skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recovery from an overwritten file has essentially never been done. Or if it has, it has been kept top secret.

There was one study a long time ago where a few bits were recovered with some accuracy with an electron microscope, but it was from a really old hard drive with a much lower density than current ones.

Those overwriting regulations are just in case such technology might get invented in the future.
Yes, it is. Some things in life are expensive, and nobody is entitled to them.
No, actually there's no difference - both serve special interests. The fact that you like one special interest but not the other is your personal preference, but the nature of these laws does not differ - they benefit one set of citizens at the cost of limiting consumer choice and freedom to conduct voluntary transactions. The fact that you enjoy the services of one special interest groups changes nothing.
Can someone "fix" XKCD 1335 ("Now") so that the current time is at the 12 o'clock position?

http://xkcd.com/now/
I've started my emacs config from scratch a few months ago to understand it better. Right now it is ~160 lines (not including the plugins).

Plugins have been added for Markdown mode, go mode, ESS (for R and Julia) and Jabber for chat.

If anyone is interested:
emacs config file:
https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs

Run this script to download and install the plguins:
https://github.com/pavanky/conf/blob/master/emacs_plugins
> Why is it 18?

The major source of political pressure behind the 26th amendment (and, yes, nationally lowering the voting age for all elections takes a Constitutional amendment) was that 18 was the age of conscription and, well, Vietnam.
knife and knight will have been pronounced with the 'k' originally in english; you can see this in Chaucer. Pterodactyl, being essentially coined by english speakers from classical greek roots, probably never had the 'p' pronounced in english, but it was certainly pronounced in greek.

However, the closest thing I'm aware of to a word "starting out with a silent letter" is debt, which was originally spelled (and pronounced) without the 'b'. The 'b' was added by someone who felt the word should better reflect the latin 'debeo', and was never pronounced at any point.
Anyone other than me having trouble making the pop-over video ad go away?
Yes, distributed clusters are limited by communicate costs, not computation power. Parallel computing is in general limited by communication costs, even on one node (as the amount of time it takes to service a cache miss). Minimizing communication is important in both cases.

DNN training is one problem where the GPU solution vastly outperforms the distributed HPC solution.
That's very cool. I feel like I should have known about that... I suppose, it's a good argument for not using big blocks of slightly different light colors in a design.
As I mention nearby, the 'b' in "debt" was never pronounced. Of course, the word was orginally spelled without it ("dette"), so it's kind of a halfway case.
In every benchmark article: you are doing X wrong. Use Y method instead.
Yes, it is known that Tesla is only profitable because of government incentives. But such laws don't do much to correct it - if anything, they make the matter worse by making Tesla more dependent on government whim.
The OP asserting that the pg statement in question was "an astute observation" implies that pg is an impartial observer who is in no way biased by his ties to the startup ecosystem. I disagree with that assertion.

The pg quote that OP provides is very brief -- State/city govt ruling against Tesla/Uber == corruption -- and more an opinion than a true argument because no evidence/elaboration is provided. That Tesla's (very different) situation is equated with Uber's further points to a hastily voiced opinion rather than a reasoned argument. Hence, I would argue that an ad hominem approach is appropriate because there is not much else to go on. Pg voiced an opinion and I made a statement that mentioned some biases that he was likely to have that informed said opinion.
How Much Should You Charge For Design Work?
Are the L's in balm and psalm really silent in British English? I have always pronounced the L, and can't imagine applying a bahm or reading psahm 23.
The Selfiest Cities in the World
Any tentative idea when Julia 1.0 will be released?
Might have a few flaws, but hey at 19b $ it's probably 50% less buggy than this 12b $ piece of firmware. So value for money.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/78.htm
For cuda books, you can go thru Wilt's, it's pretty dense https://twitter.com/CUDAHandbook

There's a handful of papers on attacking the 13 (formerly 8) dwarf problems http://tom.scogland.com/pubs/pdf/feng-ocd-icpe12.pdf

I don't have any specifics on Kaveri memory model but there's lots of small reviews: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-7850k-a8-7600-kaveri...

compiler research and thread debugging: http://iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu/iacoma-papers/Illinois_parallelism...
> Followr can’t do some basic things, like…check if you’re already followed by a user it’s favoriting.

