skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked this: If I may add - my personal few cents -

1) I am filled with distaste when people treat quantum mechanics "like magic". In this case it's just taking an unexplained phenomenon (consciousness, or heck, even the weaker 'cognition') and pushing an explanation into a 'more obscure' corner, which I think is intellectually lazy.

2) Drop consciousness for a second, it's really quite amazing if microtubules have a role in cognition (penrose's 'weaker hypothesis' vs. penrose's 'strong thesis' which is that consciousness is QM). And people on hn should take note, because this has implications for a lot of machine learning, which sometimes is bio-mimetic (neural nets e.g.)

3) if we take 1 and 2 into consideration, it is possible that cognition and ML is feasible using LESS computational power, just that we're missing out on the correct architecture by attempting biomimicry - granted, biomimicry has served some fields well, like image processing and OCR.

edit: and then I realized that my 1) is your link [1].
The problem with whitelisting is that while I might trust the site I am browsing, I cannot trust the people the site might have outsourced its advertising to. If a site owner negotiates its own ad deals and serves them from their own domain, I will see them as will many other people. If you don't trust your third party ad providers enough to serve their content from your own domain, why should I trust them? I, and many others, simply don't have the time to determine which advertisers are trustworthy and which are not, and if I did, I do not have the time to follow up with each one to make sure they haven't sold out and become untrustworthy.
Alright, when we're to the point of saying Penrose is no longer a real physicist or doing legitimate physics and implying that he doesn't have a very deep understanding of quantum physics... Well, there's not much point in continuing.
A Scorecard for Obama's Surveillance Reform Announcement
The Deathrow cluster offers a demo account and (free) accounts to an OpenVMS V8.4 cluster; on an Alpha and an Itanium. Some of the old VMS games are available online there, as well. http://deathrow.vistech.net

If you want to re-live VMS on your own x86 hardware, the simh emulator (free) includes VAX support. There are various other emulators available. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/70

For OpenVMS, HP offers (free) OpenVMS hobbyist licenses and disk image downloads for all three OpenVMS architectures; for VAX, Alpha and Itanium. http://www.openvms.org/Hobbyist

Here's a setup of a (slightly older) version of simh on OS X: http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922
Here's an edge.org answer that briefly touches on this - from the other end, by another great physicist, Anton Zeilinger[0]: http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25548

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Zeilinger
The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to automation?
Robots are stealing your job
Cookie Perfection Machine [video]
Well, yeah, that's the idea. I just thought it would be cool if there were a site that could show me T-Shirts for all of my favorite bands and TV shows, and it grew from there.

I'm really keen to write a chat app in Go this weekend which matches up similar Reddit users based on common subreddits. I was thinking to host it at chat.youshouldbuythese.com, and use that to drive traffic to the site.
People can not disagree that there are "quantum effects" at the brain because this term has no obvious meaning. There is a completely deceptional "evil sister" of that theory, that defines "quatum effecs" in a completely different way from what's on the paper, it normaly only appears when there isn't a chance for peer review, and yes, people are fast to torn it apart.

The usual answer to this one theory presented at the paper is along the lines of "yes, that's quite possible. It may be quite important for discovering how the neurons work, but even if it's right, it does not mean that our current models are wrong", coupled with a "why did you get the idea that this can be in any way more powerfull than other kind of expected phenomena?"
"The 8 Most Essential Git Commands"
Government subsidizes all sorts of things in all sorts of ways: Teslas/Priuses with credits, home loans with the mortgage deduction, student loans, Twitter moving to SF, and so on. Not saying these are good or bad, just indicating that subsidies are a pretty core part of our society and a case could be made for justifying or denying each.

Some rationales for subsidizing affordable homes specifically: fewer slums, greater social mobility for low income families (expensive areas also tend to have good schools), more stability for the elderly (who make up an astonishingly large proportion of low income folks as they can often no longer work).

A society where the raw effects of market forces were allowed to act on people would be really unpleasant (I grew up in one and have been to several) - free markets are a fantastic way to generate wealth but a poor way to ensure balanced social outcomes.
> Should the government subsidize...

I don't see why a poorly run bank which has made bad investments in toxic assets should be bailed out with taxpayer's money when it should be allowed to fail, with good banks picking up clients and assets and growth in market share...

My point is there are few markets which are truly allowed to operate freely. If housing markets were not regulated, the uber rich would buy up every piece of real estate and then we'd all be stuffed.

> we bid up the houses to obscene prices due to lack of supply.

People can only bid what they can afford, and what they can afford is driven by loose lending and cheap credit. Tighten bank lending and housing prices will start falling.
Hey Adam. I didn't realize BBF delivered. Is there a minimum order size?

