skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitions can absolutely be a priori. Think of the definition of a triangle, some thing like "a closed geometrical shape with three sides." There is nothing about observation of the world that will tell you that this is or isn't true. It is true by definition. Then all closed three sided shapes are triangles, by definition. Then you can start building all sorts of proofs from that, and a few other definitions. You get to the Pythagorean theorem, trigonometry, and off you go, without ever needing anything other than the ideas and definitions.
This itself reminds me of similar performance issues hidden in C++. The float->int cast on x86 with Microsoft's compiler called a helper library function 'ftol'. Turns out this does loads of stuff to be spec compliant. Replacing it with a single not-spec-but-works-for-us x86 assembly instruction to convert was way faster.

So not just JS - it seems language built-ins are often slowed down by bureaucratic spec compliance, and hand-rolling code can help you get a speedup.
I understand the definition. Unless I misinterpreted, the suggestion was that due to circumstance, you can only be expected to ever make one choice. Therefore set of initial conditions = predictable outcome.

That was what I was questioning, as the poster above noted, this isn't something you can assume. It's not really an argument for or against free will, just that particular explanation of why we don't have free will.
Columbine shooting was an act of criminals, so you can expect anything is fair game.

I wonder what the Geneva Convention has to say about Nation States relying on the same shady tactics.
What a perplexing combination of emotions. Sorry you got laid off, but it sounds like you're upset at losing your job and therefore have concluded that your job is not what you thought it was.

Much like the author, I am left asking "why?" with no good explanation being given.
I don't even think that's fair. What happens when everyone implements their own pet subset of a standard?
It is usually not in anyones interest to open a discussion about why someone is being let go. "Then just tell me why, so I know" you might say. Well, the problem with that is it is just human nature to argue it and it is no good for anyone.

The post is terrible though and serves no purpose other than to try to make your previous company look bad.
This is an amazing idea. Would allow the entire flexibility without having to whitelist specific styles, and close 100% of the information leaks.
The scientific method is philosophy, falsificationism is philosophy. This is the irony: scientists failing to see that they're using the tools of philosophy to claim philosophy is useless. I wonder what the experiment was that observed Occam's Razor?

Priceless!
But you'd look pretty damn conspicuous holding up a camera while someone was entering passwords or accessing sensitive info.
Of course there's no guarantee.

But there's also no guarantee YouTube will retain its viewers.

The viewers are only there for the content, not for YouTube.

If YouTube doesn't have the content, it won't have the viewers.

This is a market segment that can shift much more quickly than people (including Google, apparently) imagine.

Content is still, and will always be, king.
Having written a major HTML5 game engine, I've ended up micro-optimizing JS code after small functions really did show up high in profiling measurements. One example: calculating a bounding box from a quad involved code along the lines of Math.min(a, b, c, d) followed by Math.max(a, b, c, d). Replacing that with a tree of ifs to determine both the minimum and maximum at once was faster and moved the bottleneck elsewhere.
On that note:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States
Less Ethical, or just more prone to calculation errors?
Yes, squash would be awesome. I've had a number of cases where I had to d/l the pull request only to squash a long-running feature branch that is now ready for merge but has a lot of junk "work in progress" commits. It's be nice to be able to clean it up right in github.
And the tactic in this case is in response to what coalition troops learned on the battlefields of Afghanistan, namely that the Taliban recover their own dead and wounded after drone attacks, they don't let ANP, ANA, or locals interfere and possibly capture their wounded leaders alive. Whoever is firing the second shot would still need intelligence that the rescue party is a valid military target though.

Unfortunately Gen. Sherman's quote about war is just as applicable in 2014 as it was after the American Civil War.
I think you missed the poster's overall point: how people perceive accidents matters. This is independent of what the actual causes are, and if there are less of them. When automation is involved, people may perceive that someone did something wrong, even though that automatic thing outperformed what a human could achieve.
I'm willing to bet that jshack just lost his job today and isn't thinking quite clearly.

I can't think of a reason why a company would let you go without an exit interview though, that's rather unprofessional.
These more recent projects also made Lisp machines in FPGAs. It looks like they got further than the original post here:

LispmFPGA (2008) http://www.aviduratas.de/lisp/lispmfpga/

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.lan...

IGOR (2008) http://opencores.org/project,igor

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaitorge/sets/7215760944571932...
To be wealthy means that one possesses sufficient wealth (stuff) to live comfortably even after they quite their job.

The bastardized term of "wealth" used here, however, refers simply to material possessions even when not in sufficient quantities to provide any passive lifestyle advantages; suddenly a paid off car worth $5,000 is "wealth." The estimated $30,000 in equity I possess on my $200,000 home is "wealth". It's all a bit frivolous.

By definition, the poor and middle classes don't possess true wealth. Their value is their human capital and time, which they exchange for money. Even the "working rich" - doctors and lawyers - don't routinely possess "wealth" in the traditional sense of the term.

Then we compare the $30,000 equity I possess to actual wealth... such as the land under a shopping mall. What is the use in such an exercise?

NEWS FLASH: People who own really valuable stuff possess really valuable stuff. The rest of us don't. Let's write books about this and study the shocking phenomenon?

You simply can't compare actual wealth - such as the land under a shopping mall, which generates sufficient revenue for many people to live comfortably - to "wealth".

Now, demographically... Why would anyone be surprised that a significant portion of the population has zero wealth? Honestly I'm surprised it's only 25% who have zero. How much "wealth" should a university student have? How about someone who's been working for a few years? How about someone who's been retired for twenty years and expects to die within the next ten?

Middle class people gradually build up a small stock of "wealth" (we used to call this "savings") throughout their working careers. Then after retirement they gradually draw it down until they die.

So yes, it is not surprising that many people have zero or negative wealth.
Make him wrong on purpose to create chaos.
The wealthier folks were simply less leveraged:

1. If you own 10% equity in a home which declines in value 20%, you now have negative wealth. A 200% decline.

2. If you own 50% equity in a home which declines in value 20%, you have suffered a mere 40% decline.
You could instead have the tag bits inside the values in memory. Have the CPU treat the data in memory as though it was 60 bits wide with 4 additional tag bits instead of 64, or something along those lines. With special instructions that ignored tag metadata for those cases where you needed the full width (mainly interoperability).
That's interesting, but it makes me wonder about the value of GINI as an indicator if it hides the obviously horrifying effects the 2008 crash had on the bottom quintile and the very bad effects of driving median wealth into negative territory, where it remains stagnant.

I suspect a lot of people reading this board and living in Silicon Valley and other tech boom towns don't feel what that graph is saying in terms of day to day impact.
Yeah, I like being able to tell if I've already read, say, a Wikipedia article that is linked from some random blog article.
Alipay API is that bad?
You are describing customized devices which are build for a specific OS. Windows and MacOS don't work well on Chromeboxs either.

Also to my knowledge all modern Chrome devices have Coreboot support which enable "legacy" bootloaders and will boot any distro like a normal laptop. Older models like the C710 have unofficial Coreboot builds which allow the same (and linux driver support on modern distros).
Are you suggesting that advertising never influences people to make choices that are not in their best interests?
Yes, interjecting with questions about the road, traffic in the area, terrain ahead and so on could be helpful if it wasn't too repetitive. I think it would have to be personable and engaging ("Her"-style) to be really effective.
D-Wave and predecessors: From simulated to quantum annealing
The minimal "expressive power" required to pull off the simplest exploit is just a way to capture click events. That would be quite restrictive indeed.
I had a lecturer in AI who use to do exactly this: he would rail at the uselessness of Philosophy and then present his own theory of AI which was just so much bad philosophy.
Iron out your release process
It's worth pointing out that this is what most people think of as the traditional "Linux Operating System" but sans the Linux kernel.

Also, there are a few components on these supercomputers that you won't find on a typical workstation or cluster machine.

First, the kernel itself is frequently very small, lightweight, and much closer to what you would find on an embedded system than on a traditional desktop computer. That's because once the program on a supercomputer is loaded, the kernel's job has been mostly to get out of the way. This isn't to say that you don't find the Linux kernel on these supercomputers, it just isn't as common as you would think from reading this piece.

Fear not, many pieces of these operating systems are still open source. Here's IBM's fusedOS prototype:https://github.com/ibm-research/fusedos.

Second, many of these computers primarily only run code in C, C++, Fortran, and Python. These tend to be the only major languages in play on the HPC machines, with acceleration frameworks such as OpenMP, OpenCL, and CUDA playing major roles.

Finally, everything is glued together with MPI, a high-level (at least it was in the 90s) abstraction for scientific programming that maps down to very high-performance networks designed to help scientific codes "scale", that is, run effectively when millions of cores are simultaneously engaged.

These are beautiful machines producing important science, and the GNU/Linux operating system plays an incredibly important role in both their implementation and culture.
Amazon isn't in a position to build a law enforcement portal to this service. Google now is.
It still removes a large part of the utility of the feature. I want to be able to see if I've visited a link, even if that link is on some random blog that I've never visited before.
"Middle class people gradually build up a small stock of "wealth"" That's part of the point. As the chart in this study shows, the middle class is not building anything. In fact, it's declining.
Let's just say it's not a pleasant experience, especially when you're used to things like Stripe.
A Brief History of Databases
I admit I'm guilty of cherry picking my examples. :-) I wouldn't say it's bloat though, if it's something that most people end up having to re-implement. For what it's worth, I have my own little library of STL helpers too...
1> Do you have a "Real" CS degree?

If not, doing a good portion of the exercises in some books on [compilers](http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-...), [DFAs/State Machines](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michae...), Algorithms (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...) and theoretical programming (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html) can give you some common foundational lenses with which to see these articles

2> Learning the history of your field

Nothing informs the current state of the field more than how we got here! Learn the foundation of your field from people who lived it. The podcast [Debug](http://www.imore.com/debug) is Guy English (Creator of Napkin and other apps) along with Rene Ritchie interviewing people about the history of Cocoa and CocoaTouch

I found [this episode about AutoLayout and Key Ferry illuminating](http://www.imore.com/debug-33-ken-ferry-auto-layout-passbook...).

3> Go through early versions. Few systems START complex. Look at OLD books for EARLY versions of systems, and why old php made such silly choices is obvious (hint, they weren't that silly for what it was doing). Read books and commentary through the timeline. Understand the history of what's happening to the language, then you'll understand why you are where you are.

4> Go DOWN the stack. Understand the bottom of Objective C by reading [the open source implementation of Core Foundation and more](http://www.gnustep.org/). Also available elsewhere (and I think somewhere on Apple's Site still).

5> Do what you shouldn't! Don't ship it, but really use those implementation details to do something awesome and amazing. You'll learn tons about what's happening.

PS: To the mods, those aren't affiliate links
Creating an excellent web
Your robot would have to make a bunch of trips or else be really big for something like a grape vine or a citrus tree. Even for a tomato.

The proper way to water trees or grape vines is tens or hundreds of gallons at a time then let the soil dry down. Otherwise you don't get the root development that takes up nutrients and anchors the plant. Trees that are watered shallowly for their whole lives often blow right over on maturity. And, in watering in California, Arizona and probably most places in the western US you need what is called a leaching fraction. That means you need to water well beyond the root zone to push out and avoid the accumulation of salts. It is far more energy efficient to pipe or flow the water to the plant than carry it. And... we are talking about a significant amount of water.

This is what I mean by scale. People have trouble conceiving it in agriculture for some reason. They tend to believe a few computer controlled hydro gardens can feed the world. Nope. You know all the countless green circles you see on the ground while flying across the country? That's real food production in action and even with all that we may become strained. A change in global diet might help. Improved genetics might help. But farmers aren't stupid. Over the course of generations they have achieved some degree of efficiency. Gadgets might help get a bit more but the easy gains have been largely worked out.
That brings to mind this tweet by Eleanor Saitta on a specific instance where they actually are directly opposed.

https://twitter.com/Dymaxion/status/464457530677420034

(It's a case where physical security and physical accessibility come in pretty direct conflict!)
CSS Only 3D Macbook Air Animation
Maybe the child should be put up for adoption if not both of the parents want to be parents.
I just don't get the controversy.

Anything which is permissible for a piloted bomber to destroy is surely okay for a drone to destroy as well, yes? Why the focus on drones per se?

Yes, civilian deaths are bad. Yes, war is bad. Yes, perhaps the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be ended tomorrow. So why don't we discuss those?

Drones seem utterly irrelevant:

1. Do drones cause more civilian casualties than traditional air strikes? If anything it seems that they inflict fewer. Thus focussing on this aspect actually hurts their case.

2. Do drones terrorize civilians more than a traditional infantry occupation, such as that prosecuted by the US in Iraq? I honestly have no idea, but the answer doesn't seem obvious.

3. Do drones make the US less safe than a traditional infantry based occupation? Again, I've got no idea.

4. This point is silly. In war you needn't get clearance before killing one's enemies - attempting to do so constitutes an increase in respect for human life.
Microsoft Makes Bet Quantum Computing Is Next Breakthrough
Which giant corporation is trying to popularize the daily use of these other cameras?
It is also a war crime. Someone at the CIA, Pentagon or White House should be in jail.
Well, as recent as today, Pivotal has been pretty great to startups (ours included).

jshack, I'm sure you don't remember me, but we started running into each other at the same events starting 5 years ago while you were at Sun. I would attempt to socialize with you for the first few events until it became crystal clear that you saw no value in talking with me. You were never interested in helping startups outside of a direct benefit to you- the opposite view shared by most of the SF startup community.

You went on to work at mt for awhile where again I would see you at events, only interested in helping the latest series a/b company and ignoring everyone else.

I'm somehow not surprised by this "news".

In any case, this blog post should probably come down. Nothing good can come of it and in a weeks time you'll surely regret posting it.

Best of luck and I hope you come away learning something from all of this.
Physicists find way to boot up quantum computers 72 times faster
... and that's exactly why you don't get why this guys are trying to achieve. This guys are counter-culture. They are trying to write the smallest functional ray caster/sound engine, you name it. They target maximum functionality with minimal bloat. Coming to a post like this to say you want a ray caster in JS 'no matter how big it is' is very misguided; the equivalent of going to a Tesla dealership (assuming such a thing existed) and telling the dealer 'well, this is all amazing technology and stuff, but what I really want is a Humvee with two cupholders on each seat, 5 TVs and a driver, I don't care if I need an atomic power plant to keep it running'.

It's all fine and dandy here, HN is an open group after all. But don't go with that kind of comment to a 'scene' forum or they'll chew your head off :)
I think he is talking about Pivotal's PAAS product targeted towards enterprises based on cloud foundry and how it won't be able to compete (since cloud foundry came out before all the coreos/fleet/etcd/docker buzz and it doesn't really have those nice primitives to work with and instead has it's own hairy java solutions to those problems).
When you have that feeling, it means you know enough to recognize what you do not know.

You've escaped the Dunning Kruger effect for now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
This brings to mind the plot of Isaac Asimov's story "Lest We Remember".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_We_Remember

That title was also the inspiration for the title of a paper I worked on:

https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/
Superconductivity more common than previously thought
It sounds pretty straightforward for WiFi: you have two devices connected to WiFi on the same network. These two devices can broadcast to let each other know that there is someone else there. After that, the IPs are known and devices can talk to each other. There is nothing platform specific in this model: standard UDP and TCP, nothing more than that.

I am not familiar with BT protocol so I can't comment on how it is done with BT.
Is it really so amazing that people care about their privacy?
They shouldn't have asked.
Between this and the Salon SWAT story from earlier today, it's hard to not be completely ashamed at the depravity that Americans like myself are actively financing with our taxes. It's telling that the best data we have on these innocent deaths comes from a non-U.S. organization (Bureau of Investigative Journalism).
Under what scenario will a server start swapping due to load, only to continue performing as it should? It's hard for me to come up with a real world scenario where performance doesn't drop from peak, leaving a backlog of requests rapidly growing, which then compounds the problem.

Either way you handle it, the server is toast. So the real solution is to start dropping requests or downgrading service in some way to make sure the server never reaches OOM.

It definitely is important that the person signing the cheques knows how much capacity they're paying for, but that goes two ways. If you underprovision, they must understand that if they ever get mentioned in the NYT, their site will likely go down. It's up to them to balance the risks.
Insightful comment. I don't think we need to pity Oppenheimer for not winning a Nobel Prize. He accomplished quite a lot. We're still talking about him.

By the by, I'm always amazed at how deep particle physics got all the way back in the 1930s.
>>> the police would be severely punished

That seems to be overly optimistic. While compensation lawsuits for police misconduct are frequently successful, firing a bad cop is very hard and prosecuting is even harder, due to the enormous strength of the police unions and the notorious "blue wall" which frequently blocks all attempts for investigation.
That's true. But managing a company is still the managers task, not developers. It doe not excuse them.
It all got silly back in the day.

I was a member of various demo groups/cracking groups and I experienced all sorts of oddness. People wanting arranged fights because they thought their code was better !?

Beyond me.
Microsoft tips Android phone. Hell remains unfrozen.
> But you'd look pretty damn conspicuous holding up a camera while someone was entering passwords or accessing sensitive info.

Not at the distance from which a decent camera (as discussed in the article) can capture it, you wouldn't -- what Glass can do from 3 meters away, the camera they tested in the article could -- with greater reliability -- through a window 44 meters away (four stories up and across a street).
Indeed this is a breach of a Geneva Convention, "Medical personnel exclusively engaged in the search for, or the collection, transport or treatment of the wounded or sick, or in the prevention of disease, staff exclusively engaged in the administration of medical units and establishments, as well as chaplains attached to the armed forces, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances."[1]

[1] http://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/WebART/365-570030?Ope...
What a great website with an intuitive product. Cherry on top is the extremely relevant blog post which is A) somewhat interesting B) obviously connected to their product C) not regurgitated industry information.

This might not go viral, but this is what I define as good marketing/messaging efforts
Not exactly minor wounds. Life threatening and life changing injuries. Even if he survives, his parents are going to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the aftermath.

Why isn't this headline news across America?
Meh. That was two years ago.

If you expect a small company to persist for longer than that based on a single statement, it's best to just consider yourself outside the target audience for longevity predictions. There just is not that much certainty in the world for small firms.
Ex-Hulu CEO Raises $75MM From Benchmark and Bezos for Startup
What no-fly list has to do with passports? There are many people routinely flying in the US who don't have and never had US passports. E.g. all tourists, resident aliens, etc.
http://domain.com/tracker?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebsite-you-visit...

Oops, sorry, my tracker removed the feature for you, I feel really ashamed :(...
Is there any good reason to disable mobile zoom on this website?