Why should it need to do this?

If it's so you can avoid "wasting" one of the bot's few favorites on someone already following you, either you think it's ethical to withhold the value of the bot's favorite from someone you potentially duped into following you or you don't understand how Twitter works. Favorites add value to their recipients. Getting favorited helps a user get their tweets into the "Top" results for a search, rather than just hidden in "All." Don't people who've followed you as a result of the bot's action deserve compensation from your bot?

It's not the bot that's harmful to the community as much as it's your seeming lack of concern for the other people in it. For example, you are trying to have the bot benefit only its users, but this creates two classes of people, one of bot users and the other of normal users who end up at a relative disadvantage because they don't use the bot. This is the fundamental problem that no bot which attempts to benefit its owner can escape.

The only bots that benefit the community are those that benefit everyone equally. Infobots are in this category, and there are several which Tweet stories as they appear here on HN (e.g. https://twitter.com/newsycombinator). Query/response bots which respond in useful or amusing ways also benefit the community equally.

Finally, I'm astonished that you say that your bot "can’t be shut down with ease"
and then post the code to github, blog it, and post it to HN. This strikes me as akin to when someone used to smack someone else in the face with a glove to signal a challenge to a duel. Actually, given Twitter's size and market cap, it's more like waving a red flag at an angry bull. If you're lucky you'll only gain the attention of a crack developer looking to prove you wrong about being shut down, which would be preferable over being contacted by someone from the legal team.
Q: if i were using WordPress for a site and removed the 'generator' meta tag, would my site be part of this?
But when you buy direct from Tesla, you know who you're buying from... The same manufacturer that the dealerships buy from!

Not so much with unlicensed taxis.
Yeah, I implemented a guaranteed O(N) PAVA in Julia (see https://github.com/ajtulloch/Isotonic.jl/blob/master/src/poo...), and experimented with one in Cython - it was uniformly slower than the 'linear' PAVA across a few sample datasets I tried. See e.g. http://bit.ly/1oDF7nH for some graphs.

I'm not claiming I've written the fastest possible implementations or anything though - please feel free to improve any of this code and submit to scikit-learn if you find some improvements!
Tesla car costs under six figures, you need much more to buy even a local political power, and state-wide you probably need 3-4 orders of magnitude more.
Learn robotics.
The "every second" version, while cheeky, probably is wrong during the fall when the end of DST causes an hour to be repeated every year in many jurisdictions.

(I'm not even sure UTC would save you here...)
Rolling Stone isn't going to run an article about the impact of Flappy Bird on culture in Tazmania or Greece; while it would be tangentially interesting, the subject's incredibly small proximity to the life of the average reader of the American version of Rolling Stone means it won't have the same impact.

Not a "just how Americans think" issue, a "what is relevant to our readers' lives" issue.
1. Yes, that's the whole point. The GPU makes mandatory what we muck around with on CPUs.

2. Every GPU generation adds more things like cache. The story changes every two years in favor of GPUs.

3. My colleague trains huge multi-gigabyte models on GPUs, so its not impossible. Terabytes of data is still the domain of MPI and increasingly MapReduce.

4. This is really not a concern for us, nor anyone who is in it for the performance (6 hours vs. 6 days).

5. The Phi is still kind of a joke. Tesla is quite competitive in terms of pricing.
Depends on your requirements. In many applications, performance matters a whole lot more than "how much can I accomplish in one line of code."
I mentioned Tokyo, which is as low rise as SF. You can build up on faults, but the construction costs (use more steel) are much higher, so it happens less often than geologically more stable locations (like NYC).
In a world where what happens to you in your old age is entirely determined by the choices you make when you're younger, and where the correct choices will absolutely guarantee that you have the proper resources available, this would be an excellent idea.

