skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely, the compression part of it (LZW) is, yes. (LZW has been out of patent for about a decade, by the way, but it isn't particularly noteworthy on its own.)

GIF looks like crap on some images because it's paletted to [2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256] colours - so many images are reduced to a palette (say, with an octree) and/or dithered (perhaps badly, as dithering tends to increase noise, if not entropy), and also sometimes because some techniques exist (one implementation can be found in Photoshop's "Save for Web") which perform lossy transforms on the data so LZW compresses it better - the result is noisier, however, because it intentionally introduces repeating patterns.
Tax avodoidance used to be normal tax planning - reducing your tax burden within the law.

But now it has a different meaning.

Tax avoidance is the legal gray area between outright evasion and tax planning.

Avoidance is the bit that your lawyers and accountants say is legal, but which hasn't yet been tested in courts. The plan might not last long before the law is changed. And you might be asked to repay some tax.

Tax avoidance is the use of bizarre systems that serve no purpose but to reduce tax burden. Starbucks is a great example here. They have a gajillion shops in the UK; they employ many people; they're expanding. By any sensible analysis Starbucks is a sucessful company in England. Yet the shops make no profit. The only reason they make no profit is because they have to buy buy coffee beans from one supplier, and that supplier prices the beans very much higher than other bean roasters. That bean-roasting supplier happens to be based in a tax haven.

Can you agree that there is a difference between "not paying tax that you legally do not need to" and "going out of your way to create bizarre semi-legal schemes in the hope that you get away with it; especially taking into account the numbers of people working to create tax avoidance schemes and people working to investigate such schemes".

The other moral point is that these companies make full use of the products of the tax system - they would most certainly call the police if one of their offices was burgled - and so they should consider making sensible donations to that tax system.

(And before anyone mentions wage taxes or sales taxes: these are paid by the employees or by the customers, and merely collected by the company).
Wikipedia has many redirects or disambiguation pages for single unicode characters. What's so great about this one?
> allowed people to self-identify as non-religious, somewhat religious, and very religious.

The word 'religious' has enough negative connotations that even many religions like to challenge its use to apply to themselves.

I did a module of comparative religion a while ago which involved interviews with deeply devout practitioners of a number of religions. All of them said something like 'it's not really a religion, it's a way of life', or 'it's not a religion, it's a relationship', or words to that effect.

This poll, at least avoids that problem.
My project is done. I discovered I'm in a prison. pfft. I just talk with God and surf the net. Duh. If you are in prison... I got tortured at my last job. Oh hell no!

Dumb fuck Jew nigger. Do you realize I was one of 7 National Merit scholars in my freshman class at ASU. ASU has 40,000, so I was 7 out of 10,000 in my class.

I am 7 out of 10,000.

Dumb fuck Jew-nigger!

I had a 1440 SAT.

Dumb fuck Jewnigger.

I have a master's in electrical engineering. Dumb-fuck Jew-nigger.

http://www.templeos.org/files/ASU_Transcripts.pdf
This observation notwithstanding, if dark matter cannot be observed, isolated or detected, then why should we treat it as anything more than an arbitrary hypothesis? Why not dismiss it similar to how we dismiss the idea that God created the universe, or indeed that God is holding the cosmos together?
Because mass surveillance by a group that can use violence and deprivation of liberty to enforce its will is a lot scarier than mass surveillance by a group who can't.

Its not that people accept one and not the other, its that one is much more serious, and is impossible to opt out of.
I hate design…now what?
This is exactly what drives real science. First we gather data and make sure that data is valid, then we compare it to our predictions (model), and if not all things are explained by the model, we start refining the model. In the process, our understanding of the world becomes ever more comprehensive. So in short, data not agreeing with the model is the best possible scenario.
The day I met Tim Cook
> [Religion] can't say "we don't know" on any popular question.

Actually, the catholics do say, "we don't know" quite regularly. You can, of course, debate whether those questions are `popular'. Eg existence of aliens, splitting of souls for identical twins.
Actual correlations can be pretty clumpy too. Definitely have to look at the overall distribution.
Yeah, pretty weak. Determinism means that the concept of "responsibility" is a social construct created by deterministic events, for example: if you kill someone you go to jail; such course of action was a reaction of your events. Accountability for what you say is just the reaction from saying it.
Express to Hapi.js
Probably because a lot of HN commentators jobs/employers rely on weak privacy laws to make their business model's work.
Companies have done all of this in the past read up about the pinkertons and the blacklists run by companies in the USA and elsewhere.
Do you have any examples of the routine viation of law or lies ro oversight committees?

