skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I basically think of a single computer as a distributed system now. In other words, it's not a Turing machine / state machine any more; it's a network of such things.

Once you have multiple CPUs, you can't avoid concurrency, and message passing and immutability become common themes. The strategy for many years was to naively add locks to traditional stateful algorithms and mutable data structures, but this often leads to bad performance (and unpredictable performance)

There is an elaborate backward compatible illusion presented by the architecture, C, and most languages built on top of C. Internal busses and caches are not exposed to you as a programmer, but they are there and affect performance. But if you think of your app from the OS perspective rather than the language perspective, the distributed model becomes more clear and natural.
Really cool, but yes - the pan/zoom was definitely jerky for me on Chrome 37.0.2062.122 on OSX.
> Are the trajectories of light beams following the curvature of space-time reversible? In other words, if I reflect a light beam back on itself, does it return to its source?

Yes, it would, assuming you have a way to reflect a beam back the way it came, like the kind of retro-reflectors the Apollo astronauts left on the moon. If you were an observer and saw a laser beam emanating from some distant place, and you wanted to assure that your laser beam would be most likely to be seen there, you would point it at the exact opposite heading -- assuming neither the source nor destination were in motion.

> Because if that's true (and my feeble understanding is that it is true), then light can't enter a black hole or the reverse path would allow light to escape.

That's a different question with a different answer. If you point a laser beam at a surface that absorbs most or all the radiation that falls on it, it's possible that none of the initial radiation will be returned to the source. But -- very important -- all the energy is accounted for. If the initial light beam has energy E, then the energy absorbed and reflected by the target will also equal E, not necessarily the same wavelengths but the same total energy. This applies to black holes as well -- they conserve energy.
I can definitely see myself just using a simple REPL. I don't use C/C++ that often, so being able to start an interpreter and executing just of few line of code would be great. A use case would be checking the exception semantics of C++, or which element boost::bissect returns when you have several equal values.
I own breastpump.com and am interested in a deal with anyone interested in the space or anyone looking to commercialize a product coming out of the hackathon.
No biggie when they're bolted to the floor. :)

Also, cost of land trumps safety apparently.
The fact that there's a Marvel API is amazing in itself!

http://developer.marvel.com/docs
Great point. One that pains me terribly.

Whilst not quite PDP11/VAX territory (I do love VAXstations though!), the killer for me was I bought a low end Sun Ultra 30 in 1999 just before they EOL'ed them and spent 3 years slowly upgrading it. Spent about 4000 GBP on it in total.

Still felt faster then than the i5 X201 ThinkPad on my lap today. Everything was smooth as butter, even though it was Solaris 2.6.
Is this the way out of the maze in Colossal Cave Adventure?
Seems like if there is a salt mine they could make some sort of battery out of the salt.
> Bear in mind that systemd is being integrated with the Linux kernel, so you have to update the kernel in sync with systemd.

I'm just feeding a troll or someone who is really ignorant, but here I go.

No it isn't, and no you don't. Systemd is closely tied to some Linux-specific features, but it generally isn't part of the kernel. And you don't have to update the kernel in sync with systemd. Systemd lives in userland, by definition.

It does impose a minimum kernel version in order for systemd to work, which is something like 2.6.39 (May 2011 vintage). They have bumped up the minimum version a couple times as they needed new features, but you don't have to upgrade both together. I routinely upgrade one or the other separately on multiple systems and distros.

And it bears repeating again... systemd is not one single executable or process. And not all of the components are required, you can turn all but a few core ones off. And the core ones could be replaced if you wanted to, because there's a documented interface that you can implement.

Also, Vi, Python and Perl aren't "required" for GNU/Linux. They're common, but definitely not required. Vi is required if you want to comply with the Single Unix standard, but that is not the same thing. GNU/Linux just refers to pairing the Linux kernel with GNU userspace utilities; it doesn't necessarily dictate any specifics. There are further standards like LSB that attempt to do so but again not relevant. On top of that, Vi, Python and Perl aren't even GNU projects, which is true of a ton of other programs common in Linux distros, which is one reason I personally find the term "GNU/Linux" a bit onerous.
Yes, to the best of my knowledge, in general light beams following the curvature of space-time are reversible so that you would be correct for everything EXCEPT for the special case of black holes.

In the case of black holes, the escape velocity of the black hole is simply too great to allow light to escape at it's velocity if it originates from within the event horizon.