In my world, though, there are layoffs, long periods of unemployment, expensive catastrophic events, and generally a whole heapin' helpin' of reasons why people may need financial assistance for reasons that have nothing to do with their life choices. There are people who have done everything "right" and go into bankruptcy because a family member with insufficient health insurance gets sick. Do these things not happen in your world?
The distinction of precedence has (or should have) no profound difference to a person's opinion of what constitutes validity or corruption, regardless of a status quo. That is my point.

There is only "profound difference" to the circular reasoning of law itself. There was no reason for me to address that. Legal frameworks are inherently rigid and without much individual conscience.
The competition isn't "default SMS". The competition is iMessage. Can you do this with iMessage? Emphatically not.

And my friends are already using it; I guess the luck was not really needed.
That guy has lost all credibility calling for anything on the web by rubberstamping DRM into it.
Yes, quite possible he managed to snatch the last boost from an app that would otherwise have met a decline. It was already being covered all over the news. Reporters were looking for something more to say about it and he gave them that chance. Instead of being featured all over the news once, he got one mention for the initial spread, another one for the takedown threat. Now as a final (?) third one he achieves cult status for the game, increasing replays for the already installed base and ensuring interest for his future games.

I'm sure everything he says is true and it is not a conscious strategy, but the end result is the same.
>>> battery life is measured in days and hours since they have to send out a fairly powerful signal using the weakest antenna configuration.

They don't need to send it continuously, so I wonder why it is only hours. Sending a loud short ping once an hour shouldn't consume too much energy. Of course, I don't know enough about radio physics to know if it'd be enough, say, if it is 1km underwater - that may be a problem. Maybe supplement it with acoustic ping too?

GPS is not needed continuously too - it can record last reading, say, before high-g acceleration event and then let the GPS unit be destroyed, burned, starved of power or whatever happens to it. I.e. continuous GPS is needed only when everything is OK and the device is connected to the plane's powerplant - once it is disconnected, record last known GPS and shut down everything - we're in trouble, so the only task for it now is to scream loudly until it is found.
- Just because some people clicked on features they want, it doesnt mean they will pay for it once you launch.

- Just because some people are using your free features, it doesnt mean they will pay for it once it is paid.

- Just because you have 5 paying customers, doesnt mean it will be easy to find out 500 more.

- Just because you have 500 paying customers, it doesnt mean what you did to acquire these 500 will scale to the next 5000.

- Just because you have 5000 paying customers, it doesnt mean that there won't be a new upstart which will dramatically undercut your offering and acquire most of these.

There is a name for this validation process - its called a 'startup'.
Facebook's Menlo Park Headquarters Was Briefly Evacuated
If you found that interesting you probably also like some of the research into sanitizing SSDs - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/tech.html#W...
very cool, thanks for the heads up.
"Doubt" is another one; borrowed from old French doute in the 13th century, with the "b" added by scribes in the 14th century.

There's a bit in Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ where the pedant Holofernes is ranting about how the "b" should be pronounced in those two words, but as you say, it was always silent.

EDIT: Turns out "salmon" and "solder" were originally "saumon" and "soudor", with the "l" added in the 18th century (agsin to reflect the Latin spelling)
Happened to me too. Oh well.
Considering apps like this exist: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androidapp...

it seems pretty obvious that this was the case
Show HN: Time to give crowdshipping a go?
TinyCarrier is a web service that connects travelers and people who have a need to send or receive things. It could be personal stuff like books and clothing, a product that you have someone buy for you because it is not available in your country. Transporting items for other people is not a new concept, we just make it safe, social and global.

This is not a package/parcel service. Carries will be packing the items themselves in their own luggage. Carrier and requester are responsible for reporting goods in customs. The service will support this with communicate managed information about each location and the service will we ranking and testimonial based similar to AirBnB and Couchsurfing.

