skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
D Wave has been iterating on their flagship machine for a few years now. The big argument is if entanglement is happening on a large enough scale in their system to enable the scaling laws that they claim they'll be able to hit. You can find plots floating around where they extrapolate to having a computer more powerful than a classical computer the size of the universe in ~2020. Right now it's barely comparable with a rack of servers IIRC, but the big claim is that quantum power scales much faster than classical power with number of bits (exponential vs linear) when full entanglement is achieved. I'm under the impression that the Googles and Boings and NASAs of the world want to get their feet wet in the field despite its infancy.

It's a good effort at any rate. There's a lot of strong negativity around DWave, which I find strange, given that it's existence isn't personally inconveniencing their critics in any way. If adiabatic quantum computing works it will really speed up the future tech timeline, so it's worth the effort.
There is a history of literally many years of bombastic claims being made by D-Wave (especially in the popular press) without anything to back them up. Scott Aaronson (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/), an MIT professor who is one of the better-known scientists in the quantum computing field, has written reams of pages about this. I would recommend browsing his blog if you are really interested in the claims and counterclaims about this company.

As for me, I will not waste a single minute reading an article about them, until they can convince the sceptics first. This may seem unfair (if people aren't willing to give them a chance, then how will we know if they've really made a breakthrough), but this company has earned this kind of treatment by bamboozling journalists and getting breathless press coverage based on nothing. Briefly, for years, they failed to even demonstrate that their machine exhibits any quantum entanglement at all; this makes it meaningless to talk about quantum computing on that machine, which didn't prevent press stories touting it as the next revolution in all of human existence. Since then, there have been some articles claiming that possibly there is some kind of quantum behaviour in the machine, but there was still no evidence that this quantum behaviour is doing anything meaningful in the actual computations. At some point, I stopped following the story.
First I thought; given the population density of Northern Canada, that seems very unlikely.

Then I thought; given the population density of Northern Canada, this makes a lot of sense...
It's worth reading.
A special domain that resolves to the IP address YOU specify in the domain name
I wish I could say that more often
A New Approach to Wireless Charging Reaches Implants Deep in the Body and Brain
It's not a sign of you getting older, specifically. It's a sign of you getting set in your ways.
Tobii Glasses 2
Comcast too:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/comcas...
PHP cloud hosting overview
Function declarations inside blocks are illegal, technically, because of hoisting. See http://kangax.github.io/nfe/#function-declarations-in-blocks
No you don't :)
Triple Entry Accounting (2005)
And if you want a narrow column to make the text easier to read, you just resize or tile the browser window!

My vanity site has html with very light css, no javascript. Works ok on Blackberry as well as laptop. Loads fast. All static so very small bandwidth/processor use (shared hosting). Emergency edits using ssh / nano.

I'm wondering how much electricity we use serving and parsing all the presentation code with modern sites?
They've Made Designer Monkeys with Genome Editing – Are Humans Next?
Believe me, you really don't!
For 0.1 Instagrams worth of funding it is a start though.
Haskell comes with a very big community, and a lot of ways to start with the languages. I think about the http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and others.

Real World OCaml is that, without totally being it. The authors wrote it with the idea in mind that only people with a good background about functionnal world can read it.

I'd add that lazyness can be a good thing and that the type-system of Haskell is better than the OCaml one.
I've toyed with the idea of running completely open WiFi network that is firewalled off my LAN and doing WiFi<->LAN networking via VPN (eg IPsec). My own devices would get prioritized, high-security internet access via the VPN too. Biggest stumbling block probably would be that many devices might not support the VPN tech of choice.
Walking up on the high moors in the Dales in Yorkshire you see the shadows first, moving up the valley floor. If you are quick, and look below your ridge, you can spot the two grey isosceles triangles as they disappear out of the head of the valley.

