skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that the fact the code was in Ada gave the team that decided to reuse it more faith that it was "safely" reusable than had it been written in another language.

And you are making ridiculous analogies from the Ariane example. Ada had no bearing on the failure. They plugged in a controller for a different vehicle entirely.

The question is about relative confidence between a statically typed and a runtime typed software. The fact remains that given a fixed/finite budget of testing, wise people will not even think of deploying a runtime typed system for such tasks. These tasks cannot afford runtime errors, so it is imperative that due diligence be made to prove that they cannot happen.

(You cannot send several manned missions to the moon just to test) I am not aware of runtime typed systems that afford such proofs before running it and if some do, it is a statically proven system to begin with.

Revisit my points about runtime errors on a flight controller. Or to be less fancy, runtime error in trading software, "oops sent the wrong million dollar transaction request and bailed out because of runtime error". Has happened, and run companies to the ground.

> what was Therac written in?
Given its age, I would assume it was some fairly low level language. Whatever it was, it was something that did not prove that such races cannot happen, in other words it was open to runtime error, which is exactly what we want to eliminate as far as possible. We will run it a few times and see what gives, is not a tenable strategy for many important tasks.

> It doesn't take a lot of googling to find that Nasa used to use a Symbolics Lisp machine

You are being slightly disingenuous here, I was talking about deployed flight controllers that actually control the thing when its on flight.

As I have said its like arguing with birthers, you have made up your mind and no matter what I say you will try to avoid the logic of eliminating costly runtime errors.
That actually seems like a good idea - as long as they market as "one nickels worth of chocolate".
Yes. The S depends on the conjugation - I bung ... He/she bungs ... They bung ...
Another reason is 4G, for awhile (still maybe?) Samsung wasn't building any Exynos Chipsets with 4G radios, so markets where that mattered (US, etc.) they used Qualcomm
And yet, I wouldn't have opened yet another article on gamer sexism (I get it, gamer sexism is bad mkay?), but I did find the data point of half the gamers being female very compelling (and useful to mention during meetings).

Sometimes, the guidelines should be broken.
My 2 cents - You have software built, now comes the challenging part of actually building a business around it. There are lots of things that you can do, I would suggest making all of the below equal priorities going forward:

- Meet your customers needs: I don't really know what this means, make sure to hear from those that are using it right now, and those that will say that they will do it. You might end up getting feedback to add features like:
a) Templates: You support only OpenOffice templates? I believe it should not be too hard to support more formats like RTF, Text Documents, and MS Office documents.
b) API: Supporting Node.js, Java, and other languages. You might want to look at a site like Stripe.com for examples on how to structure developer documentation.
c) Output: Perhaps supporting HTML outputs as well as PDFs.

- Homepage: I think your homepage looks good, but can get much better. It might be a good idea to find similar/adjacent companies and see how they do their homepage. I think you should move the 'reasons to use' further up the page.

- Pricing Page: Not sure if I really care about the number of servers running. Also, jobs per day - are you really expecting that many users? I think you might want to significantly reduce the amount of usage per day in each tier. I think you will also likely want to tier on different criteria - perhaps support, keeping a history of converted documents, and others that your users will ask for.

- Conversion: Are you tracking what percentage of visitors are converting to signup? Are you trying A/B testing different prompts to them?

- Driving Traffic: You could think about doing guest posts, blogging on your site, buying ads, and building integrations into other tools to drive traffic.
Maybe you just need a more engaging project?
Great!

I do understand the problem. The problem is real, and this seems like a great developer friendly way to solve it. In my mind, that could probably make it commercially viable by itself, but why don't go a step further? Solve it for non-developers as well:

I might have missed it (which could make it a UX flaw then), but there doesn't seem to be a way to upload tabular data in any form and use that on a template. Why not? You could make it work with csv, javascript supported grid, or maybe some easily parsable spreadsheet format.

Pricing is not my strong suit, so no real comment on that - only that adding an "upgrade account" button to accounts section would be nice.

Good luck!
I'm not saying functions are bad or anything. They just "feel" wrong since they don't look like the built-ins.

Regarding "dynamically typed": CLOS[1] got this right. Common Lisp is dynamically typed. In short: Dynamic/static typing has very little to do with this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Object_System
A wet lab is a lab as you might imagine it on CSI, i.e. the whole nine yards.

Sometimes, components of this can be miniaturized to create a "lab on a chip", but that takes another level of technological development.
Oz most certainly can be used for volume. It's called the "fluid ounce".
Here's an old page with various compression bomb demos: http://www.aerasec.de/security/advisories/decompression-bomb...

