skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could just try it. It won't take long to adjust to, and you can stick to basic things so that you will be no less productive compared to working in any basic text editor. There are some things that you will have get used to in order to be able to use it at all, such as the seemingly archaic kill/yank functionality that is used instead of copy/cut/paste. And of course you want to test drive some of the more advanced features, to get a feel for what is possible in Emacs. But the point is that you can ease into these things; you won't get easily lost or overwhelmed.

What you should perhaps be more concerned about is whether you will be able to go back to a plain text editor, once and if you choose to go down this rabbit hole..
Interesting. My reading of the 9.4 docs[1][2] is that set_config can't be used to change one-off settings that require a server restart, such as wal_level. It also doesn't seem to be able to change the config file at all. Is there some way to do that?

I'd also like to know more about how superusers can overwrite files. Do you have a link?

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/functions-admin.ht...
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/runtime-config-wal...
Looking for Ex-startup Founder to Lead 42Floors (YC W12) in New York
the "positive/negative" spectrum is meant to apply to possible outcomes reflected by the emotions - not the emotions themselves. An emotion like anger typically arises when lots of new negative (unwanted, undesired) possibilities appear newy likely, or lots of desired or 'good' possibilities disappear.

For example, suppose you were going home and upon pulling onto your street, you see the house is on fire. This is probably something you "don't want" - and the SoP model suggests that the negative emotion you experience corresponds to your internal estimate of 'likely events' being updated.

I realize that for most people, the explanation of "well if your house burns down, you'll be angry" seems kind of fatuous. The point of the model is to try to find an underlying thread or consistency to emotional experiences. Yes, it's "obvious" that seeing your house burn down will make a person angry.

What's the relationship between seeing your house burn down, having your best friend cheat on you with your partner, and then finding out that lawsuit was filed against you - aside from "they will all make you mad?"

Anyone can say "its obvious that those will make you angry", but the things we found "obvious" in mathematics for thousands of years turned out to be covering up a very complex situation.

The underlying thread that I see in all of those above situations, aside from them inducing anger - is that they all will cause the person experience them to reduce the probably of positive outcomes they predicted for living in the house, their relationships with their friends and partners, and their finances and time.

For each one of those situations, if you go through the 'set of possible outcomes eliminated' and then try to eliminate them _before_ the 'anger inducing event' occurs, suddenly the event doen't make you angry any more. Playing with the 'set of expected outcomes' seems to directly impact the anticipated emotional response.

If you had already planned to move out of your house, and packed everything up - none of your stuff was damaged, you suffer no financial loss, and insurance recoups everythign you need. Any lingering unpleasantness you feel can be attributed to a reduce sense of 'saftey' or an increased estimate that the house will burn down - but by removing the chance that you planned on staying in that house for years, or that you had a bunch of stuff in there that was destroyed - the emotional sting goes down.

Your friend cheating on you with your partner - that one is much harder to 'prepare' as having zero expectations for the future' - could a friend really be your friend if you didn't plan to be with them? So try the opposite, them - it stings much harder if it's your best friend you've had for 40 years, and your spouse of 30, than if it's a someone you just met and enjoyed spending time with, and a partner you just started dating. Again - this is "OBVIOUS" to most neurotypicals - and so they wouldn't bother explaining to themselves "ok here is why this is." As someone with a very intense emotional history, i wanted to understand the patterns underlying these phenomena.
Similar to my model, which is itself quite intuitive to someone who likes economic modelling: I like to think of emotion as a function of the change in the expected discounted sum of lifetime utility.

First, utility is a measure satisfaction at any point of time, which can be a function of many variables, including relationships, food, wealth etc.

Discounted utility means that changes in soon satisfaction levels have a higher impact than changes in satisfaction that are still a long time away.

And the fact that I use the expected value of the function allows for biases abd inconsistencies, which are obviously very frequently observed.

[EDIT: typo]
I thought 1.6 (repeating-key xor) was the hardest one prior to set 6 and I'm guessing many thousands made it through that one!
> JavaScript will always be the (or, a) scripting language for the browser, and if something new emerges, we will all have plenty of time to prepare.