A few seconds later, you hear the sound

Treetop training looks fun (they are always in pairs and I'm sure they are playing tag) but I imagine can be a bit tense...
Taxi Commission Official Plans to Join Uber
Disconnect (Chrome privacy plugin) breaks this site completely - need to whitelist it to see what's going on.
> Given the wide birth that programmers give to floating point number comparison and rounding, I wonder what would happen if a browser vendor shipped a dialect of ECMAScript/JavaScript that used decimal64s to implement Numbers. I haven't read the any of the ECMAScript standards in full, but I imagine this would be a non-conforming variation.

You might be interested in this page: http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/mathcw/

It did not make enough of a difference that the Ada, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, Pascal, mawk, nawk and lua variants with decimal floating-point were maintained since 2010, apparently.
The world's best password manager and secure digital wallet
> I've really never wanted to know if a book was printed in 2008 or 2011, just to put the content into context.

I have. I'm quite interested in financial crash literature and the difference in context between a 2008 perspective (which may be interesting in its own way) and 2011 looking back at 2008 is pretty large.

Edit to add:

That isn't to say the article is wrong, I think well organised permanent content can probably live well without a date on it. There are definitely items of content for which a date is important but for others I can easily believe it would detract.
Puzzling that so many people still run in i386 mode. I haven't used a 32-bit system since shortly after x86 hardware went 64-bit, 10+ years ago. I guess in the Windows world it's because of XP?
I understand why the actual quantum effect is hard to observe, but I'm not sure I understand why the output is so hard to verify as being better or worse than a classical computer....

Can someone name the physical effect that this processor employs outside of any quantum effects that accounts for it possibly being faster than a room temperature "normal" computer?

What algorithms are they running to try to verify that the computer is quantum?
I'm getting Bad Gateway / Gateway Timeout.
I wasn't surprised to see it had to do with register allocation, since I've encountered some extremely odd compiler output with similar issues before. "Why would it ever decide this was a good idea?" is the thought that often comes to mind when looking through the generated code.

Register allocation is one of those areas where I think compilers are pretty horrible compared to a good or even mid-level Asm programmer, and I've never understood why graph colouring is often the only way that is taught because it's clearly not the way that an Asm programmer does it, and is also completely unintuitive to me. It seems to assume that variables are allocated in a fixed fashion and a load-store architecture, which is overly restrictive for real architectures like x86. There's also no interaction between RA and instruction selection, despite them both influencing each other, whereas a human programmer will essentially combine those two steps together. The bulk of research appears to be stuck on "how do we improve graph colouring", when IMHO a completely new, more intuitive approach would make more sense. At least it would make odd behaviour like this one less of a problem, I think.
This is a great point and has bugged me for for the past few months - I'm sat there watching my 'npm install' whir by and I'm thinking - 'I reckon this is not the "docker way"'

Having said - I'm still trying to work out the combination of source repo and docker repo - i.e. 1 dev makes a code change - they commit the code to github - they then commit the docker image to the registry.

Now - does developer number 2 'git pull' or 'docker pull'

What I really like is how docker does not really enforce anything upon you - leaving the above question to be answered any which way.

Docker ftw!
I run in i386 becaues it uses less memory (though I think I'll be switching)
Same with BT in the UK.
The Soviets (and possibly the Russians) had a system called Perimetr (AKA "The Dead Hand) that was supposed to be an automate a nuclear response.

I guess both the UK and the Soviets were terrified (for good reasons) of decapitation strikes - the UK because we are so close to the USSR and the Soviets because they knew how keen the US military was on "a Sunday punch" attack (as LeMay called it).
This flavour of quantum computing has no obvious implications for crypto, and the technology isn't transferrable to a computer which would.

The problem is that quantum annealing (basically, solving complex optimisation problems) is a small subset of what a full quantum computer can do. The algorithms we know can break crypto: Shor's algorithm (integer factorisation) and Grover's algorithm (database search) can only run on full quantum computers. eg. so far Shor's algorithm has only ever factored 21 into 3x7 (equivalent to breaking 5-bit RSA).
Even assuming D-Wave actually achieves quantum annealing (a highly uncertain proposition at this point), the implications for cryptography are inexistent. Quantum algorithms relevant to cryptography (mostly Shor's and Grover's) require a general purpose quantum computer, which the D-Wave machine is emphatically not.
Couldn't the devices that not support the VPN just use the open one and pretend like you're at the coffee shop?