It's not just archive formats, anything which uses standard compression algorithm could be a compression bomb (e.g. PNG)
YouTube refuses Egypt's request to remove footage of sexual assault
It's black-on-white for me.
I agree, but I think it's just a way for the producers to mask inflation. My gut feeling is that people are more likely to consciously notice a price increase of 20% than a 20% decrease in volume/weight.
Makes me wonder what are the implication of the halting problem for compression formats
Does Lumosity make any claims about improving autism conditions? It's a pretty big leap of logic to believe that a generic brain game system should improve autism range conditions.
On the one hand, that's awful.

On the other hand, if you only discovered that you got the inferior version well after you purchased, did it really matter for you?
> J0523 has the lowest possible mass for fusion, so it’s taking its sweet time using up its hydrogen fuel. [...] It could literally still be fusing merrily (though feebly) away even a trillion years from now!

The good thing about astronomy is that there's always something impressive.
"And I can't help but wonder why this gets support but I am routinely downvoted and generally crapped for attempting to talk about what I have done to beat my medical death sentence"

Since you're being so rude here, I will note that it is probably because you are an unreliable narrator who "cures" herself with blogsourced finds and people have little need for advice that is not based in reality. You post about being shunned by multiple CF communities, I would be willing to guess that it is not because they are afraid of any stunning discoveries you have made.
What's also interesting is running FreeSWITCH on a RPi. Last time I tried to compile FS on a i686/512MB host [1], GCC OOM'd during linking. And I can't imagine cross-compiling, mostly because I just spent a day fighting an APR cross-compile [2] from x86 to ARM.

But I digress.. awesome bit of detective work in the article. Compiler bugs are really frustrating/tedious to root out, especially if you don't usually muck around with asm.

[1] Underpowered according to FS's own recommended specs.

[2] FS also uses APR, but I'm just bitter that it's virtually impossible to cross-compile the Apache Portable Runtime out of the box...
I would like to see what the real raw data looks like. There doesn't look to be any noise in that wiggle plot and the signal has already been processed to a degree (see the hard edges and squareness of the features). That's really the hard part though, going from raw to digital, and the decisions that are made regarding how that transformation is achieved will have a lot to do with the quality of the data.
And I think Atoms has gotten better since the old days too.
Privacy is simply not sustainable.

Imagine all the lost opportunities, all the worry, all the steps some people take to conceal the truth. It can't go forever, and it will become increasingly more expensive to keep the privacy you had in the past, simply because technology makes transparency cheap and ubiquitous.

Designing a society that relies on the secrecy of certain information is a recipe for disaster. Passwords, credit cards, etc. It won't be long before we simply can't keep any of these secrets, and we will have to switch to a better identification system.

I've had enough to worry about what people might think if they encounter the truth. I don't want to lie anymore. I don't want to keep and remember secrets anymore. I don't want to watch each of my steps and hide behind 7 proxies when I surf the web.

We're due for a paradigm change toward transparency, and the earlier the better. Privacy and secrecy only leads to deception and inefficiencies.
To improve the calculation of the autocorrelation, first 'demean' the input sequence by subtracting its mean from it, like so: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a293bdbfa9133a607dd1

The reason being that autocorrelation (and convolution in general) is meaningful when the input signal is linear time invariant. Read more about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_system_theory#Impulse_resp...
Here's an information-theory question: would there be a way to estimate the size of the decompressed output, just given the raw zip data and no size metadata, without attempting to extract it (i.e. without spending time or space proportional to the compression factor)?
The halting problem only applies to full Turing machines, and their equivalents. So, a compression algorithm based on x86 assembly is uncheckable, but one based on a restricted format like .zip would be fine. Or, you could just give it a time limit.
http://www.pixeltrek.com/img/crew.png

Jean-Luc, you've really let yourself go, dude.
Looks great. Visuals remind me of Star Command.

http://www.starcommandgame.com
Very Novice user, and coming from a MSDOS background, I habitually logged in as root, even though I had heard dire warnings not to do that.

I had lots of dot-directories in /tmp and my disk didn't have a lot of space left. So I typed in

rm -rf .*

thinking that I was very smart, and would save time by not having to remove each dot-directory separately.

After a while, I wondered why it was taking so long and discovered I had very little of my root filesystem left, so I was forced to do a complete reinstall.

Needless to say, I always do my day-to-day work now as a lowly common user, and NOT as root.
Gmail won't allow you to send this file to anyone, throws an error pointing you to https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590

Ah, I almost forgot we are not spied on. Tried via local email client.
My understanding is that it's due to the Exynos SoC not supporting 4G, while the Qualcomm does. If you buy the 4G version you'll always get the Qualcomm version, and if you buy the wifi version you always get the Exynos version. So it's not like it's completely random what SoC you end up with.
The Estrogen Hypothesis of Obesity
I'm pretty sure that any narrative that is shared by a substantial number of authors inevitable goes down that road, though Marven may well be the one that went furthest.