It would be like if you were rolling tennis balls to a friend across a trampoline. If you place a bowling ball in the middle of the trampoline, suddenly rolling the balls straight to your friend won't work anymore, because you need to roll them angled to account for the bowling ball in the middle of the trampoline causing the trampoline to be bent a bit so the balls will curve around the bowling ball and a person on the other side of the trampoline can then grab them and roll them back to you with the exact same speed and angle that you rolled them to that person.

However, if you tried to roll a tennis ball instead from the MIDDLE of the trampoline (where the bowling ball is) to your friend you would find that no matter what angle you chose you could not get the tennis ball out if you used the same speed to roll it as before. On the other hand, your friend will of course have no problem rolling tennis balls from the side of the trampoline inward to you.

This is the situation you find light in. Because the absolute maximum velocity that ANYTHING including light can have in a vacuum is equal to c if the black hole is bending the trampoline of space time so much that that velocity doesn't surpass the curvature then it doesn't matter what angle the light faces, it's just going to end up heading right back towards the black hole.
If numbers are the deciding factor for anyone, have a look at TokuMX which I believe has much better performance and storage characteristics compared to plain Mongo.

http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokumx-for-mongodb/
666 pages... Coincidence? I don't think so.
Ethan Siegel just posted a detailed response to this.

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/yes-virginia-black-hol...
Probably. Clojurists have attempted to have DB/ACID through STM/Datomic. core.logic and core.type for robustness. transit for intermediate representations (xml.nextgen).
I think that is one of many salient differences between the scenarios.

My thought is: if one argument is good and another is bad, clearly the reason for the difference does not exist within the properties they share. It must exist where the arguments are different, or more likely in this case (as what the poster said and what I said are so similar), in the outside world of facts and understanding.

But if the shape of the argument allows for things that may successfully convince you, then clearly that information is not enough to dismiss it outright. It should be the start of a dialog with the parent comment.

Now, for something completely different:

If, for some reason, you want to actually engage _me_ on this particular policy issue, angle your thought at this: my understanding is that it's 2014, and if you want to regulate the information people share or sell over the internet you've accepted a challenge I do not envy.

I would be particularly skeptical you could do this without building a comprehensive computer spying system and perhaps outlawing crypto (it's been tried), as you're trying to read communications of highly security-conscious people.

As for if Mitnick is a good person (or similar things under discussion here), I have not met him.
While I agree with some of your points, I don't see how they relate to the conversation you stepped into.

> The only interesting question is is the spread tighter when I want to trade in the presence of HFT or in its absence.

There's never only one interesting question, so that's not correct. If you're seeing liquidity that disappears the second you try and touch it, it's an arguable point that's it's not real liquidity.
I've self-published several books.

I primarily use lightning source for print books (both for getting copies for myself and delivering to conferences and for distribution to retail and amazon). I used Lulu for my first book and was disappointed by their responsiveness in case of problems (note this was in 2007/8, so things probably changed since). I've published two books through lightning source and those got into Amazon very quickly, and have been selling quite nicely.

For e-books, I use a mix of things. The Kindle store is #1 in terms of revenue for me, and I guess not having a book there is akin to creating an IOS app and not publishing it on the AppStore. Having a book there is a must for discoverability.
I still use Lulu.com to get things on the apple iBooks store and other lesser ebook stores, and to sell the PDFs online. The amount of money I earn from those places isn't enough to justify bothering with each individual submission. For the Kindle store, the submission process is pretty straightforward and there is no need to pay Lulu commission.

My two latest books are in progress on leanpub. I think this is a pretty good early-access channel. They now have github support and will generate PDF, MOBI and ePub, so this fits nicely with my workflow and toolchain. Leanpub didn't do anything special in terms of discoverability or promotion for my books, but they were a good channel to republish stuff frequently and let people buy early versions. I plan to re-do the PDF completely for print publishing, but I'll use the MOBI and ePub they generated to sell the books directly on the Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle stores. I think that's going to be better than just keeping it on Leanpub, again because of discoverability. So if the book is already done, I don't think you'll get much from them.

Smashwords.com is another option that looks popular with fiction writers, but I never really did anything there so I can't provide much more than a pointer.
I wonder why booting a computer may be a concern for a desktop user at all. With hibernation being polished enough (on Linux and elsewhere), one mostly puts a computer to sleep, then continues exactly where left.