Of course don't do your banking on that device.

Alternatively only your wifi router needs to vpn into your lan and that offer a secure wireless solution.
I do not see any cubes and there's no sound using Chromium 34.0.1847.137 under Linux. Firefox works however.
In case anyone else has trouble understanding how to use the TAP button – I had to look at the code to figure it out – you tap twice to set the tempo.
Is WeChat the World's Most Powerful App?
Given the various changes in policies in the UK of late, how many of these actually provide complete Internet access? (as opposed to "Some" Internet access)

I travel frequently to the UK, I use a torrent based sync solution to sync between laptop <> desktop (outside UK) <> VPS ("oh shit backup") - and I've found it absolutely astonishing how many ISPs throttle bittorrent and in some cases any traffic to a host known to run a tracker. I've tried to resolve this by putting my torrent sync within SSH (poor speed) and inside a full VPN (OpenVPN) and found several throttle VPNs too! I've subsequently moved my VPN to port 443 which seems to work, for now. Then there's ridiculously strick fair use policies despite terms like "Unlimited" and "High Speed" etc being bandied about. Seems bizarre to me, I expect that when I pay for 100mbit cable Internet, I get what I pay for, all the time, every day.
Usury.
The only way money is generated is by debt. Debt, by definition is encumbered by interest. Thus, the only way to generate money to cover the interest is to generate more debt, this is a feedback cycle, requiring accelerating borrowing just to stay where you are. I think this is a large part of why we are so busy today. We are always behind the eight ball, at every level.
I think "retarded" is what is being referred to. It doesn't make any sense to call the terminally-gullible "gay".
Would be even awesomer if it supported MIDI export!
Global Raids on Blackshades malware users and authors
>Edit: Anyone able to inform me how "FYI" could be offensive?

You are being trolled.
Surely that shouldn't matter? As long as the subscriber can prove their network is open or multi-user (which is easily done). That would make it necessary to prove the specific individual committed whatever crime is alleged. To my mind, given the prevalence of malware, compromises to security - that should be the case anyway, after all if malware does something illegal on your PC, why should you be liable? Expecting John "But it said I was infected and should click the EXE to clean it!" Doe to be responsible for their computer's security in this day and age is .. laughable and unreasonable.
Depends on the use cases.

Your sweeping statement applies to a minority of them.
Blogging shit is too complicated in all kinds of ways.

Think for a second about why we're writing here of all places.

All kinds of people write insightful stuff here for no reason other than that they're bored at work or because someone is wrong.

Because it's utterly simple and text-based.

It's a medium of communication, not a flashy thing to create your individual brand and promote yourself as an author and blah-blah-blah.

I wish people would always think about why certain places on the web become popular in such a way that they integrate themselves into peoples' lives and let them easily express their natural spontaneous creativity.

HN, reddit, LiveJournal, Craigslist, mailing lists, Usenet, forums, GeoCities, IRC, BBS, etc.

They all obviously focus on "content." More importantly they get out of the way and let human beings communicate without hinders.
RIE 2014 – Reabilitação de Infraestruturas e Edifícios na Lusófona do Porto
On my car some times when I push the volume button it freezes the radio and I have to turn it off and on again to fix it... this is just a car radio here.. Itll be a long time until iot. But I agree it will be awesome when that happens 50 years from now. Until then im sticking to a coffee maker that wont lock up due to a software error when im dying for some coffee.
Oh. Thanks.
As NASA seeks next mission, Russia holds the trump card
Yeah, on hosting systems where memory costs money, 32 bit can be a significant savings. I wrote this a few years ago:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode/
I certainly understand why you say these things as I have 2 kids.

