skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blog post is flat out wrong makes some huge, errant assumptions.

To create hardware that implements the same behavior as this program, you would need:

a dynamic memory allocator

Wrong.

a virtual memory system (or dozens of gigabytes of RAM, just in case)

Why would this problem need a VM?

and a very complex Finite State Machine to implement the behavior of all the methods that are called directly and indirectly (so this includes methods from "list", "reverse_iterator", "allocator", etc.).

Again, wrong.

If the problem is to do

We'll make the assumption that there exists a system than can transform any simple program written in a general-purpose programming language to an efficient hardware implementation. This means that if I write a simple program, for example one that creates a list of random numbers and outputs them in reverse order

That is not a very hard problem and one could very well write a compiler that does that efficiently on FPGA or otherwise. Heck even designing a circuit would be doable for many EE BS grads.

In general, I believe the author attacked the proof wrong. The things he believes are necessary (malloc, VM, FSM) are inventions to circumvent hardware limitation, not language expressiveness or other issue with the general purpose language. Humans invented programming languages not because the hardware is impossible to create, but because it is impossible for most wetware (humans) to create that hardware (and/or software).
Ask HN:  Why don't hotels let you pick your room?
Does anyone know why I can't pick my actual hotel room when I book a room? I want room 807, not 805 or 806. Now you can do it with planes, you can select your actual seat. I want that but for hotels. This would be especially helpful to me as I usually need to book two connecting rooms for my family and it NEVER works out no matter what I do unless I call 24 hours in advance and make sure they are connecting and even sometimes then I have to go up to the manager and complain and threaten to leave before they manage to get two connecting rooms.
I think a lot of it comes down to how you define "luck". Finding the right investor or employee involves a lot of luck, as does getting helped or hurt by a Google algorithm change. Google itself was lucky that it raised a lot of money shortly before the tech crash that killed off many of its competitors.

A better way of understanding the startup world is that everything has a high degree of uncertainty (which you can call luck), and so the smart strategy is to remain as agile as possible, and continually learn from the market in order to refine your strategy and vision. I prefer to think of it as Newton's method of product/market discovery, and the most successful startups are those who are able to iterate the fastest.
It sure would be nice to have some reviews associated with all of the fly by night valet services out there.

When I went to retrieve my keys from the Valet at a friend's wedding recently, I was told that they were unsure of where exactly my keys were.

"O.K." I thought as I stood on the street corner of an unfamiliar city, "this stinks".

So after following the Valet manager around while she searched for my keys over the radio and by rifling threw employees pockets... the manager gets into a fight with an employee right in front of me where the employee ends up quitting on the spot and says "I didn't sign up for this crap, I just wanted to make some money this summer, that's it.". That was the employee that the manager who lost my keys chose to hire. "Great!" I thought now, "hopefully that employee isn't holding my key out of spite!"

After walking around for another couple of minutes and having no luck finding my key, the manager looks in her right palm, and wouldn't you know it... there it was the entire time.

Weddings are tough to plan, and when my buddy was racing around getting everything together in the months prior, he probably just picked the valet with the best look and lowest price. It sure would have been helpful for him to have a reliable review service for that sort of thing.

At least it saved me a few bucks in her lost tip. The entire situation is kindof humorous now when you think about it in hindsight ;)
Microsoft is shipping products (Windows Phone, most notably) that use most if not all of the patents listed, and they're currently raking in money from multiple Android OEMs (Samsung is confirmed to pay Microsoft for patents related to Android). That doesn't really apply here, they've been very active in both using and seeking royalties for these patents.
As a YC founder, I can say that this post is absolutely correct. Also, any intern that can put together all the peices the way the author has done, won't be an intern for long. She/he'll be full-time or a founder in no time.

That ability is one that I look for. It's a rare skill to be able to see the bigger picture.

Also... any UX people with Python, django, JavaScript skills (pick one or two) looking for an internship, drop me a note. Mountain View or Orange County, CA.

Any Ops/sales/hustlers that want to work directly with a founder on growth, brand awareness, and sales, drop me a note. Mountain View.
That is true of Haskell at this point too. Stictness annotations and unboxed types are sometimes necessary to squeeze maximum performance.

I think the idea would be to keep the backdoors, the question is how to make them still usable in that case.
Totally agree. If someone comes up with a simpler way to do it and proves it out on a few projects of real complexity, then I think it's great.