Boot times may be important for cloud instances, though; the faster you can spawn more nodes to accommodate a load spike, the better. But cloud instances are usually pretty stripped-down, and often get spawned form pre-configured images where much of the discoverable stuff is hardcoded.
Demystifying Venture Capital Economics, Part 2
I suggest the possiblity that this is a manifestation of TMS. Check out John Sarno's The Mindbody Prescription.
Thanks for the tip, I'll make a note of it if we get that far east. IIRC, some in the online motorcycle community have pointed out the Kananaskis area as well. Steak house: noted. As a vegetarian, I might miss out on the restaurant's most notable feature, but my wife still enjoys a good steak from time to time, and I can appreciate a restaurant for what it is rather than whether they have my food of choice.

Snow might be an issue, but warmth won't. Electrically heated jacket liners and heated handlebar grips can go a long way toward keeping warm in low temps. :-) (Though I just looked, yeah, going across Banff to get there could be a problem in October. Part of the adventure is seeing how the weather holds and adjust accordingly.)
This is pretty much clickbait.

For those who want the gist of what this article/startup really is, it's a centralized platform for managing budgets in a transparent way used by governments internally (to create reports, manage expenses, etc). It makes it more efficient for different departments to collectively manage and access budgets. Apparently it gets $50B of government spending flowing through it's systems. This internal usage is then presented to citizens in a Mint.com like format in the name of transparency (like here: https://losangeles.opengov.com/)

Pretty cool and I wish them well, but it is nowhere near what the title implies.
Bashpocalypse
Peter Thiel to Harvard MBAs: Value Mission Over Money
Machine Consciousness: Fact or Fiction?
I don't know what you mean by 'hook into', but I presume you can simply #include any existing source code.
What about importing the unstructured data into one table in Postgres and querying that table to populate a structured schema on the same Postgres server? It shouldn't be as IO bound, as its copying data from Postgres to another table rather than from Mongo.
Can anyone tell me if that would likely bring a performance improvement?
Could you list some of the ones you've looked at?
Thanks for the resources! We will definitely check them out
You also get extensions, but they require developers to create them and I haven't been very impressed yet. The new iCloud Photos will be nice (especially on a 16GB device), but that hasn't shipped yet. Continuity will be nice, once Yosemite ships, if you have a Mac.
IIUC, you're already pwned after the first line of your wrapper script, i.e. #!/bin/bash, as your CGI environment was already set before, and now you're running bash in it (unless FastCGI works differently, not by setting the environment as plain old CGI; I don't know FastCGI, but from a quick glance I think it works similarly)
Think Protection
I never understood how Blackberry hardware designers can be so bad. I'm glad they realized that the keyboard is where the Blackberry shines but, a square design!? They should've stuck with something more similar to the Q10.
Hey this is Steve Cheney from Estimote. We encourage you to experiment. Basically you can cover a fairly large venue (100 feet or more on a side) with just 4 beacons. It depends on some of the variables of the venue -- walls, surfaces, existence of metal and glass for instance. But the point of the SDK is to provide smoothing and consistency and have the phone itself help resolve user location while beacons also continually reduce error propagation of signals. We have a team of PhD's building this product and taking into account tons of smart data science. The ultimate goal is to have a venue covered without requiring an entire "cell network" of beacons. You can get greater accuracy by testing with multiple beacons per wall though. We would love your feedback on what works best for you as you iterate so we can also put these improvements into the SDK.

Thanks for the support!
I've heard internal employees calling this phone 'Fugly'; Fat and Ugly.
Definitely think this is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, it looks like this solution does not address the balance sheet side of the equation, which is where most towns are in dire straights (even if they don't admit it as they have more latitude in not recognizing the future costs of say pensions than corporations do). Until people have true transparency into this area, it will be hard to make good decisions as an electorate.

Again, think its a great step forward...on a very long road
If you or anyone can suggest a more accurate, neutral title, we'll update it. Often an article contains such a description somewhere.
From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.

As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.

Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.
Could someone explain all of the grounds?
Beaker Notebook v1.0 released – open-source polyglot data science web app
I think that he's asking if you can do something like the 'debugger' statement in Chrome/FF when debugging JS.
Right, the point being that bash is vulnerable, not zsh (as was suggested by the post I was replying to). I'm not claiming that using zsh as your interactive shell somehow makes you immune.
IDDQD
IDKFA
C11 added a different set of safe string functions, although as an optional standard annex (Annex K). They have _s suffixes, e.g. strcpy_s(), and somewhat different behavior. It seems unlikely that ISO would also add strlcpy() at this point, given that one set of "safe" functions is already (sort of) in the standard. But maybe POSIX could standardize it.
Looks like a Weebly issue, see https://www.facebook.com/weebly/posts/132902413424071?commen... (last comment)
Not every startup has to produce a "minimum viable" product. Treatments also do not have to start with human trials.
A New Theme for MetaFilter: Modern
One issue with the str..._s() functions is that the invalid-parameter handler is a global setting - all code that calls the slibc functions and hits an invalid parameter problem will call the handler. This could cause anything from your application code to some random library you never heard of to make your program abort().

I personally don't think this is a big problem, as the kinds of issues that would cause the invalid parameter handler to be called usually are not recoverable no matter where they originate from.

But I can definitely see why the loss of control is technically troubling - those random libraries could be calling set_constraint_handler_s() and thus causing your code to keep running and not abort(), forcing you to rely on your second defense of checking the return values from all the functions.

(There's also a potential political issue with str..._s(), but I won't go into that one.)
What would be the best way to go if using Debian 5 (lenny)?

The only service exposed is ssh, and no one outside the company has an account. Is it still vulnerable through ssh?
Which came directly from MS.
PR Firm Pulls False Flag to Push for Internet Censorship
Inside the collapse of the FCC’s digital infrastructure
Hearthbreaker: An open source Hearthstone simulator for machine learning
When I was at Google this was the single worst problem we had in engineering, at least in terms of engineer-hours consumed. We came up with a bunch of solutions, a few of which (like protobufs) are open-sourced and many of which are just in the heads of the engineers who did them, but there's unfortunately no general solution to the problem. Sometimes I dream about a programming language that has thought through all these issues and includes "evolvability" as a first-class design constraint, but oftentimes these problems show up in multi-process situations where you may be using multiple programming languages.
Why only a 3 line keyboard? Having to use an on-screen keyboardlet for punctuation and #'s seems to detract from the point.

If they were serious about spreadsheets, why not shrink the keyboard horizontally and make the first phone (in a long time?) with a numeric keypad.
Ask HN: Do you use a smartwatch?
http://www.Tradeshift.com is already well into that game IMHO and doing well.
Secure your servers from the bash vulnerability using Ansible
The bit about the Antarctic water "bulb" mining and subsequent sewage dumping to fill the hollow reminded me of a bit of fiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_7_%28novel%29 - not mentioned in the wiki is the part where the underground reservoir for supplies has a moving partition, the other side of which is being filled with sewage.

Ah, cautionary tales ...
They laughed when I took out my Iphone, but when I dropped it
"...the brain to send pain signals to the body..."

Is this wrong or am I missing something?
You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.
You are intimidated by something you don't understand, which is normal. But nothing is easy until you learn how to do it. You're intelligent, and just as capable of doing these things as anyone else. Are you going to walk around your whole life tripping over your shoelaces because learning how to tie them seems hard?
I sent a e-mail to my co-workers containing "...natural English to ask Watson..." and somehow people read it as "You can ask Emma Watson, who is English, a question and she will respond".

And I thought, "...close enough - Watson could answer questions about Emma".
>> "... why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do [piracy]?"

Because in market societies, we have all been trained since birth to find the goods and services we want at the lowest possible price in the market. I feel entitled to buying Wrigley's Doublemint gum for 75 cents instead of 2 bucks, because it's readily available at that price. In this case the price of movies is zero, so people feel entitled to that price.
No comment on the technical stuff, but the paint algorithm applied to the video looks really pretty.
Google Page Rank: What You Know and Don't Know Can Hurt Your Business
Very excited to see how they project their vision (htdp, etc) onto OOP in full details.
Everything I have read about CRPS suggests that it is essentially the same as FMS, i.e. a psychosomatic pain disorder caused by stress. The unexplained weight loss experienced by the patient in this article would also be consistent with this.
Neil Gaiman: ‘Terry Pratchett Isn’t Jolly. He’s Angry’
the easiest way to run it is via the docker container:
https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/beakernotebook/beaker/
Linode can't modify packages; they're signed by the upstream distro. (Unless Linode added a key of their own to your apt keychain (apt-key list), but I've never seen that.)
Yes, and some games needed "Start" as well in the end.

For a real nostalgic magic code, have a read about Xyzzy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy_(computing)
> Inverted mode for displaying cells upside-down (using CATransform) -- a necessary hack for some messaging apps (including ours)

Care to elaborate? Sounds intriguingly crufty.
import os
os.putenv("ANYTHING", "() { :;}; echo bu")
os.system("bash")

If this works (and it does) that means it's enough for a CGI script to invoke bash. It doesn't even have to be written in bash.