I've been ordering from Costco, which is convenient but has a limited selection.
Awesome concept. I love this.
> What other method of allocating scarce resources did you have in mind?

I've always been a fan of allocation based on who had bigger muscles and was better with a club or other blunt weapon. To each his own.
> This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.

Yet it's one of the best questions on SO. Something's very wrong with SO if this isn't considered a good, on-topic question for a programming Q&A site.
You seem pretty smart. Let me ask you a question. What happens when all the middle income and low income population leave San Francisco? Who is going to work those jobs? You don't think people are going to commute from Oakland, or farther, to San Francisco to work low paying muni or janitorial positions, do you? They will get jobs where they move.
Why does 1+2+3+⋯=−1/12?
LSD's first-order mechanism is known, like all tryptamines it's a 5HT receptor binder. It's a fairly complicated tryptamine, though, what is more bizarre is that for simple tryptamines there are incredibly complex differences in effect for small changes in the molecule, and the rationale for 'second-order' differences in pschedelicity is generally unknown. There are some hand-wavey explanations about differential binding for different 5HT receptor classes with different prevalences in different parts of the brain. (I would strongly recommend reading TIHKAL/PIHKAL if you're interested, to get an idea of what I'm talking about).

In general, though, tryptamines effects (including LSD) are unlikely to involve microtubules, since they are charged, water soluble and don't cross inside the neurons (where microtubules are) so easily.

I would also generally posit that visual hallucinogens do not generally require MT/Quantum 'involvement'. The visual cortex is incredibly well-characterized, and relative to the rest of the brain well-understood in the absence of a strong MT hypothesis. Moreover, visual cortex-like applications are very amenable to neural network solutions in silico (e.g. ocr) and these ANNs also don't require a strong MT hypothesis.
All of the explanations I've seen are related to encouraging OpenBSD developers and surfacing bugs in OpenBSD, how does that help the typical x86 OpenSSH user? "We want $20k to help maintain this other thing we do that you have no interest in."
It runs the gamut, of course -- someone's out there building an awesome campaign to advertise a blood drive, right now.

But most advertising basically using psychological tricks to push you to want & buy all kinds of stuff that really make a negligible difference in your quality of life, if they add anything at all.

Worse, the best way to convince you that you need X is to convince you that you have an X-shaped hole in your life. That desirable mates are looking for a [your gender] with X. That your neighbors/friends/colleagues/rivals have X, better X, newer X, etc. and are wondering about you.

It's not real, and it's actively harmful -- we find happiness/contentment by being self-aware, by learning what things really matter to us, and finding ways to focus on & improve those parts of our lives; this most commonly doesn't involve buying anything at all -- often it involves getting rid of a lot of stuff and leading a simpler life.

But who has time for clear thought and introspection, nowadays? By default advertisers want you distracted and discontented, your thoughts teeming with desires and urges, racing along on the hedonic treadmill....
>I would imagine that a [lot] of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources).

But that's just it. Even if they could make money off a dollar-per-person-per-month model --even if they could pay all their bills and then some-- they certainly wouldn't make the switch. Ad sales always have the potential for growth, even if the size of your audience is the same. Offering base subscriptions puts a hard floor (edit: ceiling, not floor) on the amount of money you can make with any set number of viewers.
The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistrust of the internet and technology in general to the point that he only visits 3-4 domains he knows he trusts and doesn't do anything else without asking his wife if it is safe. One of the examples he shared with me was the fact that he went for a long time without knowing the top results on Google until he found out they were ads shown before the actual results. He basically stopped using Google wholesale when that happened. He (I believe) is an extreme example of what happens when you abuse the user's trust and try to trick people.

Commerce functions best on trust and between shady advertising patterns like this and dark patterns like opting into subscriptions, a lot of bad actors are destroying trust on the web for luddite users.

There is probably a startup in here somewhere in making a Google Chrome or Safari extension that looks out for dark patterns and highlights them on the page for the user. i.e. spot ads and place a semi-transparent overlay stating "possible ad, click to reveal and interact" or looking for check boxes with whose default is being checkmarked and analyzing the text next to them to see if they match the dark patterns of opting into services you probably don't want.
Om: Enhancing Facebook's React with Immutability
Hot New Sex Song
American Lawmaker Propose Firing Squads
Its less a question of "don't want" than cannot. Systemd leverages core Linux kernel features like cgroups and soon, kdbus. All of this, mind you is what upstream kernel wants.

Other OSes - like Hurd and Free BSD - lose out, because they don't have these features. The systemd developers have invited others from the community to be maintainers, if they are interested in porting - but nobody has responded.

I want to leverage my Linux box better - already I'm seeing a use case for groups and systems to build and contain services for myself. I don't have any problems with Hurd, but don't want it to be dictating how I run my servers.

