an abrupt transition for their students, and ultimately failed the students in the process.
The most important aspect is more to think like an engineer (software/system/data whatever). This lets you at least recognize common information problems:

Why does this document go to each person serially when it could go to them in parallel).

Why do we store all our important data in a word doc on a windows share where it's difficult to collaborate on it.

Why are the other business group repeating 50% of what my business group already does.

Why are we keeping so many versions/copies of this data - any changes to one copy is exponentially expensive as we have to update the other copies.

Why is it so difficult to keep track of projects/issues/tasks/action items/etc?

Why am I manually running this report instead of getting it automatically emailed to my team ever week.

Why is it difficult to communicate and collaborate to colleagues in different parts of the company.

etc.

So much modern "work" are really just repetitive information problems that are so common that they're easily solvable by existing tools. Likely free ones. You just have to be able to recognize them and apply the correct solution.
Can the designer of a decentralized protocol be held liable for illicit use?
The 10% is figured based on the amount of the distribution, not AGI.

(For 2012, it's reported on line 58 of the 1040...)
Exactly. Zip guns more practical than plastic printed guns can be made in prisons. Access to a hardware store just makes it straight up trivial.

Rational response to things like printed guns is probably a good case for bringing back shop class.
There's rarely a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But if the first wave of "learn to code" gave us you and RethinkDB, then I'm all for the next wave.
Maybe not the /all/new but I pretty much only visit /new on the subs I frequent. It's a much better way of using smaller subs from my perspective. Lots of things never make it fully to the front page of a smaller sub. The drawback is that subs which get caught in a filter appear to show sorted by their submission date and not the mod approval date so you can miss things on /new that might make it to /hot
I'm surprised by this choice of domains; many of them don't seem to be very appealing for either businesses or individuals. How many people would really want .foo, .boo or .soy?
How to fight a baby?(golden rules to remember)
Zip guns NYC 1950's ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm
If you consider selling ads and complying with the appropriate authorities when compelled to "evil", that is.
Oh, that's mostly a failure to communicate in the prestige dialect of English.
Tell HN: Hiring a swat team of Chefs for the cloud, right now
Are you great at the Chef ecosystem?

Got deep knowledge of physical and virtual servers and how to transform them into infrastructure code you can automate with Chef?

Come write chef code to build Netflix-scale (but harder, better, faster, stronger!) infrastructure automation.

You should be RHEL, Ubuntu, AMI Linux savvy, super fast at leveraging chef on migrating legacy systems, and giving assistance to traditional IT at sizing what needs to be done to support a transition from Enterprise to Chef-managed cloud.

If you rock at Chef, and can bring other devs up to speed around you, we definitely want you on the team. And bring friends!

Write me at my username on gmail.
"The High Cost of Free Parking" Donald Shoup
Obviously we are not on the same end of the philosophical spectrum, because of course the market knows best. The market is the sum of invididuals' actions. No amount of geniuses sitting around a table can predict how each decision they take impacts people's lives. That's why Central Banks make stupid decisions. It's not that they are learning, it's the best they can do.

And Central Banks were supposed to be independent in the first place from political power, but we all know how that turned out.
really neat designs. its a shame the url doesn't reflect a specific month when viewing the site - it'd make it a lot easier to share.
You are mistaken.

LeCun is now running a high profile lab for a $100B company. He's got the personal attention of the founder. He's only going to be at NYU as a talent conduit. It's not the same as Hinton's arrangement at all.
Cheers. I found it helpful.

I too would like to have an answer but having the question is the most important thing.

http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park