Just look at what happened to the Star Wars extended universe - and that with a much tighter creative control.
From what I've heard, and judging by the titles of this group's publications, direct sequencing with solid-state nanopores hasn't been achieved yet. My PhD advisor has another research group (I'm in his gravity-measurement group) that works on sequencing using mutated versions of naturally occurring protein-based nanopores [1]. They have been able to sequence DNA.

[1] http://www.phys.washington.edu/groups/nanopore/
From the article in reference to sea squirts that digest vanadium: "Having committed themselves to this life of tedium, they also digest their redundant brains" . --- There are times in life where being able to do this temporarily would certainly be a relief :)
This is great. I love the easter eggs, like the one on deck 3. I won't spoil it, but someone in the storage compartment is having troubles.
UW Nanopore Physics Lab
The World's happiest country
Here are some other compression oddities: http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php

A 42 byte file that expands to 5 MB; a file that compresses in one compression software but not another; a file that compresses to itself; and some extreme compression software.
There is a small map that shows the "approximate Area Enumerated" in each date. This doesn't undercount only Native Americans and they weren't numerous in that period. The west was sparsely populated by the standards of Europe and even the incorporated states where the many of the new immigrants came from.
I think the reason that it is of questionable interest and value, is the same for why there is no proper blog post explaining it.

It's a coincidence found from playing with numbers. There are infinite "oh, neat, this simple expression is close to this other constant" coincidences, none of which provide any deeper understanding or appreciable use.

Here is the wikipedia entry closes fits, and might actually be of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_coincidence
You're right, wasn't thinking of Africans. But I think you knew what I meant.
scoped monkey would be quite usefull? One could mess with prototypes yet keep them clean in the global scope.

last(array) feels to much like C style OOP.
C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Fortran

Only the vast majority of all commercial code ever written.
One approach is quite simple:

Ask the user to translate a piece of code (such as a function/method/class) from [language A] to [language B], where language A and B are listed in his list of "known" languages.

With proper language-agnostic unit tests, and an environment that can execute most of the popular languages, you can easily test if the code is valid or not.

For example, you could manually provide the source code for FizzBuzz in Javascript. Then, someone that knows Javascript and C# would translate the FizzBuzz to C# (where the definition of the FizzBuzz problem doesn't have to be written in word, as it's already there in code). Then, if the tests pass, the service now has FizzBuzz in 2 languages. Any of these 2 can be used as input for translation/porting for other users, until the algorithm/code is covered by most major programming languages.

You could easily expand on this by either providing new algorithms/code, asking users to tweak the code a little to generate a new unique algorithm, or even generate random algorithm.

This is not a replacement for proper tests and interviews, but would probably be much better than anything out there to quickly test if someone is making false claims on their resume or not.

TL;DR: Ask people to translate an algorithm from a language they can read to a language they can write. Use their answer as input for other users, for minimal manual content creation, and covering any language your service can run and unit-test.
I was expecting (and missed) the role of Watchmen in this narrative, as well as the evolution of really mature comics (not only based on sex and violence).

I understand it is a story about Marvel, but their story was influenced by these players also, not just DC. Anyway, great reading.
Naive idiot alert.. could you process the "same" DNA numerous times then take the mode in each case? Or are the errors essentially ones that would be repeated each time?
Well, yes. The linked page shows you how to calculate it.
What was the role of Watchmen? (This is a genuine question.)
Agreed. I've found that as a casual comics aficionado, the sanest route is to just stick to omnibus/one shots. I'd recommend that for anyone curious to get deeper in the story lines but who doesn't want to enter the giant rabbit hole that is the Marvel universe.
According to this paper* there were estimates of ~600k remaining in 1800. 3.9million citizens in 1790 USA -> nontrivial number and effect on the mean centroid, especially considering they are not uniformly spread.

As for no discontinuity between 1840-1860, it does say 'living in the general population'. So maybe that excludes the remainder.

The 'settled' areas being only a small fraction native of course depends on the time you measure it relative to the disease onset... which often comes after the first settler. I think at first the ratio is the other way.

*: AMERICAN INDIAN MORTALITY IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY:
THE IMPACT OF FEDERAL ASSIMILATION POLICIES ON A VULNERABLE
POPULATION.
http://cid.bcrp.gob.pe/biblio/Papers/NBER/2006/Octubre/w1257...
I wonder had Jules turned over the domain to them (or might still, given the intention to transfer the site to a new domain) if IKEA would have just made it a blind redirect to their main site, or just killed it to prevent the next Jules from having it.

I almost thought they would start their own DIY community, but running a community is a ton of work and I doubt it would increase their sales by a large enough percentage to warrant it.
Try again. There were some major build changes in the FreeSWITCH source tree within the last several months.