We will eventually be providing an API to allow for blogs, apps and curator services to make use of it as well.

For people thinking: commercialisation of drug mules, silk road, etc. In stead of thinking that everyone are criminals, try think that they are not (because their aren't) and think about the benefits.
> I'm not claiming I've written the fastest possible implementations or anything though

Oh I never thought that you were claiming so. Thanks for clarifying the implementation. Julia is indeed something that I want to pickup. BTW what data-structure does this snippet invoke

ydash = [1 => y[1]]

fixed length array ?

> please feel free to improve any of this code and submit to scikit-learn if you find some improvements!

Ah! then you would all hound me for my insistence of keeping https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav LGPL. A discussion I dont want to engage in. BTW I am not even sure if libpav would be faster as it stands now, because it does some really stupid stuff, like unnecessary allocation/deallocation on the heap. Its an old piece that I wrote years ago to entertain myself (proof: comments like these

// I hereby solemnly declare
// that 'it' is not aliased
// with anything that may get
// deleted during this object's
// lifetime. May the runtime
// smite me to my core otherwise.

https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav/src/dcc8411b10a0d4e220... and the perverse namespace pollution).

Its such a strange coincidence: I started hacking on it again just a few days ago, and lo and behold a thread on HN on PAVA. Now motivated enough to fix my crap :) Once I get rid of that damned linked-list I think it would be decent enough, although there is a fair chance that it would be faster than the current Julia version.

That said, libpav does a lot more than just isotonic regression, its more of a marriage between isotonic regression and large margin methods like SVM. Even for just the isotonic regression case, it can work with any abstraction of an iterator (so it is container agnostic) can take a ordering operator, and is of course fully generic (meaning can handle float32, double64 without any change).

@jamesjporter Thanks
So, nearly any "online" sale is cannibalizing the dealer's investments.

I suspect that Tesla would actually prefer to sell cars at dealers (that are owned and operated by Tesla); their online sales are just a hack to get around the fact that their dealerships are banned. So any concern about conflict of interest between the dealer and manufacturer seems like it does not apply to Tesla.
If WhatsApp Is Worth $19B, Then WeChat’s Worth “At Least $60B” Says CLSA
Well remembered. Also "island", the "s" in there is false etymology by trying to relate it to Latin "insula" (my dictionary says it's to relate it to "isle" so take what I say with a grain of salt!); the actual word is "i(eg)land", no "s" to be found.
Cython does have limited support for generics in the form of its fused types [1]; it can be made to generate C code for different primitive types, for instance. It's nowhere near as flexible as Julia in that regard, since you can't redefine operators for working on Complex numbers for instance, but if you want the interoperability and maturity (read: available programmers and existing libraries) that Python offers, you don't need to trade away generics completely. I'd love to live in a completely-Julia ecosystem, but unfortunately that's not quite reality yet, and luckily Cython is more than capable for making do.

[1] http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/fusedtypes.html
Yes, that's how they operate in several states.
My dreams have come true. (Commenting to save for later)
I've often heard people use the term "mute point" instead of "moot point". That seems fairly similar to the borrowing similar words from other languages.
Another example of words borrowed from French before and after the 'ch' -> 'sh' shift: chief and chef are actually derived from the same French word, but chef arrived later and was applied in English only to the cooking context.
Yeah, I should have printed a UNIX timestamp instead... ;)

A better workaround would be to write "Under our system that time and date may only happen at most once again!" in Cueball's speech bubble.
My personal favorite idea on how to use a massive twitter botnet: A digital version of the classic Hitchcock "Mail Order Prophet" Scam http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_Presents_...

Setup half the accounts to tweet one team will win the Superbowl beforehand, the other half to tweet in favor of the other team. After the game, shutdown the incorrect accounts. Continue doing this until you have one incredibly prophetic account which you rename to "The Oracle" and use to pump and dump penny stocks.