Which laws do you think GCHQ have broken?

Normally when I ask people this they mention things like RIPA, but fail to notice the excemptions in RIPA for a bunch of GCHQ activity.

Here's what IOCCO say: http://www.iocco-uk.info/
PAQ (particularly ZPAQ) is pretty good at most things because it selects the model which works best. Variants of PAQ tend to be the Hutter Prize winners (paqh) - PPM derivatives are generally excellent at text, source code, HTML, and things with that kind of word-like symbol distribution (which is why PPMd.H in particular is used by RAR and 7-zip for text compression, although RAR selects it automatically and unfortunately 7-zip doesn't seem to, probably because of the extra RAM overhead for decompression that PPMd.H introduces).

However, PAQ tends to be really* slow, largely because it tries more things. It's highly tunable, but people who aren't compression geeks tend to not want to tune their compression. Presets are available.

That's pretty much why it hasn't caught on - speed. There may be some hybrid approaches that deliver a better compromise between context mixing's effectiveness and dictionary coding's speed and memory usage: I guess you could argue LZMA, bringing a Markov-chain algorithm into the mix, is one such, in a way. Sort of.

I'm also a little antsy about ZPAQ formats containing bytecode descriptions of the decompression algorithm needed, and are, broadly speaking, executable (and in some cases, are). That seems like the kind of thing that may invite security problems if approached without due caution.
GCC 4.9 is doing “some seriously crazy shit” according to Linus Torvalds
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British Pathe puts entire back catalogue of 85,000 films online
I'm a layman, but my guess is that as physicists know that there isn't enough matter and energy in the universe to account for its mass, they really want to know why.
Precisely ! Fe XXV ? That sounds a bit like descendent from a long line of monarchs.
Great answers folks. I don't think I will need it in the immediate future, and will attempt to only install necessary software that I anticipate that I will need. I bought the 4gb RAM MBA and it does well...much better in Chrome than in Safari..still learning.
Interesting. A complete atheist would be best able to run a church software business dispassionately, but wouldn't grasp the problem domain as well as an adherent of the faith. Perhaps this is a great place for complementary co-founders.
This article is very good, but it is very short about gzip. Event if there was no technical innovation, I think that gzip was really important for development of compression softwares that are not patent-encumbered.
If one of the engineers responsible for developing the technology had written this headline: "Possible Widespread Bug In X-ray Telescopes Uncovered"
Dark matter was proposed as an explanation for observations, e.g. the galaxy rotation problem. [1] Assuming the hypothesis is correct, then we have therefore already observed it (albeit indirectly, but all observations are indirect).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve
Because there are numerous calculations and observations indicating that it is there. In other words, the hypothesis is supported by evidence. That cannot be said for certain supernatural beings.
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So can one assume that Bose headphones won't be prominently displayed in Apple Stores anymore and/or sold there then?
Dark matter explains two things that we currently don't know how else to explain: how the galaxies are rotating so fast without flying apart and why we see gravitational lensing from seemingly otherwise empty space.
I have never heard about detecting gravitational lensing coming from empty space. Do you have any info/references on that?
Some people hide behind human shields. I shoot them anyway. I don't give a fuck. I am in prison. Fuck the Jew-niggers.

I am finished with my project.

UEFI is ugly. It would take thousands of lines of code. It adds no values, just a big fucken wart on my project -- ugly ass shit. No I don't want the fucken wart of UEFI.

God talks. I made His temple. The only rational thing is God becomes known and I command the industry to do my will.

God talks. I'm the boss. This is insanity that I have to put up with this shit.

God talks. What's the only rational outcome? I command the industry.
“Proof Of Charity” by the Dogecoin community. Wow. Such charity
Congratulations. Looking forward to the blog posts too. What was the learning curve like starting work on a game with your respective backgrounds?

Not to add to the learning curve but if you have any plans for an Android version I'd be interested in one! I love word games but have no iDevices.
You need a lot of mortar rounds to have the same effect as 10 Tons of TNT let alone the radiation damage.

Well dug in troops can survive a motor round a small nuke a lot less so.
> Your problem with primitive types is valid, but I've always seen this easily handled by optimizing inner loops. It's ugly, but so is all low-level optimized code.

OK. I guess if there is a way for the optimizing backend output which unboxing failed it would satisfy me. For us native programmers having tagged pointers that are often optimized, but we don't really know when, is a concern.
Might be irrational terror for sure like with the GC fear.
So FP languages proponents need to explain more why and how these features like GC/uniform representation/whatever are not a speed impediment (imho).

> And many languages trade off between uniform access, byte-string representation, and Unicode. Haskell just splits each use case into its own type.