I've heard people are able to get a few concurrent calls on the Raspberry Pi, and at least one person turned it into a physical phone.

http://www.switchpi.org/
http://www.switchpi.org/switchpi-proto-lcd-with-dtmf-pad-liv...
You are of course open source software existed for a long time before it was called that, way back to the early 1960's. People called it free software for a long time. And not just Stallman called it that, even the BSDs did and still do, despite hating RMS and all he stands for (GNU, GPL...)

ESR edits his texts a lot, and CATB came out before 1998. I don't know if I can track down a first edition of CATB and see what term ESR used here, but I bet it wasn't "open source". Note how he hyphenates it, according to his recommendation in the thing I linked.
What is the most compressed file ever?
I worry that svn and git have done more harm than good, because I've now got into the habit of using rm -rf (it's the only way to delete .git/.svn) where I used to use rm -r.
Netflix became Level3s problem with Comcast because of unbalanced level of traffic flowing from L3 to comcast.

There is a simple solution to unbalanced Peering that Netflix could implement – just setup their clients to upload dummy garbage data at 70% max uplink speed whenever their client software is running. All of a sudden traffic will go both ways and they will be able to peer as an equal party.

This alone proves Peering agreements based on traffic amounts are a joke.

Streaming service that generates one way traffic is simply 'too nice' to comcast. Flood those asshats with /dev/random.
The case for simple passwords
Man begins second week trapped 3000 feet underground in cave
I don't know whether it's possible with ZIP, but there are definitely compression schemes for which this can be done in time proportional to the size of the compressed file.
JavaScript library for browser to S3 multipart resumable uploads
Let's use this as a case study: What (according to HN) should IKEA have done?

On one hand, trademark preservation is important.

On another hand, how many companies would kill for a community of "Raving Fans" like this? And in addition to enthusiasm, the site seemed very high quality and thus complementary to Ikea's marketing.
I am still trying to find how they defined "gamer". Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count? Statistics without background can be worse than useless.

Also, adding female assassins would not be as simple as "create a model". Each added character requires dozens of animations (climbing, falling, running, using each weapon), full voice acting for each of those situations (every time "he" is used would need to be re-recorded with "she"), each cutscene would need to be reviewed for timing issues, and the bug testers would need to do everything twice to check for graphical bugs.
While they probably could have done it, something else would need to be cut.
Inheriting off-topicness, while that stereotype does apply to most mathematicians, a large number of the CS theory people I've worked/TA'd with were actually pretty good programmers, and a few had even taught multiple years of our intro systems course. Of course this is just one school, but I think computer science as a field is still young enough that someone can be an expert in one area and still be reasonably fluent in other areas.

Don't think the last point is particularly true either: being a good programmer is valuable even for theoretical CS. Point in case, recently saw the work leading to a paper on SDD solvers: there was a ton of programming and exploration (albeit in Mathematica/Matlab) that led to the final paper. Also, people working on parallel stuff these days (even the theory guys) usually publish CILK/MPI along with the paper. It's great when you can do both :)
A delightful article. I would also recomend this article:

http://www.wired.com/2012/06/the-crayola-fication-of-the-wor...

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains, Aatish Bhatia, 6/5/12

It is a fascinating discussion of the origins of color words and how our perceptions are, well, colored by them. It also touches on the XKCD color map (search for "XCKD Color Survey Results"), another lovely insight into color names and perceptions.
Right, so the latter, he was just being daft and trying to say something snide about Dell.
What? A lot of spam filters will block zip files and the like, include free software and company run ones.
Of course Euler's identity is far more interesting. That's an actual mathematical insight. This is just a coincidence from playing around with irrational constants. Two entirely different things.
"We make it easy to anonymously contact users who have used certain features or taken certain routes."

Interesting!

Small note: The back button on the data didn't immediately bring me back to the main page.
The original headline is more than 80 characters and is Most expensive rescue in German history as man begins second week trapped 3000 feet underground in cave. The man who is injured is a researcher who was researching drainage systems in these caves. He is also one of the people who originally discovered this complex of caves.

Excerpt:

So arduous is the journey ahead that different teams of rescuers will work in relay stages to bring the victim to the surface.

Cave rescue is highly specialised, and teams have converged across the Alps from Switzerland, Austria and Italy to help.
What is the benefit to Ikea (or other companies with armies of lawyers who like to threaten loyal customers) by sending cease and desist letters to sites like this?
> if you type "hostname help" then your new hostname is set to "help". For us that means a full rebuild/reinstallation of the machine is necessary.

What the hell? Why not just change it back?
Without passing judgement on this example, there's at least a hypothetical risk that if you don't continuously defend your trademark, you could lose it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark