skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
""A board, spring and wires could always trap a mouse, they just weren't configured to do so."

How is programming a computer different from assembling existing components in a new arrangement to make a new machine?"

You are not "assembling existing components in a new arrangement with a computer".
Also, if I gave you a board, a spring, and wires, you could not trap a mouse with them.

You actually have to physically change them to accomplish anything. The spring won't stick to the board by itself, etc.

You are also taking things that were previously limited in some way (a board is not elastic, etc), and assembling them into a new thing that is not so limited.

When you program a computer, you are not changing the computer in any way, shape, or form.

It was never limited. By programming it, you are doing exactly what it was built to do: Be programmable.

You are simply picking a subset of the things it could already do, and saying "do this subset". The computer, no matter how hard you program it, will never trap a mouse. It is the building of the computer that was the hard part. You, on the other hand, are always operating entirely within the existing limits of the computer.

"Not a neuroscientist, and this risks derailing the thread, but isn't that exactly how brains and learning work? This has also been observed at the macro level, e.g. that study where London cabbies' brains were found to have enlarged portions that dealt with spatial processing.
"

Yes, this is exactly how they work. That's my point. By your argument, you can replace "computer implemented" with brain implemented, and end up with the same patentable result.
Given that, i'm arguing there is nothing special, at all, about computers, or implementing things using them, any more than thinking about things or learning to play guitar. Enlarging the center for spatial processing in cabbies is something the brain was meant to do. The cabbies did not create it out of whole cloth. They did nothing but exercise their normal skill in spatial reasoning, and their brain did all the actual work.

Programming a brain does not make them do new things they could not do. It simply tells them what task to perform.

IE There are a set of tasks they can both perform. That set of tasks is fixed at creation, both of brains, and computers.
You cannot make lasers shoot of your eyes no matter how hard you try.

Much like a brain implemented invention, a computer one is just picking a certain task the computer already could do.
Yeah.. I have a 'weekend project' that i've been working on for... almost a year now. And mostly not even weekends.
There are a great many businesses whose entire model is centered on search working, and therefore search breaking is a major problem.
> The theory is fantastic, but the practice leaves much to be desired

Ok... What is more fantastic for:

- large audiences?

- users who can't install/update software?

- " " can't/don't back up data?

- developers who don't have the resources to target multiple devices/platforms?

- integrations with other applications?
Oh great, because HN needs more logical fallacy callouts.
But in practice it is much better than any alternative multi-platform instant software installation ecosystem. And in practice, it has led to a thriving ecosystem of applications, most of which can link to each other and will work on a large portion of users' devices.
Labour calls for 'owl for everyone' after Twitter hack
Google Rolling Out Android 4.4.4 With A Security Fix
If people actually installed custom loud pipes as a safety precaution, they would point the pipes forwards, towards the vehicles that are actually liable to hurt them out of negligence.

Nobody points their pipes forwards. They install loud pipes because they are assholes, and want everybody behind them to know.
Nominative use is allowed. (You can think of this as a trademark analog of "fair use" in Copyright.)
Careful that turning the key doesn't engage the wheel lock. Ouch.
Goofy-looking security guard bot runs Linux
Although I would love to own such a e-motorcycle for daily commuting, as an avid cand daily cyclist I getting more and more afraid of all electric vehicles.

Until now I could usually rely on the fact that motorised vehicles are loud enough so that I can hear even when I can not see them. But with all these new e-vehicles it might happen that they are almost completely silent at low speeds so I as a biker would loose half of my senses. I rely so much on vehicle sounds while riding bike that I feel almost feel blind when I wear headphones and listen to music while riding bike.

So I hope that all those new vehicle will make at least some sound when they drive on the same road as I do.
Excerpt:

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships.
If that were true, towns would not have "No compression brakes" signs at the town limits. No one wants a loud ass Harley ridden by wannabe outlaw bikers waking their baby up at 2:00 a. m. That's one reason noise tickets are written (though not nearly often enough) for those with open pipes.
Dude!! You're a beast!!

Once this is over, I want to help you with the idea you told me about over Skype!! All the best Joey!!!!!! Crush it! :)
In my philosophy 101 class at a decent public university, people had a lot of trouble actually engaging with the questions, every week we had a couple of asides dealing with what were usually pretty silly points.

I thought the instructor did a decent job with it, but it was always a boring period in the class.
> However, what I'm trying to say is, regardless of how the statutes have been implemented, the theory is sound and rational: a patent has multiple, largely orthogonal, dimensions and it should be judged along those lines. To my engineering mind, anything that conflates those dimensions is an inelegant and problematic ruling.

Yeah, the problem with that idea is that rulings aren't intended to implement abstract theories independent of the controlling enactments (the statutes and the Constitution). The theory that patents have "multiple, largely orthogonal dimensions", at least as you seem to identify those dimensions -- and particularly the idea that newness is a consideration only for Section 102 patentability, and not Section 101 patent eligibility -- is inconsistent with the actual text of Section 101, which explicitly requires for eligibility that the thing sought to be protected is (a) an invention that is (b) new and (c) useful.

Your aesthetic preference for orthogonal considerations where newness would be a considered only for Section 102 patentability is, of course, a legitimate aesthetic preference -- but its not what the statute says, and I think it would a more "problematic ruling" for the court to ignore the statute simply out of aesthetic preference for orthogonal categories with a certain configuration.
It's great to remind everyone how Node follows various rules of the Unix Philosophy, and how it is designed to make process spawning/streaming as natural as on the OS.

I would prefer it though if the implication wasn't that a failure in Node's design is responsible for the failure of this in-process-memory technique of sorting massive data sets. From the article:

"However, as more and more districts began relying on Clever, it quickly became apparent that in-memory joins were a huge bottleneck."

Indeed...

"Plus, Node.js processes tend to conk out when they reach their 1.7 GB memory limit, a threshold we were starting to get uncomfortably close to."

Maybe simply "processes" rather than "Node processes"? -- I don't think this is a Node-only problem.

"Once some of the country’s largest districts started using Clever, we realized that loading all of a district’s data into memory at once simply wouldn’t scale."

I think this was predictable. Earlier in the article I noticed this line:

"We implemented the join logic we needed using a simple in-memory hash join, avoiding premature optimization."

The "premature optimization" line is becoming something of a trope. It is not bad engineering to think at least as far as your business model. It sounds like reaching 1/6 of your market led to a system failure. This could (should?) have been anticipated.
> most controllers implement a secure erase

Yes, a secure erase of the entire disk. That does not help with erasing the free space (a free-space wipe). Erasing the free space can't be done purely at the controller level since the controller can't tell which blocks are free and which used.
kick ass indefinitely!!!
I read several times that the situation for Harley Davidson is quite bleak, so this might be the try to extend to new markets and save the company in the long run?
Yes, absolutely true. But I can't help thinking that there must be a better way to achieve these goals than this mess we've made.

We're clearly in 'we should be amazed the pig dances at all' territory rather than in 'look how good the pig can dance'.
https://code.google.com/p/cubeslam/
This is about the same thing that's already on the front page with 70 comments, including a great one by grellas. I'd go there if you're interested in this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160
Facebook explains the cause behind its early Thursday downtime
>We were able to reach the speed we needed by writing our own Go client to ship off the logs to our cluster

That's a fair argument: when written intelligently, Go has great performance.

The other reason is performance v. flexibility. Any generic log collector (Logstash, Flunetd, etc.) needs to support multiple data sources and outputs and is probably less optimized for the specific situation at hand.

Just curious: what's the buffering strategy for your custom agent written in Go? Does it support file-/memory-based buffering?
From the article:

> The good news is that Elasticsearch is a search engine, and you can often
> afford the loss of search results for a while. Consider tolerating data
> loss; Elasticsearch may still be the best fit for your problem.
> the Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely adding “a generic computer to perform generic computer functions” does not make an otherwise abstract idea patentable. This statement (and the opinion itself) makes clear that an abstract idea along with a computer doing what a computer normally does is not something our patent system was designed to protect.

This opinion gives me hope that reform is possible & that the U.S. government still works with reason.

Now the question is are patents still relevant in today's world of internet, rapidly accelerating innovation, and evidence that free/open source research reduces costs?
The link you gave is just a personal opinion of some dude, he even admits that. No statistics, even lying, is provided.

I can easily throw an opposite opinion: besides riding motorcycle every single day, I drive car, and usually I notice motorcycles roar too late. Also, I had two occasions when drivers didn't notice sound of my motorbike (it's not quiet at all) and changed lanes right into me. So I prefer to assume every driver is deaf and ride that way.
Interesting but the devil is in the details with systems like this and the article doesn't go into much of that.

I do like the decision to separate AtlasDB from the underlying K/V store.
The "safe" way is to pull in the clutch, shift to neutral, and hit the kill switch on the right handlebar. It's actually pretty dangerous to do this. If you slip and let go of the clutch while the engine is off and you're in gear (Not uncommon. Finding neutral is hard on some shifters.), you'll probably lock up the rear tire. When it regains grip, you risk a high-side.
With git, one doesn't realize its importance, unless they use it. So I would suggest first use it for smaller codebase like some utility libraries or something. This will give them real exposure to git.

Don't try git with repos where lots of people are committing very regularly. Once good number of people have got their hands-on with smaller repo, then shift larger projects to git. Also then you can convince everyone with the model u want to implement.

This way you should be able to start shifting major repositories in like 2 months.
> above is a terrible write-up

To clarify, do you mean that the OP (the Belkasoft article) is a terrible write-up of your work, or that the link you provided (of which you're a co-author?) is a terrible write-up?
Around 50Hz... They're not hearing the hum of AC electricity, are they?
It's just a slight grammatical ambiguity in the title, worsened by the "headline grammar" and the fact that it's a newspaper with a general audience. The headline is intended to be interpreted as "the performance of a particular computer that is marketed as a quantum computer is no better than the performance of an ordinary PC."

But it's pretty easy to quickly read the headline and interpret it as "the performance of ideal quantum computers is no better than the performance of ordinary PCs."

> Assuming the correctness of quantum mechanics, a quantum computer WILL be faster than classical computers for specific classes of problems, exponentially faster in some cases.

I'm not sure about this part either. Some smart CS guys apparently think that quantum computing isn't even possible. Leonid Levin (yes, of the Cook-Levin theorem seems to be one of them: http://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/lnd/expo/qc.htm.
Hey Brian, just emailed you. We are on our way, however we wont be able to be there until 5:30 or so
Scala: The Movie.
Julian Assange 'fears for safety of family'
> I'm you're right that the experience is "almost always" sub-par. I would say "often", but not even "usually". I guess YMMV.

There aren't actually many fair/accurate comparisons around since most companies have either a shrink-wrapped product or a webapp. Rarely do you see both, and when there are I agree with jacquesm that the experience is almost always sub-par on the webapp [in comparison to the desktop app].

You can't really compare one company's webapp to another's non-webapp. i.e. you may feel GMail is better than Outlook, but since Google doesn't make a non-webapp version of GMail we don't know if that would be better than both Outlook and gmail.com. Microsoft does make a webapp version of Outlook, but I don't think many people find that better than "real" Outlook.
I think we're all still waiting to see the evidence -- as opposed to biases -- upon which you're basing these antecedent probabilities.

There's also another point worth making: even if it were true that you have a truly objective, rational reason for assuming that (e.g.) the author of the blog is a man, this doesn't resolve the question of whether you should speak as though you assume all unidentified hackers, bloggers, whatever are men. There is more at stake than whether you happen to be right or wrong in guessing the blogger's gender. The problem is that such patterns of language can and do easily harden into norms -- i.e., you may only use masculine nouns for probabilistic reasons, but this pattern of speaking, if sufficiently widespread, can give rise to the view it is abnormal (in the normative, not the merely descriptive sense) for women to hack or start hacker blogs. This is a bad thing because the social pressure that results can meaningfully restrict the freedom of future women.
iOS dev weekly recently had two sites linked. Sorry can't remember the URLs right now, I'll try to search for them
> A generic computer running a program is a special purpose machine: it's now doing things it could not do before it was programmed to do so, and as such, it is performing potentially novel functionality. Otherwise, in my mind, you might as well argue "a kitchen knife could not be a murder weapon because it's a kitchen knife."

I don't think that analogy goes where you want it to go. Suppose that a kitchen knife exists in the prior art and you want to get a patent on "homicide weapon with hand grip and pointed edge." That which infringes if later anticipates if earlier. So if the kitchen knife would infringe that patent then it's also novelty destroying.
Spoliation of evidence is one of those things that courts really, really dislike. If you're found to have intentionally destroyed evidence, the court can give instructions to the jury essentially saying to assume any destroyed evidence was showing guilt.
Spin up services from npm packages with ndm
The best advice youll ever get on the topic is to "drive like you're invisible." Don't depend on loud pipes or loud colors. You will have close calls even in a school bus, but you on a bike have more to lose in that situation.
Never say never.

There would always be doubt, and some kind of parallel construction would surely be used to protect the secret technique.

I could see it being used in hundreds of cases per year for a decade before anyone could prove anything. Just like ubiquitous internet surveillance. And even when irrefutable proof surfaces, the very same people who staunchly said "that could never happen" will say "of course, how could you even be surprised?"
Thanks for the clarification. Although I still think a person in a position such as that of the TrueCrypt developers might be reluctant to take anything from a government or provide them any sort of... statement.
The link I provided, of which I am a co-author. Technically I didn't write the paper though.
How do you know you have it? I've had a particular high pitched sound in my head that's apparent as soon as the ambient sound in the room goes down to a certain threshold. It's been that way for as long as I can remember, and I'd just assumed it was that way for everyone. Is that not the case? What should absence of sound in a room sound like to a normal observer?
Cool! I need to try this someday (week). And the video is just pure madness. You might want to add a small warning, though - I'm not an expert nor an epileptic, but the video does look seizure inducing to me.