True and this can indeed be contentious where this isn't done.
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For this type of "report" the vendor will usually chuck in the hosting for free. It would have conditions like "can only be used for this test (not anything else" and "results must be published on your blog" etc. etc.

Microsoft do this all the time - its great publicity. It would be interesting to see if they (Microsoft) have something showing similar results...
So, one has to just find a host that would respect their privacy and serve their country with a big warm fuck-you response when asked about owner details without a proper warrant, or - even better - that would only cooperate with local law enforcement and won't give a damn about other jurisdiction demands.

Or get a host with some form of anonymous payment, like Bitcoin.
Even if it was, why does that matter?
Again, that's whether you support regressive or progressive tax systems and their efficacy. What is fair? But it's not punishment.
It seems to classify open areas as unsafe and photos with lots of variation as safe.
Because dark matter is the only theory that fits all of the observational evidence. There have been many theories put forward to explain the phenomenon which has been labeled "dark matter" and the only one that has withstood the test of time is "cold dark matter" in the form of "weakly interactive massive particles" (or WIMPs). Perhaps that theory is wrong, but so far it's held up remarkably well while other theories have crumbled.
The reason that we are talking about dark matter is that it is detectable by its gravitational effects on ordinary matter. Our ways of looking at it are still incredibly blunt but they're much better than what we had 20 years ago.
We can make hypotheses about dark matter and conceive observations to test these hypotheses.

As for dismissing God, I don't see why, we just need to come up with some signature that would differ between a designed universe and an accidental one and apply for observation time on a suitable instrument.
More and interesting conversation happens here:

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61904
There are observations which we can't explain with current scientific theories, and Dark Matter is a theory that seems to explain many of these observations. Either we'll find irrefutable evidence for it, or we'll ditch it, and find another theory to explain the observations. Most science is formed by testing theories, even if those theories are wrong and you end up making different theories to explain the observation.
That was indeed the original assumption when the Cosmic Microwave Background was detected. The problem with the CMB, from an observational standpoint, is that it's enormously uniform. It differs by only a few parts per million across the sky. Which means that when you perform observations with less sensitive equipment the signal tends to look like a uniform noise source. But it really does come from the sky, as we eventually figured out.
Does not work on my Android phone
Fixed in tree: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61904
What's up with the many insults? A bit of professionalism amongst developers would be nice...
I had conveniently forgotten about the origins of the CMB when jotting down my witty riposte. Well put!
> The bad compiler versions are 4.5.0 (when debug_insn came in) to 4.8.3 and 4.9.0 and 4.9.1.
"Here's a small (auto-)reduced testcase for this specific issue"

Do you happen to know how that is done? How is a test case "auto"-reduced? I've never done that before.
If a patch is incorrect, why are you applying it? What makes a github feature different to this? If a patch is incorrect you get the other person to do it over.
Sounds like regular ol' Linus to me ...
This is just Linus, unfortunately
So it will get posted on HN and other news websites.[0] Notice how no one else in the thread cares about Linus' language.

[0] He is after all warning about the use of gcc-4.9.0
http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html
As in, Torvalds being mean about the compiler, or something else? That seems pretty par for the course in the context of a badly-broken thing that people tend to expect never to be broken.
Just use LLVM:
http://llvm.org/
Professionalism? Torvalds is a teenager with too much privileges.
If we ask it to dumb it down sure. Also often it's a lot harder to find a conclusion then to understand the conclusion and how to arrive at the same conclusion. Unless it's so complex our minds cannot comprehend it without years of study on 1 particular problem. But that is already occurring in silence today not ?
Ironically, the point of a cryptocurrency is that you don't need to rely on a provider who is asking you for information you don't want to give.
And if you find one bug in llvm, switch back?
Linus wants to keep this tone and considers it important.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-...
> Notice how no one else in the thread cares about Linus' language.

Except Sarah Sharp and others.
For example http://embed.cs.utah.edu/creduce/ ; the slides from a presentation in 2012 are interesting: http://embed.cs.utah.edu/creduce/pldi12_talk.pdf
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/A_guide_to_testcase_reduction
Torvalds has earned his privileges as much as any developer alive or dead. In fact, if his abstract power ranks up there with Fortune 500 CEOs and national leaders, I'd say he deserves his privileges more than most of them as well.
People are working on it http://llvm.linuxfoundation.org but it is not a trivial thing to do.
17 and counting, it's come a long way.
I cannot seem to find her mail or the others' in this thread. Am I missing something or are you referring to previous instances of Linus' outbursts?