But do you also want your boy to dream, and try something noble and possibly fail but get back up, to experience as much as the world as he can, and to understand that limitations are self-made? Of course, you do.

So you tell him all this, but he may look at you and say "Well Dad, if you want me to do all these things, why didn't you do them?".
There are valid concerns.

Someone with access to the docker control socket effectively has root on your machine: e.g. `docker run -v /etc:/external_etc ubuntu visudo -f /external_etc/sudoers`.

Don't let untrusted users (or scripts) run docker.
I suspect that a major reason for the demise of Metafilter is it's just so rude that people have started leaving and not returning. I used to love it and spent a lot of time hanging out there, until it started to get so incredibly snarky that I felt uncomfortable commenting. The last straw was when some veteran accused me of trivialising the holocaust just because of an innocent quote. Nobody needs that stuff.
Why developers won’t go straight to the source
How to move off of Dropbox
Deep Knowledge Venture’s Appoints AI as Board Member
Parallel Internets, another Internet treaty or both?
Mongodb in production
Do you use mongodb in production?

What type of application have you been using it on? How have you found it? Is it stable?
You are correct that they seem to have not yet built a proper adiabatic quantum computer (aren't even trying/capable of building a universal one). However I do think that the press around them is good for quantum computing in general.

I work trying to make the early stages of a qcomputer using semiconductor quantum dots and I definitely think that the press around DWave is helpful.

Firstly they are showing that there is a well defined commercial interest in such a computer. I also think that they are paving the path that other such companies will take in the future.

But yeah I agree, they have not yet shown much in terms of a real, useful quantum computer. There is a lot of unjustified hype in the technology, but at the same time I think its useful for this hype to exist for the q-tech industry in general.
D-Wave's machine is running an approximate optimisation algorithm. It's like trying to solve a large Sudoku by filling in all of the squares randomly then adjusting them to make the solution better and better (ie. get fewer invalid squares).

They're using an 'annealing' algorithm to do this, which means that the squares are all adjusted concurrently, in a random way which is biased by how well each square's value fits with its neighbour's. D-Wave claimed that their machine is quantum, without much evidence. They've since shown reasonable evidence that their machine does indeed use quantum effects, so that it's running a 'quantum annealing' algorithm; that basically means there's some probability for non-neighbouring squares to interact, which may find better solutions faster.

However, 'quantum annealing' isn't difficult to calculate. Despite the name, it's easy for classical computers to implement it and they can do it faster than D-Wave's machine (thanks to decades of Moore's Law). So at this point D-Wave have a single-purpose ASIC which is more expensive and slower than regular computers. They're doing something quantum, but there doesn't seem to be much point.

Compare this to a "real" quantum computer, which would be general-purpose (rather than being restricted to one algorithm like D-Wave's machine) and would be able to efficiently run things like Shor's algorithm, which are known to be unscalable on classical computers.
Quantum cryptography is in my opinion a bit of a rat race, you can make theoretically perfect systems, but the implementation will probably have some weakness.
The only benefit Base10 has over Base2 is that it's more easily understandable by beginners.

It's more complex to implement in hardware. It still has exactly the same precision issues that must be taken into consideration. It still cannot represent everything exactly (1/3 in base 10 decimal. It gets truncated).

Using base2 floating point is pretty much the same as using base2 integers.
The Australians have "road trains" which are exactly this.
We have 2 toddlers; double-income household. We live at the edge of a small city center in Belgium.

Originally, we both worked full time, lived in a small house, and had income to spare to save some and do some small-scale travelling within Europe. With no kids, there was not really a lot of stress and "busyness" for us; the household chores had to be done in the evenings and weekends, but other than that we didn't feel overwhelmed. (Although it sometimes did feel that way anyway.)