My complaint is you see a lot of upstart projects pulling mindshare when the reason they're simple is either a matter of personal preference or a lack of essential complexity. Hamlet was an easy target because cursor position management is a great example of essential complexity and they made pretty aggro claims on their site about how over-engineered everything else is.
Unfortunate fate of an indian programmer
Go read 'Fooled by Randomness.' It makes the case that your wall street pundits are EXACTLY that measurable, consistent percentage of the rather large population of traders who haven't blown up after five years. Thus, every year, half+ of the pundits blow up themselves, never to be heard from again.
My predictions about Swift 4 years ago
In summary, Orwell finds that his books are most full of life when he writes mainly with:

> (iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It would actually seem like a win for everyone as hotels could charge more for rooms that are better just like airlines do for premium seating. That room away from the elevator that is another $25/night. They already do things like that, the ocean view costs more for example.
Wacom released the SD tablet in 1987. Their patent on inductively-powered styluses should have expired by now.

(Back then, US patents were valid for 17 years from issue date, but the backlog was also much shorter.)

I know that N-trig used to make an inductively-powered stylus about 5 years ago, but for whatever reason, they switched to batteries.
His comment on the TC article started by saying, "But, sorry, I am not going to read Techcrunch article about it.", so I replied in similar form. It's a meta commentary :)
Yea, totally agree that memory is at the heart of the problem. Not only in needing a unified view, but also in bandwidth constraints that seem to be the bottleneck in so much code (von neumann bottleneck).

I think a real solution would not just be software only, it would include a hardware component (or tuned to work with a particular chip): a SoC with a few fat cpu cores, many lite core, a GPU, some fpga fabric, all sharing a large cache subsystem and memory.
I just meant that OpenCL/CUDA are moving towards a narrower scope than what I would like. There is too much emphasis on manually arranging your data with the correct interleaving, or doing things in batches, pipelined in just the right order. It all reminds me of DSP, which I was never a huge fan of. That's because all of the supposed gains can easily be replicated with a general purpose language and an order of magnitude more computing power (which is easily attainable with billions of transistors at your disposal, getting cheaper every year).

You are right about memory bandwidth though. I'm excited that memory has come so far, with wide channels running at a GHz or more. But, that has come at the expense of latency. I think this problem is intractable, because everything is moving toward data centers with even slower interconnect.

I’m reaching here, but I think the endgame will be memory that works more like bittorrent, where the latency won’t be how far the nearest neighbor is, but how much the data differs from what you already have. Then we can eliminate most of the problems with slow interconnect and move to a big dumb hash system that uses diffs but results in orders of magnitude higher throughput. If processing is really not a bottleneck, then this will be trivial.
As someone who's looking for an internship, could you briefly go over the skills you are looking for in an intern. I have a hard time judging myself and don't know exactly how much an intern should be capable of for a YC company or really any company with similar status/success. Obviously, it depends from company to company but still would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
You're right, it's a tricky line to walk.

When not citing technology-focused issues, I like to use the bathroom example: "Would you use a public bathroom with glass walls?" It illustrates the difference between covering up wrongdoing and need for personal privacy, two entirely different things.
Like most other exponential growth patterns, there is suddenly HUGE number of people now wanting to use ML but don't have necessary background. Pretty much every other enterprisy developer who had been happily spending their lives pushing data from RDBMS to/from UI now wants to try out ML for something or other. Unfortunately current state of ML framework is a minefield. If you don't know your precision from recall or confusion table really confuses you or have no clue when you have been merely overfitting all along, you are screwed.

I can see huge market if you can bottle down complexities of ML in a nice easy to use package. A very easy to use ML service or tool would allows you to import your data with few clicks, apply normalization such as stemming or edit distance by pick-n-choose without writing any code, has nice generic featurization library, can run tons of algorithms with large number of parameter sweeps, does automatic feature selection, takes care of maintaining test and validation sets etc. This kind of thingy would be super popular. My guess is that it has to run in cloud because it eliminates all the setup and updates plus doing what I described even on moderate size data sets usually takes hours on single machine. Now throw in plug-n-pray deep learning algos which even few ML experts are familiar with and can require significant GPU based infrastructure.

Can this be reality? In my opinion, this is more in line of those graphical tools that claims you can create programs without having to learn programming. It's impressive when you do demo but don't last long in battle grounds. Ultimately, if you want to write program, you will need to get your hands and cloths dirty with oil stinks. If you want to do machine learning, you will need to start from stats and probability.
Who knows, maybe my comment made some "full stack" developers feel insecure. Just look at the code base of the original, and you'll see that the animation is done through API calls.

Regarding the point you brought up: you are conflating two issues. One is whether the UI is appealing, and the other whether the underlying code is of a high quality. The point of my article was merely to show how nicely the game logic can be expressed in Haskell, compared to many other languages.
FOI Request: leet speak (FBI)
From a quick peek at their announcements from long ago, it looks like they used to run 64MB as the smallest size, but this was, of course, back in 2003/2004.