The only reason the CTTE discussion went on for this long is because of "greater good" outside of Linux. Else Systemd is the best for people living off Linux.
I'm really interested in the NYC comparison.

I don't know anything about city planning or the history of it, but places like New York must have gone through similar transitions. What worked, what didn't? I feel like there has to be a lot of history to learn from on the topic.
The problem with succinct data structures (and wavelet trees especially, but also rank-select dictionaries) is that while they have excellent performance characteristics when you look at them from a theoretical perspective, they tend to perform relatively poorly in practice.

This seems to be due to how much memory is accessed when checking a single bit, and the difficulty in predicting branches.

Of course it could just be that all my implementations have sucked, but even in playing around with libcds[1] didn't yield the kind of performance expected.

If anyone knows of a fast implementation of Wavelet Trees, I'd love to see it.

[1] https://github.com/fclaude/libcds
This is very misleading even after your "correction". Penrose's theories on consciousness and QM might be eccentric, but he is one of the better known physicists of our time, with integral contributions to the mathematics of GR. He deserves more than being presented as "not a physicist" at first, and then as somebody who "did some work on back holes 40 years ago" later. He is also definitely a very real physicist.
We've been using a Kanban-like approach for about 36 months. While it's not perfect, it's advantage is that it's actually fairly flexible: you can modify it to fit your needs.

For example: we look at the immediate backlog at the beginning of every week, and then look at what we accomplished on Fridays.

We also do longer range planning at a monthly Product meeting where Engineering, Sales and the Product Manager all look forward to bigger product milestones. We also try to set general launch dates for these.

We use http://sprint.ly to manage the dev process, which has added features for estimating delivery (based on past performance). Everyone in the company can access Sprint.ly, suggest features, and see what items are currently being worked on.
It's not highlighting one thing, but Chris Okasaki's book on Purely Functional Data Structures, and this brilliant top answer to a question about functional data structures published since the book will keep you in reading material for a while:
http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/1550

(it was all 'lesser known' to me when I started using haskell not so long ago)
Thanks this one is awesome, I had never seen it before.
I notice that yet again, only bald assertions come forth, never evidence.

What do Theo and the project have to hide, exactly?
Why do people download mobile apps?[academic survey]
This reminds me of the Jeff Bezos philosophy of writing a press release as the project proposal.
This is a tough one. No doubt about it. No easy answers here.

I just bought a house in Berkeley (used to rent in Glen Park). I'm curious what you think about rent control laws. I know a lot of landlords are abusing Ellis Act evictions but outside of those, rent control laws do a fair job at protecting the types of renters you mention.

The city budget is flush with revenue driven from the tech boom. I am not against them using a portion of this to help with housing issues. But it seems mostly to be a lack of ideas that's stopping that from happening.
How is that one of the best questions on SO? There is always someone who wants SO to be what they want it to be. I'm not saying everything is perfect in SO but I think the standard answer is that if you want a site that is about subjective discussions related to programming you should make one...
"tech's shuttles are a godsend, eliminating 327,000 cars"

That doesn't seem accurate. Over a third of San Francisco's population leaves town on tech buses?
I actually find this clever and patentable. It's machine learning assisted caching for physical packages. Now it all comes down to the predictive performance of their algorithms.
Adoption of Java is a different issue, junk food chains are also enjoys growing adoption, so what?)
he makes a lead gen pop up come up when you visit...not a fan.
To auto-promote to BigInt in case of an overflow, use a quote after the star(multiplier) operator. Since HN is not allowing me to use star in this comment here is the link to the gist with a simple factorial example: https://gist.github.com/devasiajoseph/8485836
If only it worked this way. Fares are already set years in advance and BART management seems to have their own ideas on how they want to spend the limited resources they have.
That's a good point. I guess my adverse reaction to building a proper recommendation engine is because I've never experienced one that works really well. I've never seen a decent product suggestion from Amazon and Google. But maybe the problem is that their suggestions are based on my search history, instead of my specific interests.
I'd imagine the length of the train is limited to the shortest platform it has to support. Not from SF, so not sure if there really is room for expansion.

Frequency might be another answer - run the trains closer together, but again there are limits there too.
Alternatively, SF could just legalize privately owned buses.
Thanks for bringing this to limelight

Just started experiencing this early on this week via Node Webkit, it is just awesome what NW with Chromium brings to the table.

The first thing that came to my mind is that this should have been there 15 years earlier through Java/Embedded browser. However the powers of the time (read IE) were not interested/even actively blocked embedded browser usage.
I don't always cite "tl;dr". But when I do, it's in regards to over 300 pages of half-century-old metaphysical text.