I guessing on the latter, in which case I specifically wrote 'the thread' for this reason.
Yup. This is awesome. It's been a while and an awful lot of work since somebody found evidence of some new physics. The LHC has been a bit of a disappointment so far - it has yet to surprise us.
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Also note that his tone in the actual gcc bug report is professional and matter-of-factly: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61904
Unfortunately the linux kernel still relies on some gnu C extensions for some low-level control of the output. I don't know if comparable stuff exists in llvm and clang, and if so, if linus has any plans on supporting them. However this is just bugs in a new compiler, and the Linux kernel is probably one of those things that hits cornercases.
Non native speakers often don't have the instinctual grasp of slang and swearwords in English and so tend to use the F C and S words a lot without fully understanding the severity of the words.

"seriously crazy shit" seems a bit restrained for Linus though
As if LLVM had no bugs.
> First of all, it's not necessary to use a word such as "menagerie" in any article, apparently it's being used incorrectly anyways, it means "a collection of animals".

A commonly used secondary definition of menagerie is "a strange or diverse collection of people or things."
You'll notice that the insults are entirely directed at an inanimate piece of software.
I did concept/design which I felt was largely commonsense, though we made mistakes that we could avoid next time. I think we underestimated on-boarding and how many people would ignore our tutorial. I'll get Quentin to answer the technical side.
Here are the first links that came up when Googling it:

http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/scientist_dark_matter

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/04/20/how-gravi...

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~ger/ASTRO-110_sp08/Lecture28_Dark...
You seem to discuss much different aspects of safety - I'd assume that the article refers to the threat to a potential passer-by, not of the general crime rate in that area, which would include thefts from property.

Also, safety is not neccessarily correlated with a crimerate - if place A has 100 times lower rate of street crime than place B, "because there are no people" as it has 1000 times less foot traffic, then place A is 10 times more dangerous to a person who actually happens to be walking there.
No, we understand them all right. We are just not generally as prudish as English-speakers. Perhaps it's more a culture difference than a language barrier.
It'd be better if he knew some manners though. I can't believe the amount of people who will most selflessly throw themselves between Linus and criticisms.
Great article. I use Python and Java a lot today, and C/C++ quite a bit over the years. Recently, I have been dabbling a bit in Go. Sure, Go builds static binaries, and it's generally performant, but I simply cannot get away from Python's economy of language and breadth of 3rd party support. Like you noted, if you want performance, use PyPy.. if you want a better concurrent model, use concurrent. A little like the C ecosystem, but I generally don't have to worry about the quality of whatever library I choose to use as an add-on.
Same goes for vernacular Scots, where the F-word isn't far off being verbal punctuation, roughly equivalent to "eh" in Canadian English.
Some US states have introduced a new corporate form for businesses which have both financial and social objectives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Maybe up to a point - though it can make you look like your going off the deep end over trivial matters.
If he was designing a video game, your assessment would be viable. As it happens though, Torvalds writes code that makes half the world function reliably; some would say his exceptionally direct attitude has served him well in this endeavor.
>We are just not generally as prudish as English-speakers.

So you're speaking on behalf of the entire non-English speaking world?

I think it's important here to distinguish between swearing about something ("aww, fuck") versus swearing at someone ("fuck you"). If you are more inclined to swear about something, then yes, perhaps you can say you're "less prudish".

But if you're more inclined to swear at someone, then it has nothing to do with prudishness and everything to do with aggression and rudeness. Is your culture more aggressive and rude than that of many English-speaking cultures? Some are....
If you can automatically get data "how safe it looks" for all addresses, then it's a way to actually measure the [anti-]correlations with actual crime happening there.

We had the actual crime data already, and now we could compare it with the perception to try and identify the reasons for mismatches. Not that identifying reasons is simple, though - with machine learning it's far simpler to get a system that makes good decisions than to get an understanding on why it makes those particular decisions.
It'd be better if he knew some manners though.

At some point arguing over manners is like arguing what serialization format is best; it's just another way of exchanging information.
The NVIDIA hardware is not necessarily better, but the toolchain is unmatched. Race checker, memory checker, top-notch debugger and profiler, visual disassembly graph, makes it a very smooth experience.

AMD can only compete through HSA and non-standard OpenCL extensions, and only companies whose hardware originates from AMD GPUs are in HSA.

OpenCL suffers from being fragmented and with very fuzzy mapping to real hardware. Even OpenGL compute shaders looks more interesting to me with their vast texture format access, and the fact that OpenCL multiple queues don't deliver in practice.

There is both SPIR and HSAIL in competition with PTX, NVIDIA can rejoice.