Until 2008 or 2009, they were also still using UML, instead of XEN.
FWIW, no problems at all on FF 30, Macbook Pro, OS X 10.9.3. Responsiveness and framerates were good, and no unusually high CPU logged for the entire time I was reading the article.
A better game analogy would be a game of dice where you win by rolling double 6's. Except that to be able to roll in the first place, you have to be able to solve all of the differential equations in the back of a college engineering textbook.

What's the best way to improve your odds at this game? Be sure you get to roll more than once.
What platform(s) would the simulator support? Just GNU/Linux? Even that is quite different from actual Android in some ways, e.g. glibc instead of bionic. It's easy by comparison for Apple to provide a simulator, because the simulator only has to run on Mac OS X, which basically shares everything below the UI toolkit with iOS.
Small world -- the attorney the judge was complementing was none other than Ed Reines, the Newegg attorney we're always reading about who fights off the trolls.
I'm not sure this would work well for the user, simply because you're distributing a limited number of jobs to a large number of developers. Even if you cap at 150, and only 20% of those are Pythonistas, that's still 30 people after the same job.

And frankly, most advertised freelance jobs are bottom feeders who just want cheap and fast. With this type of service, there's no big incentive for the service to avoid listing those jobs.

I'd much rather the placement service take a percentage, say 10 or 15% of the total. Then, the incentives are lined up right. They'll look for the highest paying jobs, avoid bottom feeders, and they'll be sure to give the job to the best performer in whatever sub-specialty area (say Python desktop apps).
Let's say you have a million people. They each roll a 6 sided die. The odds of getting any one number are 1/6. The odds of getting any given number 5 times in a row are 1/6^5 or about .0001286. Out of your million people, 128 of them will probably roll e.g. 3 five times in a row. It doesn't mean they have a particular talent for rolling 3s. If you get the million people to roll 5 more times, probably a different set of a million people will roll all 3s.

I'm not saying there's no skill involved. There are certainly things you can do to guarantee failure. But if someone has 5 successful startups in a row, it's not easy to distinguish them from someone who rolled 5 3s in a row. The population of people who've done startups is pretty small, relatively speaking.
If you're right about that, Abenomics is doomed to fail!

And it's an interesting coincidence that inflation has finally started to happen again in Japan.
Congratulations!

I'm working on my first non-trivial system with Rust right now, and I'm finding that the learning curve related to the borrow checker and lifetimes is rough. I'd liken it to macros in Common Lisp, but not quite as a cliff as monads.

In other words, I would like to ask that a substantial amount of your time in documentation at some point be pointed at the lifetime & memory system, as it is, IMO, the really unusual and hard part of Rust (As well as the whole freaking point of it too! ;)).
but I see your point not having a team I can see how it might scare people. I'm thinking just hire someone just to do the business right?
The Fox, Only Better. – Firefox add-on
Ask HN: Does HN automatically censor some new posts?
I just tried to submit a post for a kickstarter project, but when I log out the article disappears from the "New" page.

This is the item ID.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902079
which I can see fine when I'm logged in, but it's blank when I log out.

Is there some unwritten policy disallowing links to kickstarter? People seem to be able to read my comments and reply to them fine, and I don't post often, so I'm not sure what is going on.

Post was to http://kck.st/1nh8gp4
When I see such legalese style writing, I search for the first fullstop.

here it comes after 716 characters 0r 130 words. After this they seem to be lot more frequent.

Looks like the idea was to put people to sleep after 5 seconds.
And this post shows up fine, whether I'm logged in or not. Is this domain based filtering?
Shorturls are almost always autokilled. Try submitting without the shorturl.
It goes deeper. Abbott actually started out as a journalist for The Australian before moving into politics.

If there ever was a case for a corporate groomed politician, he's it. I struggle to believe his self-indulgent conservative ideology could explain the breadth of the changes he is attempting to make. It's like he's thrown it all out there and is hoping some will slip through while everyone is focusing on the big ticket items.
I thought about that when constructing the demo but opted to use the JSX / plain JavaScript version because that's what's displayed on the React homepage.

We have a strong preference for Haml and CoffeeScript dialects so that's how we present our demos. I built jsfiddles based on how each framework presented their own product.
This is going to be great SP4 is going to work great for Gabe.

But surely these changes were made for a reason?
World's first [hackable] smart home audio and lighting platform.
I read the original report and I don't feel it is objective. First, there are a lot of benchmarks about patient communication. While it is important, it is not necessarily the only way to deliver information. For example, while my kids doctor don't talk to kids about health eating, they receive a lot of information at school and constantly talk about it at home (yeah, I do like a good and unhealthy steak :) ).