Plug: Maybe you could try a tiny chrome plugin I wrote:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-you-have-anyt...

It's a simple site blocker I made after doing the same /etc/hosts routine a couple of times.
I think there is value in this ruling beyond 'what is a computer'. For example I founded a startup a number of years ago to do traffic monitoring with an FMCW radar based sensor. In the process of researching patents in the area I found a bunch of patents that were in effect 'radar applied to traffic monitoring'. IANAL but my interpretation of a large number of them was that they were granted based heavily on block diagrams that 'looked novel' but where really just a matter of taking the block diagram of any old off the shelf DSP SoC and dumping it in the patent (in uglier form of course). It is the same as how ridiculous patents are written for software, 'A system comprising of an analog to digital conversion module, a filtering module, a mixing module, a processing modules....blah, blah, blah'. Depending on the interpretation of this ruling (which I don't know enough to comment on), it could impact a lot of patents, both in and out of the software space.
Good work. Just one point of clarification, if you can:

RE: "There are approximately 110,000 ecommerce websites generating revenue of meaningful scale on the internet."

Can you roughly translate the phrase "meaningful scale" to something like "$x or more per year"?
I gave a talk about some caveats we ran into with delegating support early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs2NN-qQZf0 a few years ago. In particular it bundled up a lot of customer feedback inside of one department/person and started isolating us from our customers.
Wayland-based Compositor With An Oculus Rift [video]
> Opinionated best practices stop being useful when the emphasis is on opinionated and not on best. If the cabal that has political influence is not the strongest there is, standardization just increases how much technical debt can be built in a short period of time.

I agree so, so, so very much. We've had issues where one teams wants everyone to standardise on a given technology for ideological rather than practical reasons.
Can we look at the 67 commits and review them? </troll>
Code Oregon
It's a toy example; he's just trying to show how currying works, rather than why you should use it.

If anything, it does show that one useful thing about partial application is that you can write a generic function (formatNames) and then make it more specific (formatNames("John")) without repeating yourself.
Many people are still going to need or want to be really careful about selecting the best value. So the question is, if you rent say an 8GB VPS from Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Linode, or something similar, how inconsistent is the performance actually? And given that measurement, will the presumably somewhat more expensive "on metal" be a good value?

I'm not even considering EC2 because I don't trust the reliability and I know that its not a good value compared to the others. EC2 only makes sense to me if you really need to take advantage of features they have like the private networking or DynamoDB etc.
That's right. The search result, however, assumes the only way of accessing the database is through a black box oracle. That's why I wrote "non-oracle" in my previous comment. It's called an oracle because the internals of the black box are assumed to be unknown. That assumption is necessary in order to prove that classical computers need ~ N operations. If you know something about the internals of the oracle, then it may well be possible to exploit what you know to search faster.

The quantum search algorithm is very interesting. However, most people in the field would, I think, agree that a non-oracle separation between quantum and classical would be vastly more interesting. Oracle results feel a little too close to cheating.

There is, incidentally, a nice paper showing that for computing total Boolean functions the quantum oracle model can be no more than polynomially faster than a classical model. This means there can be no exponential speedup for such functions, which is a real pity.

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9802049
"you" was the formal form of "thou". In Ireland we use "ye" as the plural of you.
Bundler 1.6.3 now available – faster gem resolution
The guy is baiting in his first couple of paragraphs. By the end of the article, he reveals that he approves of Twitter's decision. Indeed, the automatic conversion from GIF to HTML 5 is well underway with sites like gfycat, which is getting integrated into major extensions like RES if it's not there already (RES [finally] merged the code to support this last night). HTML 5 video is greatly superior to GIF; the files are many times smaller and you can pause and/or control the loop, and normal video players are equipped to handle them, which makes platform integration easier (Android's browser famously didn't play GIFs due to memory constraints in the browser's early implementations).
Washboard – Ships you rolls of quarters for laundry
The million-dollar app that says 'yo'
Yeah, the most common cartogram in those pictures is population.

Therefore, each pixel of the cartogram contains an equal number of people in it.

If you bin your heatmap into pixels with equal number of people in them, then HOT regions in the final image will correspond not merely to the number of people who live in an area (like in the xkcd), but to the percentage of a constant number of people.

You can still recognize the underlying geography, because the population density isn't CRAZY skewed.

Here are some well-documented cartograms that give you a feel for what they can do:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/11/01/163632378...