skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of problems with the way this is presented in the article. Though the chip is patterned after a naive model of the human brain, the headline assertion is far too bold. Additionally, while the Von Neumann architecture can be characterized as bottlenecked and inefficient, it has also allowed for extremely cheap computing. A processor with all of its memory on the chip would not be inexpensive. Note this article never mentions the cost of the chip nor its memory capacity.

The comparison of this chip's performance with that of a nearby traditionally-chipped laptop is questionable. A couple of paragraphs later it says that the chip is programmed using a simulator that runs on a traditional PC. So I'm guessing the 100x slowdown is because the traditional PC is simulating the neural-net hardware, rather than using optimized software of its own.

Yes, this is important research, but engineer-speak piped through hype journalists will always paint an entirely unrealistic and overoptimistic picture of what's really going on.
Further easily-caught sins:

What EXACTLY is the problem with adverbs?

you've SURELY been told

try to explain better THE NEXT TIME we were together. (adverbial phrase)

and SURELY takes longer to write

we get to the destination [...] much more QUICKLY

I mean, lots of the uses of the dreaded -ly adverbs the author identifies are also instances of bad writing, but so what? Are they bad writing because they contain adverbs? Surely (!!!) one could easily (!!!) find plenty of instances of good adverb-containing writing. This sounds like a very ad-hoc justification of a rule that the author admits to never have even examined!
Unfortunately under this hiring program, yes. But if a listing with wider scope is posted, I will update this or include it in next month's listings on HN.
1) This shell is not required to play games, so that motivation is not relevant to this discussion.
2) survivorship bias.

I think starting with something approachable like Scratch then advancing on to a posix shell in Ubuntu is a great idea, but I take issue with the attitude that if a child is scared by a shell they should not learn to program.
The issue I have is regarding how this technology will be applied to a population. If this is for screening, then it has to be incredibly safe and cheap. If this is for follow-up of known cancer, then you aren't going for 'early detection,' micromets, etc. as you suggest.

So assuming this is intended to be a screening tool, is there any feasibility data regarding fluorescence from even more than a couple centimeters within human tissue? I am skeptical that you will be able to see a lung or colon tumor for example... two of the three most common cancers in America.

I am a physician and consider myself very knowledgeable in imaging (Radiologist) as well as fairly informed about optical imaging (large institution with quantum dot and other types of opitcal research).
What kind of scanner/imaging equipment is needed for the studies? It's not quite clear to me from the article.
Weird this is blocked by corporate firewall...
Didn't this company used to sell some biometric payment system?
A single page load with no AJAX roundtrips, and no client-side scripts running helps a lot. Was reminded of that when I clicked on a search result to a mailing list archive today that happened to be hosted at Google Groups (vs the usual Mailman-style archives), and it took something absurd like ~4-5 seconds to load.
> Hard to imagine nanodiamonds being added to someone's body if there is not an unusual risk.

Why is it hard to imagine?
The programmer mentality: any suggested guideline must immediately fit all possible test cases or it is wrong.
Here's some more info on CABs and the effect they are having now, and how much damage they are likely to do to the future of the US

http://patimes.org/poor-decision-worse-capital-appreciation-...
Yes.

It's both hilarious and ironic that they didn't.
I wonder if some of the reason for the 32-bit-to-64-bit transition is because there are still a lot of people who remember the last one. 16-bit-to-32-bit was in fact a very big deal. People who remember that one may have it coloring their expectations for 32 -> 64.
Is this a "load test"? It's certainly handling it quite well! Performance of the CPU is ~9 Dhrystone MIPS - comparable to a 33MHz 386 (9.9 DMIPS). Serving static content is really not CPU-intensive; most of the computation would probably be in TCP/IP processing. I think this, and other examples of old hardware commonly thought to be too slow for anything but still doing something useful, shows that much of the software we use today is really vastly less efficient than what's theoretically possible. I.e. how to make use of limited computing power efficiently can be more important than how much of it there is.

For comparison, here is a static site served by a machine with a 4MHz custom CPU: http://www.magic-1.org/ (more details at http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ )
When Apache was written that wasn't old, slow hardware.
This is exactly the type of thing I've been thinking of making for a while... esp. random sampling
Basically I see it as an example of how we spend performance on complexity and overall stay at a similar net level of performance.
I don't buy that argument. Lua has a much worse STW garbage collector and it's commonly used in games.

Furthermore with games you can do tricks like allocating out of an arena with bump pointers and then resetting the pointer at the end of the frame.

Lots of games are developed with JVM, .NET, or Lua. GC doesn't seem to be a show stopper for them, you just have to be smart about allocations.
Harvard Men Seek Perfect Computer Date
Windows is great for development and so are other platforms. People who claim that OSX is better are simply biased or drinking the typical apple fan boy kool aid. If anything, I would compare the development tools and in that sense Visual Studio is the best IDE out there!