10 correct predictions would take only 1024 accounts.
Making silicon photonics cheaper than VCSELs must be really hard because it seems like nobody is shipping them. Or maybe silicon photonics are only cost-effective for parallel fiber optics which are a pretty small fraction of the market.
Sort of...a little bit...
You realize antirez is Italian, right?
Yeah, now that I look at it, looks like you're right. Most of the questions are answered elsewhere in this thread, though.
As long as you assume that Sybil attacks don't exist.
Call me crass, but when I'm in the functional mood, emacs puts out... er, outputs... and I don't even have to worry about side effects.

Wait... that might have been contradictory.
Seems to me if you start writing your app with a service oriented architecture in mind then you have the flexibility to make your calls to services either in memory function calls or HTTP requests/RPCs.

One example case: you write a monolithic Rails app that is structured around services but all services are in memory service objects. In production you find that your search service is both doing far more work than your other services & getting queried more often. So you refactor your application so that a call to the search service is no longer an in memory function call but instead an RPC to a group of servers that only handle the search service and have been rewritten in Java/Go/C++ to be blazing fast. Since you wrote your app with services in mind, you probably don't change the API at all, it just becomes a wrapper for an RPC rather than a class in your monolithic app.

This way you don't automatically bulk up on unnecessary, expensive HTTP requests but you maintain the flexibility of optimizing modules of your app for performance.
From firsthand observation of YC since 2011, YC doesn't suffer from most of the (legitimate) gripes you point out.

I also have a pretty high opinion of 500 Startups as an outsider. It seems like 500 goes for singles and doubles more than YC does, and ranges farther afield in trying to get new applicants from underserved areas (although YC has stepped up on this in the past 9 months). I don't have as much data about 500 Startups, but I'd probably say it's a net-accretive thing for participants and a solid #2.

Every other choice I would very closely judge before participating. The problem is most of the people entering are in the least capable position to judge the value of a specific program.

Apply to YC -- Summer 2014 apps close in a couple weeks.
Thanks a bunch, this is exactly the type of information I am looking for.

I figured housing to be expensive, nice to get a number ball-parked though. As far as rooming with someone, it is true that I do not know anyone but would accept living with an initial stranger. That said, do any SF social forums spring to mind where I can post such a wanted ad? And, by "south", do you mean working for one of the big guys?

As far as my skill-set and experience goes, I am pretty certain that my background is quite different from the typical developer. I would love to talk with you about it and can explain in much more detail if you would hear it.

So as far as possibly filling a role your company is looking for...

I would be a liar if I said that I am an expert/have a bunch of experience with iOS and Android but, I would also not be doing myself justice if I left it at that...

I know python and c# well (so, not unfamiliar to the concept of the JVM) and have done quite a bit of thinking/tinkering/learning about cloud computing and associated technologies. I guess what I am trying to say is if I am not qualified for it now I can get myself there in the near future. In other words, its up my alley and I would love to find out if I can hack it.

Before I go I gotta thank you again for the info and time, it really is much appreciated!
I actually don't know anything about how commercial piloting works. Can a pilot fly with a friend and split the cost of gas?
"Last week, Menlo Park's city council voted last week to allow the company to pay about $200,000 a year to the city to fund a full-time police officer who would be stationed near the new campus."

They have tons of ex SS/Mil working there...

Plus Menlo Park is mandating plenty of cameras to monitor every single license plate passing its new building...

FB has plenty of security.
Timbl is planning on using DRM to enforce it, of course.
The Food Porn Index
Everything is reproducible. Things that have no reason to be tangled up are, in fact, not tangled up. If that doesn't sound advantageous, I don't know what else can be said.
Yes, but now they want someone they can control who has the full force of the law behind their actions.
Major "national security asset." <cough, cough, puke>
The "southern pronunciation" on that Wikipedia page clearly has an N sound at the beginning.
IE and Firefox on Windows 8.1 render it properly. Chrome renders it as all boxes.