After the first kid was born, my girlfriend started working 80% instead of 100%, to cope better with the additional tasks imposed by caring for the child. The second kid added to the child care burden, leading us to delegate some of the cleaning chores to a household helper (4hrs every 2 weeks), which is not for free. The situation stabilized, but we do feel overwhelmed by the tight planning of each day, and chores left to do in the evenings and weekends.

Weekends are not always relaxing any more: even family visits have a tendency to start feeling like a burden if they displace other things that you have to do, and if several of them queue up in the same weekend or if several consecutive weekends become fully booked this way. Also, we try to build in "down"time in the weekend to let the kids play or to do something with the 4 of us, but this becomes more difficult with all the other engagements competing for time.

I too have requested a contract change to work 90% instead of 100%, so that I can move some of the chores from the evening and weekend to a weekday. This will hopefully leave us with more relaxed evenings and weekends.

I realize that in some sense we're lucky that our finances permit us to trade some income for more time off work. I think (hope) we're approaching a OK balance between work, child care, "obligatory" off-work stuff, and "voluntary" off-work stuff.

(Note: 100% means 40hrs/wk here)
Best music for work
Interesting observation. Although, if you go purely with that guideline, you'll find yourself out-of-sync with day and night pretty quickly.

You'd need an additional constraint to make sure that the duration of a sleep/wake cycle adds up to 24h, on average.

Some soft constraint such as "try to go to bed at a sensible time" will probably do it though.
Why people need boolean logic as in "Keynes was right OR wrong" ?

Contrary to computer science you can be right AND wrong.
Linux offers the x32 ABI[1] for this reason: small 32-bit pointers but maintaining the advantages of x86-64 (more/bigger registers etc).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
Engineer invents safe way to transfer energy to medical chips in the body
That article was written in 2009.

Go look at their route schedule. Looks like penetration to me to more established areas.
I always thought the advent of RISC was a side effect of the (very) low register count and how hard it is to actually make optimal use of them without manually writing Assembler.

The flat memory model on i386 at least made it somewhat easier compared to the segment address mode coming with 8086.
At first I wonderd why nothing happened... then I realized that the frequency of the bass drum sample is just way below the lower cutoff frequency of crappy builtin laptop speakers ... :-)
Plan 9 has no #ifdefs ano no preprocessor macros.
This Is the Secret Google X Internet Balloon Everyone Thought Was a UFO
Convert your iOS App into a PSD file
I guess not, but can you run graphical applications in Docker ?
Doesn't the press know about rocket launches, including spy satellite launches, because policy is to announce all rocket launches to minimize the chance that any foreign observers might think it's a preemptive nuclear missile strike?

And "we know" about orbital elements because of hobbyists. I assume that major nation states - those who have satellites in orbit which can detect ICBM and SLBM launches - also have their own space tracking systems. Eg, the Russian SKKP.

TDRSS - sweet! Yes, my primary interest in space flight was during the early shuttle years, back when there was a 30 minute blackout.

Still, can that hole be enough to provide accurate position targeting data? It doesn't seem like there's enough for triangulation, only communication.

Your point about size is completely apropos. There are too many things I don't know for me to guess how to scale down. Oh! What about using a Genesis comparison? http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/gm2/mission/history.htm shows a reentry diagram, with STRATCOM (Strategic Air Command) able to detect the incoming probe at 32,000 km (and potentially up to 60,000 km).

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/192937main_genesis_reentry.pdf says:

> This experiment demonstrated that a simple forward scatter radar system utilizing TV transmitters as the illumination source could detect the ionization trail left by the Genesis spacecraft as well as the ionization around the spacecraft itself—the “head echo” in meteor radar parlance.

What it's saying is that the ionization trail is easy enough that amateurs do it often, using a reflected signal from regular TV broadcasts.

What I can't find is how long it took to get from a visible plasma trail to when it crash landed. That would be roughly the same time it would take for a re-entering warhead to get to its target. (It came in faster than LEO speed, but its tumble would have slowed it down more than a designed warhead.)

My point stands that it's easier to test SLBMs than anything in LEO.