skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm really shocked so many people see this as even a question.

I work for a company very similar to Microsoft. If this happened to us, we would do the same thing, for the very same reason.

We would lose every Cloud customer from another country immediately if this was followed. All our work investing and building data centers in the world would be wasted. Companies would pull away all contracts for Cloud work, and we would gain no new ones. It would be the end of the Enterprise Cloud.
I think the problem is that you compare population densities without comparing population distributions. The comparison with the Scandinavian countries is less unfair than you claim: "almost everyone lives on the coasts, unlike in the U.S." Over 50% of the US population lives in the largest 20 cities, and > 75% live in cities, mostly near coasts and rivers and the great lakes. The centers of population in the US are just as dense as the centers of population in Europe; the difference being that much of the interior of the US is almost empty as you mention.

The point is, there is not a legitimate "population density" excuse for NYC or LA or Dallas or Seattle or SF or any other major metropolitan area to have much slower internet speeds than cities like Seoul or Tokyo, or nations like Israel or Singapore.
And then, in a fit of pique, he napalmed Cheltenham. Even the police began to take notice.
There isn't any pondering needed. They are doing it because if they follow this request it will destroy their enterprise cloud computing entirely. That's reason alone to do it.

It would destroy an entire business of theirs. It's vital to their very survival to stop it. It's not even a question, this is as large of an attack on their business as there could be.
Apple reportedly planning multiple wearables, most expensive might cost $400
"they agreed that people had a right to medical services"

What does this refer to?
> one global country would probably fix that

This is a joke only up to a point. The current legal landscape emerged throughout the last few centuries mostly in response to commercial pressures: as commerce grew in range, volume and needs, so did laws, agreements and conflicts.

We now have a situation where global commerce is real, both in a physical and logical sense. The law, both at national and international level, just doesn't know how to deal with it. Companies design hardware in Massachusetts, produce it in China, sell it in Europe, and file their accounts in Caribbean islands. They develop software in Romania, run it on servers in Texas, sell it to the Brazilian market, support it from India, and file accounts in Luxembourg. This stuff could only be done by a handful of players back in the '70s, and we could deal with it on ad-hoc basis ("dude, we know your money is in Switzerland, just open a token factory in my constituency and we'll call it even"). Now it's just how business works everywhere, and we need real processes to scale up.

What rules can be defined and applied? How are they going to be enforced? Who is responsible for amending them? These big questions are the real challenge of this century for us "First World", and some harmonization will eventually have to emerge one way or the other.
From my perspective, passive income is about having enough cushion, esp in the US where we have no safety net, so that we can work on stuff that is value over just money. I have lots of stuff I want to work on that other people would like, but is risky from an income standpoint. Passive income is our own version of "basic income" so we can pursue other things. Not winning or hacking the system.
Similar site: http://instanerd.me/

(no affiliation)
Top Bitcoin Proponent to Plead Guilty to Federal Charge
Nice. BTW, there is a curious variance between the analog and digital clocks. Sometime they're in lockstep, sometimes they're 0.5s apart, and this can change just by switching tabs.
The STL isn't a library that can be optimized - it's a interface definition with expected complexity requirements. By it's nature (i.e. not tied to a platform) it doesn't have specific benchmark numbers. Specific implementations (e.g. MSVCRT, the GC++ implementation, the clang implementation) can be, and are.
Calling NixOS an "academical experiment" is slightly disingenuous. The initial author does come from academia, but works in industry now, and you just need to look at the Github [1] to see that NixOS is maintained quite actively.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits/master
Well if you have a lot of contention in your last-mile infrastructure bandwidth caps make sense. This applies to shared infrastructure like a coax cable network, or the connection up to a DSLAM.

Fiber nicely solves that though.
I certainly agree with the idea that a fairly large amount of private indoor/outdoor space is conducive to happiness and mental health. The tendency of central planners to want everybody to live in a small space and commute by public transport in the name of "efficiency" and "the environment" is depressing. Let's all have half an acre of land, a nice car, and a properly planned road system so we can all get from A to B without running into too much traffic. (Of course you'd want walkable town/city centres as well.)

I don't think we need to centrally plan our society to make people happy, we just have to stop getting in the way of letting people have what they want.
I'm building up a team to address this exact issue.

Most of the folks have that 'beginner' experience, but they just lack the real experience (think of this as the "next step" after learning basic stuff on Codecademy or Codeschool).

All the projects will (ideally) be open sourced and there's no charge to join either. I have about 40+ signups so far.

I will be posting a Show HN soon.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
Doubling your estimate is a common rule of thumb that goes way back but over time if you keep learning from your previous estimates you should be able to become more accurate on average. There's another subtle thing going on is that many times when the estimate increases so does the actual time, a self fulfilling prophecy, hence Hofstadter's law...
It's primarily client-side, but React components output a virtual representation of the DOM, so it's relatively simple to render a page on the server and return HTML.
Solving Jekyll Highlight Linenos
Without the internet you cannot function well in the economy - many many deals (including those for utility companies as well as retailers) are only available either online, or if you found them online and then mentioned them in the shop/on the phone.

The internet is an information network that gives consumers nearly perfect information about price; which translates to a much more ideal market (in economic jargon,) which is much more efficient. It is essentially a utility, if people without it are at a significant economic disadvantage like that.
Naturally, at least as fast as the other guy or gal competing for the same job.
"The US government" is not a monolithic entity. Certain departments (e.g. NSA) might "log everything" already, they just don't (or can't) share it openly with other departments yet -- if anything, because revealing such capability is damaging in itself.
Putting your API on the same hostname and presumably the same codebase as your website is not a great long-term strategy. And mentioned before, consider HTTPS to protect the API key.
Can Machine Learning (or NLP) ever help in estimating effort based on expected lines of code where the model would be trained upon similar applications/files that already exist? If so, is anyone researching this in academia or in any research lab?
Honest question, does your repeated support of the cable companies' excuses have anything to do with your living in Philadelphia (per your profile) near Comcast HQ?
Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs.

Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the government.

And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business? Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem.

I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition.

Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.
Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fear of mathematics was gone forever, and I spent the rest of the summer acing a series of intensive calculus courses. 17 years later, I've co-founded three successful and highly maths-intensive companies. I am certain that I could not have done this without the drugs.

I do hope that some day the world will wake up and realise how much of a wrong turn it took in banning psychedelic research; it has the potential to be a power for good unlike anything else.
Do we have evidence that the millennial generation on the deep south also has liberal values?
Are there compelling advantages to using one of the above rather than GNU 'as'? I ask out of ignorance rather to say there is not. But 'as' is well documented, and if you access it as 'gcc -c foo.S' (with a capital S) it gets run through the C preprocessor first for macros and definitions. And if you are distributing Mac/Unix/Linux source, you can generally presume it or something compatible is preinstalled.

One possible other tool to consider is 'terse': http://www.terse.com/howdoes.htm

It's got a lot of issues, and you probably don't want to actually use it. It's unmaintained, proprietary, DOS only, and according the website, still distributed on a 3.5" floppy. But the syntax has a lot of appealing things about it. You can't actually read the real manual without buying the product, but a short lived open source clone "nega" used a very similar one: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7E6Ddug...
Am I the only one who's worried this may make the government less careful about giving orders in the future? (i.e. won't they figure "hey, let's just give the order; if they disagree then they'll defy it"?)
> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.”

That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.
If all you're doing is moving text around then faster internet isn't going to help any. Unless you're streaming video or doing a few other high bandwidth activities then even really shitty broadband is going to service your needs just fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8065207 ?
I thought Shirley Jackson spent most of her last term jawing about the sewers?
I have a lava lamp on my desk at work- not only does it attract attention (more so than the more boring plasma globes), it's also very relaxing to watch when thinking about some bug or implementation detail.

Unfortunately, the quality of the ones you find today is pretty dismal, and they're easily ruined if you leave them on for too long or if they stay in sub-optimal temperatures (e.g. an office building that gets cold over the weekend). Collectors seem to favor the Lava Lite from the 80s for durability.
This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth.

Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?
everyone except the lucky few who can get
rent controlled apartments

No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:

* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.

* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.

* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.

* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.

* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)

RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
need of expanded protections under the law.

Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.
The local electric coop is plowing fiber in Taos, NM. They don't have a problem serving a VERY low-density region.
You conveniently left out the words "high speed." Everything you talk about can be done just fine even on the mediocre broadband speeds that people in this thread are complaining about.
Because getting hit with unexpected groups of 6 or more can be brutal on restaurants.
If you're interested in these sorts of micro-optimizations, you may find Mozilla's nsTArray (essentially std::vector) interesting.

One of its unusual design decisions is that the array's length and capacity is stored next to the array elements themselves. This means that nsTArray stores just one pointer, which makes for more compact DOM objects and so on.

To make this work requires some cooperation with Firefox's allocator (jemalloc, the same one that FB uses, although afaik FB uses a newer version). In particular, it would be a bummer if nsTArray decided to allocate space for e.g. 4kb worth of elements and then tacked on a header of size 8 bytes, because then we'd end up allocating 8kb from the OS (two pages) and wasting most of that second page. So nsTArray works with the allocator to figure out the right number of elements to allocate without wasting too much space.

We don't want to allocate a new header for zero-length arrays. The natural thing to do would be to set nsTArray's pointer to NULL when it's empty, but then you'd have to incur a branch on every access to the array's size/capacity.

So instead, empty nsTArrays are pointers to a globally-shared "empty header" that describes an array with capacity and length 0.

Mozilla also has a class with some inline storage, like folly's fixed_array. What's interesting about Mozilla's version, called nsAutoTArray, is that it shares a structure with nsTArray, so you can cast it to a const nsTArray*. This lets you write a function which will take an const nsTArray& or const nsAutoTArray& without templates.

Anyway, I won't pretend that the code is pretty, but there's a bunch of good stuff in there if you're willing to dig.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/xpcom/glue/nsT...
This is a very real issue, and if the US states that any US company has to turn over data, you can kiss every customer from another country goodbye.

It's not as if Microsoft is selling access to the highest bidder, or considering a request from another company or a charity. Turning over specific data in the face of a court order is not going to drive every customer away, many will see that as acceptable, low risk, reasonable behaviour.
The doctors lost the argument decades ago when they agreed that people had a right to medical services.

A bold claim without any backup.
There are many great examples of socialised health systems in the world, I'm not sure why the US ignores them?

Because debate in this country has been taken over by assholes and idiots. They lie at every turn to justify their position and they don't care about facts or figures, unless they agree with their ideology.

In my dreams I fantasize about what happened in Portugal regarding decriminalization of drugs. In the current US climate, that could never happen. It bums me out, too.
More frustrating is that you automatically think this is a bad cop. No jury thought so. Why do you think so?
I'm sure you can find many examples of excessive force but you are assuming this is the case when no one else thought so, specifically a jury of her peers.
Do you mean John Lilly? I'm not finding much about a Robert Lily with regards to "psychedelics" and "cognitive metaprogramming."
iPAS 2 Review – Free  web based sponsoring system …With the Coach
Yeah, but then you got all in to mobile maps...
Sentimental versioning
The Sneetches and other DevTools
> When they permitted intelligence agencies to run amok [...] they thought very little about the long term consequences

I don't think intelligence agencies are involved here at all. In fact, them "running amok" would be easier in this case: they would have those emails already, process be damned.

In truth, this particular process would have happened at one point or another regardless of intelligence services, it's just a function of global internet services existing and laws having emerged to deal with them. Back before EU privacy laws were introduced, Microsoft would have just handed out anything they had to the FBI without really a second thought. Now they have to comply with two conflicting sets of laws.

It's not just a problem with the US Congress: it's a transatlantic (or rather global) conflict between incompatible laws.

It's like France had a law prohibiting a company from selling widgets at price X worldwide, and the US had a law forcing them to sell the same widgets at price X worldwide: you just couldn't obey both laws, since they both claim the same jurisdiction while mandating conflicting behaviour. You would need an international treaty to harmonize this, or one country to drop their law.
I agree it's cheap by US standards. My 100 Mpbs (symmetric, fiber) is $42. It's in Sweden though.
Or she or he wanted to stay anonymous/safe while admitting to the use of psychedelics. If you believe, then why do you doubt?
WebCLGL – Browser GPGPU
I found some helpful thoughts regarding GAS - agreed, for source distributions targeting Linux is has a place, but it's not really a full blown macro assembler. Using the C preprocessor seems like a poor hack to me. Although I haven't tried it, it's generally discouraged in C, never mind something it was never intended for. Also, AT&T syntax: Yuck!

http://x86asm.net/articles/what-i-dislike-about-gas/
Without contesting the rest of your argument, I'd argue that these rates are not unreasonable or artificially low.

I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding).

I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.
Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand!

In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science -- and in fact already has been. Much of the early development of those disciplines was directly influenced by psychedelics.[1] I personally haven't tried to apply psychedelics to programming/CS in the same explicit way as I did for math, but I've found that the general visualisation skills developed over about a decade of fairly steady experimentation -- tripping about 3-4 times per year -- have been invaluable in solving constraints problems, visualising codeflow, etc. But one could argue, in that case, that I might have developed the same skills without psychedelics, since it was a slow development over many years. Whereas in the case of the "mathematics trip", the cognitive change literally happened overnight.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
When were doctors ever 'lower-middle class' in any western society?
The ancient wisdom is the practice of medicine is as much art as science. There is "evidence" supporting many practices. As in every complex endeavor, evidence is not static, but evolving constantly.

Evidence is necessary but by itself insufficient. We must use our own power of observation combined with what we know and what we've learned to decide what to do.

So your question is indeed profound, cuts to the core of the issues. Intuition is one way to phrase it. I once heard a colleague say we're not paid because of what we know, but for the judgement we exercise about advice or treatment to offer.

Each human is indeed unique. Even identical twins are in fact not exactly the same. Rules have limits when no two cases are precisely the same, it always comes down to that very intuition you are intuitively aware of.

After all, we frequently wish to have a second opinion. I do often enough too. I like the saying, get 5 experts in a room, and you're likely to get at least 6 opinions on any subject.

Who said decisions should be easy? I sweat over each and every one.