My schooling was in Solaris, Windows and Unix. About 15-20 years ago open-source software was mostly available on nix variants and not as much on Windows. Most people didn't want to pay for software, so they chose nix... OSX happens to be a variant of FreeBSD (if I remember correctly), so it can run everything that runs in *nix. IMO, it was mainly used by graphics designers because of better hardware and some standard software that came with OS X. I think if you looked at Photoshop, you could do the same things regardless of the OS.

At home, I use Windows on a Macbook because I like the form factor of the Macbook and because Windows makes me more productive. I've done startups / developed under various platforms and there's not a single system where you're restricted....other than typical iOS stuff on the Mac and Windows Phone stuff on Windows. With new frameworks, you can develop for any mobile platform on any OS. I think OS X fans have probably based their opinion off of a handful of issues they've faced in Windows. Nobody seems to compare and contrast specific issues where Mac is a winner.

People that complain about Windows have probably not tried to install and configure remotely complex products on Linux like mail servers for instance. Their complaints are not usually first hand experiences. IIS on the other hand was a PITA to configure in Windows, but it really isn't as bad as people made it look.

I've coded in many languages/frameworks on Windows just fine:
- NodeJS / Server side JS
- Python
- C++
- C
- Java
- Ruby / RoR
- R
- Matlab
- Web based HTML5 / JS
- C#
- VB

The only time I was forced to use OS X was for developing iOS apps around in 2007.

As far as your CS degree goes, I would start out with learning typical core computing concepts:
- Algorithms
- Data structures
- Processor Architecture
- Compilers
- Memory Management
- Etc.

In addition, I would keep a few different kinds of OS's handy and set up the same stuff across all of them to see how it's done and what the issues are. Along the way, keep blogging about your experience so you can always refer to it. This helped me quite a lot in picking the right platforms before venturing into a new project.

And btw, I write software in Windows that runs on all OS's and cloud services (although we're sticking with Azure for now).
I disagree completely. Their USP is clear - they are an accounts receivable team for getting paid on time. Freshbooks, Hiveage and most of the others just let you send invoices online - they don't interact with your clients. These guys handle all of the A/R by making phone calls, sending reminders, followups, cashing checks etc.

Very similar to http://zencash.com who spell it out a bit better, but definitely solving a real problem that a lot of companies face.
I used to study nano and I remember hearing about nanodiamonds 3 years ago in the context of medical diagnostics. It's really exciting to see more nano stuff taking off as startups.

Major props for using a cheap source of nanodiamonds. Any issues getting ones that are the right size/shape?
MVP Playbook for Founders – Feedback Wanted
This is a link to a post I wrote a few days ago. Let me know what you think!

http://socialmatchbox.com/wp/2014/08/05/how-much-will-it-cost-to-build-my-startup-mvp-part-1-what-is-an-mvp/

So you know where I am coming from on this:
I have co-founded 4 startups (2 profitable), spent the last 4 years building and launching my latest. I have directly advised, mentored or otherwise helped several dozen startups (Consumer, B2B, Mobile) go from the idea stage through early product design and development to fundraising and on from there. 6 had successful exits in the last couple of years including ($57M, $117M, IPO, ...). For the 6 exits, I played a key role in building their teams at all levels from college hires to CxO's. I also hosted the largest software product startup launch event on the East Coast for five years (I had lots of help). I wish I had knew then what I know now.

When someone tells me they have an idea I would like to share some of what I know and have learned with them so I try to blog about my experiences.
>By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before.

Only I never made such an argument. Email and the internet (www) for example were truly important.
I am on vacation right now, without my literature archive in arms reach, but from recent publications you may be interested in the whole-exome single cell sequencing work from Lohr et al.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v32/n5/abs/nbt.2892.html

There is also an overview editorial in that issue of Nature Biotechnology.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v32/n5/full/nbt.2897.html

I remember seeing reviews in Lab Chip and Nat Rev Clinical Oncology recently.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2014/LC/C3LC50...

http://www.nature.com/nrclinonc/journal/v11/n3/full/nrclinon...

The introduction sections of those papers should give you plenty of references to read. It's a good idea to look into the devices/methods used to enrich CTCs from blood prior to screening; Toner's devices based (in part) on EPCAM expression, and the CellScreen device (size/morphology), in particular.
It should be, "do not use vague, semantically empty or inapplicable adverbs".

For instance, one cannot really say something "snobbishly" because that isn't specific manner of talking; the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking. This is much like the adverb "furiously" in the famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"; the adverb doesn't apply to sleeping, which isn't furious. And in that sentence, the conflicting and inapplicable adjectives are not off the hook, either!
C# has had structs since V1 I think.
I'm so very excited about this.
Elasticsearch is a good place to start
Yeah if you want to hit 60 fps, 2/3rds of your processing time just evaporated.
the favicon.ico is broken
Of course it would make sense to do the computation where the memory is. Trouble is the memory area is dramatically larger than the computation area.

Imagine if you were a reference librarian, asked for facts like some kind of ancient Google. Suppose your library was the size of your bedroom- you could very quickly find facts. You only have to cross the room. Now suppose you are right in the middle of the Library of Congress. You are smack dab in the middle of it- you are where the memory is. But you're still going to spend half your time just running about the building due to its sheer size!

The only ways to solve that problem are:

- Make memory smaller. Engineers have been hard at work at this for decades.

- Use less memory. This is slower.

- Use a memory hierarchy. This is what we do today, and is analogous to you sitting in a bedroom-sized library with the Library of Congress just down the street, and a young courier who fetches you books from it.

The other challenge is speed. We can't have a huge pile of registers because fast memory is less-dense than slow memory. So 1KB of CPU registers occupies a lot more space than 1KB of DRAM- but DRAM is a poor choice for registers because of how slow it is.
user contributions, purchased databases, paid moderation and web crawlers.
It'd be interesting looking at histograms rather than averages and separating out cash from credit card tips.

Most taxi rides, I'm paying cash because I don't want to be bitched out by the taxi driver about using a credit card. With cash, I'm more concerned about minimizing the amount of change so I'll usually do something like hand them a 20 and say "can I get 3/4/5 dollars back".

That could partially explain some of the weird shapes in the data.
Sounds great! I will have to try to contact you/Bikanta when I return from vacation.
How to Avoid Wasting Years of Your Life Due to a Startup Incubator (Part 1)
Two million pounds sterling was a horrendous amount of money at the time. Enough to stretch plausibility to the breaking point.

Assuming the money in question came in the form of 18th century British gold coinage, we're talking somewhere in the area of 10 or 15 tonnes of loot. To propose that people would use human power to lower that much gold into a pit over 100 feet deep is. . . optimistic.

OTOH, assuming it was wasn't in the form of precious metals, then by now it's in the form of compost.
One thing that I have observed and learned is money management "strategies" or "styles" vary between socioeconomic brackets.

E.g., tradespeople don't always futz with stocks; they don't have the appetite for risk and volatility that stocks introduce. Long-term investing tends to be not done (maybe 401(k) or an IRA is used). Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture.

When you cross a certain barrier upwards, financial understanding of stocks and so forth increases, and money is leveraged to produce, e.g., use of index funds and their return on investment.

Moving downward in the socioeconomic classes and passing another another barrier, money saving becomes less common, and impulse purchases appear to become more common.

---

Some of this is definitely familial: I never learned about investments growing up and had to self-teach. That has limited my total financial situation to date. I did, however, learn about self-control, discipline, and self-teaching, which has helped me move forward financially.

Another aspect is behavior expectations of the successful - How to comport and present yourself in a way that signals that you are a professional, capable and trustworthy individual? I feel comfortable saying that most anyone from a poor/blue-collar background and who has now made it into the white-collar ranks can join with me in saying that that is a big deal. (n.b., I would totally pony up cash for a local course in So You've Made It Now Past The First Job, Now How Do You Act?)
> no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse."

Do you have evidence for that? All the evidence I read, including the research discussed in this HN post, says that it depends heavily on where you start, including factors such as family income.

Are you saying that children born into poor families or who face other such disadvantages achieve less because they have less willpower than children born into wealthier families? If so, perhaps we should look at the relationship between family income and willpower.

EDIT: Minor clarification
How tattoos went from cool to corporate
Well, I did broadly define success as "able to cover your living expenses while saving some for later".

As a former wanna be professional violinist, I definitely don't think becoming a billionaire is the only mark of success. But I also think that if you can't cover your basic living expenses no matter how modestly you've sized them you're doing it wrong.

Outside of that narrow definition, I'd encourage everybody to do whatever it is they wish to do and gives them fulfillment.

I knew a guy who quite a mid six-figure job to open a Tae Kwon Do school because he enjoyed the art and liked teaching people better than what he was doing. He didn't make much money, sold his house to buy the school and lived in the back of his school for a few years, but he always made rent, paid his bills and didn't miss a meal.

I think that's cool. He did what he wanted to and didn't fall into some kind of sense of entitlement that he should be taken care of by other people because he was pursuing his passion.

I have another friend who graduated with a degree in digital media right at the top of the 90s .com boom, when people were throwing wheelbarrows of money at anybody who could operate a keyboard, and turned it all down to go play guitar in Irish folk bands. He made enough to rent a basement apartment and feed and clothe himself, and got to see lots of the world going on tour. That's fantastic and I love that he got to follow his desire. He still does a version of this, but now he's a also a professional staff guitarist for a major guitar maker and does professional guitar soundtracks for commercials. That's awesome to me.

I totally think of these people as successful.
I have always been so nervous about my email habits that I would happily share my private email with a complete stranger in order to receive a ranking. I would feel even better if I could win a prize!
That's a high-level overview, not a spec—not sufficient for implementation.
They are also valuable for Tom Swifties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty#Examples
In case you didn't notice, Manning was acquitted for revealing documents that proved government wrongdoing. She was also acquitted of the ridiculous charge of aiding the enemy. She was, however, convicted of leaking 700000 unrelated documents without a reason. Had she not been tortured, I'd say the sentence was fair (so long as she actually gets paroled in 8 years). However, her torture was substantiated by a judge and so she should have walked a long time ago as a result.
Are you concerned by the FDA's announcement that they intend to regulate lab-developed diagnostic tests in a similar manner to medical implants and devices?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/business/fda-to-regulat...
Did we all read the same article...Where is the evidence of a third leaker?
> Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours.

The more I see in life, the more I question how valid a concept "free will" really is, and to what extent we really "choose what to do with those hours." I'm not prepared to say there's no such thing as free will, but just the way people's behavior changes under the influence of chemicals, or in response to brain damage, suggests that we don't have a satisfying theory of why people make the choices they do.

I keep meaning to re-read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. What he said about making social policy from behind "the veil of ignorance" makes so much more sense to me now than it did when I read it in law school. (Back then I was much more conservative, and a fan of Robert Nozick's response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)
Maybe Google Hangouts should be interested in this.
> Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture.

What's interesting is that you'll find the same group of people often purchase weekly lottery tickets. Which, if added up over time might make a small, but solid stock portfolio.
That may be the case, but there's many contexts where you'd use this button where you can't alter the page's CSS. Perhaps the prime example being GitHub READMEs.
I bought one of his books on Amazon. Its a lot of fun. And it is interesting to see some of the pictures in his book that were edited in other sources. I can easily recommend it as worth adding to your library on nuclear weapons and their development.
Hemp Plastic could change everything
At Gandi, a single-address standard SSL cert is $16/12€ per year.
The $50/40€ applies to multi-address certs (3 addresses)

The full SSL price list is here: https://www.gandi.net/ssl/grid
""Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo," Minx said snobbishly."

The author implies this is undesirable because it's obvious that it's snobbish, but it's really not. The sentence could have easily not been snobbish.

A good point in the comments was that the verb+adverb can often be replaced by another verb, eg. yelled angrily -> exploded.

I remember seeing a big issue raised with the adverbs in Harry Potter, but I don't remember any problems with its writing when I read all of those long ago.
The interesting context is here: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cauldron2014?action=AttachFile&do=v...

tl;dr: GCC and LLVM are collaborating to make some interfaces the same to make things easier for users.
"Rotate the bomb's dial three clicks clockwise or counter-clockwise?"

"Can't tell you; words ending in -wise are adjectives!"
well haven't posted a lot lately.

My clearly annoyed comment a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8135515 started out underwater a bit, flowed up to 7 and then back down to 5, which means someone's clicking downmod. I think these downmods are fine because I wasn't entirely careful in writing that post (whiskey will do that).

I tend to think of downmods just like the catcalls you hear in the House of Commons from the opposition party. It's chaotic and rude sure but that's just human nature.
Though we live in an age of economic acceleration, it is still to some degree a zero sum game. There are only so many good jobs and though the potential to create more of them seems infinite, in reality we know that the demand for a comfortable lifestyle still vastly outstrips supply.
Yup, so who's gonna build the automatic video watching / bidding bot?
> Do you claim it's misleading that the GCs need at least twice as much RAM to be performant?

This is not what you wrote. You said that "most GCs start being really slow even with 3 times more memory than needed with the manual management", while the generational mark-sweep collector has essentially zero overhead with 3x RAM in that benchmark. The "most GCs" you're referring to are algorithms that are decades behind the state of the art.

Also, "really slow" is a fuzzy term and I am not sure how you come to that conclusion from the image.

Remember, they're compared to an oracular allocator that has perfect knowledge about lifetime/reachability without actually having to calculate it. That ideal situation rarely obtains in the real world. The paper uses this case to have a baseline for quantitative comparison (similar to how in some situations speeds are expressed as a fraction of c), not because it represents an actual and realistic implementation.
Yeah, don't think I am going to provide access to my inbox to some random website. Hell, I don't think I would provide access to ANY website.