Plus, some benchmarks are completely arbitrary: "Out-of-pocket expenses for medical bills more than $1,000 in the past year, US$ equivalent" - of course US will get lower scores than Canada or any other country with government run healthcare which is paid from taxes. It doesn't make any sense to ask this question.

P.S. My wife works in Stanford ER and I hear a lot of stories (good and bad) from her and her colleagues. The kind of stuff they do and the tools they have today is just magic.
I like the idea. It's nothing new and sensational but well presented. [0]

But there's one essential problem: you are selling a limited resource for a very low price, which will cause problems later on. And the rate is unreasonably low.

First, the easy bit. What is $29/mo to a decent freelancer? One hour of work for a beginner. And (ideally) the value the person gets back is at $300-$X000. So if it gives such a massive value, why pay so little? The users would be happy to pay more.

$29/h is not much, and it will take a while to make it sustainable. So your motivation is to grow user base. But growing user base would increase competition and will make it worse for your users. By charging more, you could focus more on your value proposition, spend more times on leads rather than new users.

Also, I wouldn't commit to X leads/day. Leads are finite and limited. Would I be happy if you promise 5 weekly leads and you deliver 10? Yes. Would I be happy if you promise 20 weekly leads and deliver 15? No, you under delivered, I didn't sign for this. Under promise and over deliver is much better.

And distributing leads is another problem. But you would have to grow a bit to actually face this problem.

All in all, I like your idea and had a little fun writing this comment :) if you want to chat a bit more about, my contacts are in my profile.

[0] Only one thing I didn't like. "Are you passionate about finding leads? Is 10 hours of your time worth more than $29? Do you have too much time on your hands?". The first 2 questions put me in a nodding mood and when I read the last one: wtf...? It's not emotionally consistent (I just made up this name).
Free App: Horizon
Awesome, that looks like it was the issue. Thanks so much!
> "Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
The ISS Will Get a Custom Espresso Machine With a Few Space-ifications
We say: Better social network is possible!
The truth is, neither do patent examiners. I've heard they only get 10 hours to review a patent application, at which point they have to approve it if they can't find any published [1] prior art.

[1] And that doesn't mean, "on some long-forgotten website in the dank corners of the internet". That means academic papers or other patents.
I'm more intrigued by the domain name. Why there even exists 1st level domain "coffee"?
"the device is done and shipping in like a week"

Those competitors are probably going to have to put in a bit of overtime then :)

The other stuff he talks about isn't new either - pressure curves have been around forever (I have a very old tablet thinkpad with a pressure curve) and the tablet photoshop he played with has already been displayed at a show.
It would only invalidate that claim, but barring finding other prior art for the other claims, the rest of the patent would stand.
The possibility also remains that Wacom did not want the kind of business that the Surface brings to them. The surface is the first product that does a reasonably good job of cannibalizing cintiq sales. I would expect their margins on Cintiq to be higher than selling a digitizer component to Microsoft. I think Wacom is in a really tough place here - they have to balance between limiting access to their crown jewels while also making sure that ntrig doesnt make too many inroads as a legitimate alternative.
Last summer, in NYC, I was in central park almost every weekend. After I started counting, I counted like eight low-impact bicycle accidents involving twenty-something girls before it started getting cold in September (it averaged to nearly once a week). I'm going to estimate that prior to counting it was about three or four (it had to be more than two), before it struck me that it was getting repetitive. Once I started paying attention, I was kind of surprised at how frequent and consistent it was. None of them drew blood or broke bones or anything, but the ones that I noticed were usually accompanied by a surprised yell, and enough to make people stop and check for concussions. As far as I witnessed, I did not see any similar accidents involving males in their 20's, or adult women of other age groups. On the other hand, lots of 40 and 50 something women are always out riding bikes with their kids and husbands.

Bicycles in NYC are serious business though. I've known people who were slapped with hundreds of dollars in violations and summonses in one sitting. I know one guy who was car-doored on a narrow street and woke up hospitalized and missing teeth. I've also heard similar stories of males and females drunk bicycling home at night that also ended in serious hospital visits.

More often than not, males in their 20's are on skateboards, and certainly falling a lot, but usually with a degree of anticipation and a strategy for absorbing and surviving the fall. Otherwise, males under 40 and not on skateboards seem to be keenly aware of their own lack of athletic inclination and poorly trained physical coordination (myself included; I like my teeth).
I second Toastmasters. It's good for speaking skills too http://www.manager-tools.com/2011/06/coaching-presentation-s...
Ten years ago the answer was craigslist and now the answer is still craigslist.