But on a more serious note, is a more concise counter-argument available, one that takes the latest discoveries of neuroscience into account? And if I see any appeals to consequences in the explanation, I won't bother reading more of it.
Cup-a-bits
"anticipatory shipping", this is pretty much just saying that local warehouses/stores should anticipate demand by using as much data as possible. For Amazon that means wishlists, viewing history, shopping carts, emails etc. This is good Jeff Bezos, but not good enough. I could do this better.

In order to best anticipate demand, they should be trying to make deals with manufactures instead. This system would initially work best with subscription based products. And then we could figure out how to turn everything into a type of subscription.

Manufactures have a release cycle that is important to them staying 'competitive'. So they have to constantly make new models and 'retire' the old ones by planned obsolescence forcing us to buy the new slightly improved model that has a time bomb built in it to go off when the next model comes out.

So basically Amazon needs to place their customers in a 'release preference' category. With names like, 'bleeding-edge','beta','stable','2 generations back', or 'annually/biannually'. This could make manufactures more responsible and get the latest designs out of secret labs and into consumers hands quicker.

Customers can choose which category they want to be included in for different product families. So for example, I might choose the 'bleeding-edge' release cycle for my phone, but prefer a biannual subscription for a refrigerator or car.

And unless someone has a brand preference, the best products can be automatically chosen based on reviews from amazon and social networks and blogs and benchmarks on hardware/battery life/speed/etc

Discounts will be given for recycling your previous models, and as our 3d printing becomes better and closer to home, eventually we might just get 'ink' credits to print out phones, computers, cars, furniture, TV's etc.

On a side note, this kind of system would be the system of all systems and it would be hard for competitors to start (without the data owned by Amazon). So I don't think 'Amazon' should get to boast and claim this system as their own and keep the profits. I would like to see this type of system organized at the national level at first (until we fully embrace globalization) and we could vote on an open source 'shopping and distribution' system whose profits go back directly to the people in the countries they operate. Then people could join and accept a national system to be proud of, one whose contributors, ideas,transactions,money,etc are all open and viewable by anyone to encourage accountability.
Im using the chromium codebase to build a sort of netxgen "browser" (not web browser).. but more akin to a application platform with p2p in mind (and other crazy ideas). While the idea proposed by the author may sounds cool, i think chromium is a huge codebase to be used like the author says so trivially..

Its ok; if you need multiprocess ipc + net + actor-based thread concurrency + gpu compositor + webkit.. (like i do)

But, dont know if it worth the trouble otherwise..

For instance, it takes a very long time to compile everything, it takes long to debug (the final chrome binary with debug symbols end with 2G.. all loaded in the heap) and you got a big codebase to know about.. so use it with care and in need.. otherwise you will waste your precious time trying to kill a fly with a canon
Avoiding exceptions isn't the worst practice. You still get automatic resource cleanup with RAII when you return from a function with an error code, which is a big win over completely unmanaged C.

I generally agree though, error paths are the last area I want to expose myself to flaky manual propagation and the 'well, I think I handled/freed everything' discipline. The regimental 'goto cleanup' type code you see in the kernel is not something I want in my projects.
There are any number of things you might buy from Amazon instead of a local store if you got same day delivery rather than even 2 day Prime.

It's fairly clear Amazon sees that as a key source of future growth.
Really, what happened 2 months ago was just the tail end of what had taken many months to build up. I say "last year", because it started much earlier, as Ben alluded to in his parting message.

People outside a team rarely have much insight into the day to day relationships. That's just how it works. That's what a "team" is.
CGit 0.10 Released, Adds Lua Support for Kernel.org
Joshua Topolsky put it best:

> America we are under constant, vague, terrifying attack. There is no end. There will never be an end.

http://twitter.com/joshuatopolsky/status/424220069003288577
So, first off, it needs to be acknowledged that this was written by the "Bay Area Council", which is a PR machine for a dues-paying group of bay area corporations, including Facebook and Google [1]. Consider the source.

Second, while I'm the first to acknowledge that SF needs to build up, it's clearly absurd to say that the tech boom is "not the cause" of the city's housing problems -- that's like saying that skiing isn't the cause of Aspen's housing prices. Nonsense. It's plain that tech is the proximal cause, even if you believe that the boom has brought both positive and negative consequences to the city (as I do).

Fair debate on this topic has to begin with the acknowledgement that the tech companies' policies are indirectly driving a displacement of non-tech workers from the city. It's dishonest to claim otherwise.

[1] http://www.bayareacouncil.org/about-us/member-companies/
you want a zune or an ipod?
It doesn't. A bailout was 100% necessary, but it needn't have been as generous as it was. Especially considering it severely curtailed Congress's appetite for heavier demand-side stimulus in the aftermath.