Thing is - what if it already emerged, but you missed that?
It sounds like something coming from a really weird misunderstanding of Java and its perf characteristics. For most Java projects, immutable, semantically-useful objects make a lot of sense (indeed, Scala does this all over the place). For a game, not so much; you're going to end up object-thrashing all day and unlike on the web you have very hard latency requirements that make this extremely undesirable.
For some (usually specialized) languages, emacs is easily the best IDE/editor, so if you want to use one of them, give it a try. Its key combinations are less ergonomic than vim's, so you should definitely spend some time configuring your keyboard if you're going to try it. (I'm being serious.)
Yes, the scale at which _some_ industries are performed is changing, especially those based entirely on information access (e.g., travel agents).

But that's often even larger single-point monopoly point of control: Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Banking would be another instance.

What's changed is that while there are still tremendous economies of scale, the holder of that control point has far less security in their tenancy.

Yes, the changes for those directly involved in these firms -- founders, financiers, and the relatively small numbers of employees -- are fairly large.

But at the level of everyday life, the benefits are still pretty slim.
On the opposite side, there is http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
"the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
This kind of thing is where I really hate the big GC systems, the JVM and the CLR. Many times, a ton of efficiency could be gained with some simple tricks. For instance, "OO style" code really loves newing up objects, even if they're simple containers. In .NET, this means a heap allocation and garbage, even if the little object is immediately picked apart and never used again.

Example, the String.Split function takes an array of chars to split on. So every time split is called, normally, a new heap alloc happens for no good reason. Functions should be able to provide some simple "pure" annotation and let callers stackalloc. In fact, the CLR already supports this - it's just super cumbersome to get at. The JVM supposedly can do this in JIT, but this post seems to indicate it's not effective.

Secondly, it seems there it often a unit of work where you could allocate from an arena, and then throw it all away together. I know this is more involved, as something could leak out by accident in code. But perhaps the arena could be a hint to the GC "if nothing points into this entire arena dump it in one chunk". Maybe GCs are too fast to benefit from this.

Really, it's s bit if what Rust will accomplish with the borrow checker. I know for a fact (measured) that adding a bit of such management to .NET would be a major boon in certain high allocation scenarios.

Edit: The evangelism around these languages doesn't help. There's a big push to leave it to the JIT, that the runtime knows best. But in truth, they seem to still have fairly suboptimal codegen. Even inlining is poorly handled. For some idiotic reason, they still JIT, and have to make a time/speed tradeoff. Even if it's an program that you're going to execute repeatedly, the installer has to go out if it's way to pre compile. And even then, the pre compiler doesn't do a lot more, and MS warns people it might be worse, because the runtime knows best. I guess no credible competition leads to not putting tons of resources on things.
> I'm skeptical of the "financial security" claim.

I guess it depends on how you define 'reasonable financial security'. As someone in the US, I define financial security as having a couple month's pay in the bank, and a retirement plan of some sort, while making enough money every month to pay the mortgage and the bills and have some left over to spend on entertainment, then it is doable, even in the US.

A mediocre developer who has a bit of experience, making $75k/yr anywhere but San Francisco or New York, could afford to be in the situation I describe.

What does 'reasonable financial security' look like elsewhere?
See the updated blog again. It seems issue is with Clang/LLVM on MacOSX. I reran the test on Linux with Gnu g++ and it outperforms Java.
Show HN: Newslines – The Paul Graham Story
> - All internal methods which used parameters (x, y, z) are now converted to one parameter (BlockPos) which is immutable. So if you need to check another position around the current one you have to allocate a new BlockPos or invent some object cache which will probaby be slower. This alone is a huge memory waste.

In other words, Java desperately needs value types so that this kind of simple abstraction needn't cause any overhead.
For what it's worth, I learned Emacs out of my desire to learn Clojure. It didn't take too long to develop the muscle memory (a few months of forcing myself to use it). Now, 6 or so years later, I use Emacs for essentially all ad-hoc text editing jobs, and of course Clojure dev. I love using it for my shell (M-x shell) - being able to move about the shell buffer w/out limit is very liberating.

I also do a lot of iOS development, and, I do 95% of editing in Xcode, and 5% in Emacs. A nice thing about Emacs is, if you're on a Mac, is that Mac OS uses most of Emacs' movement keybindings, so even when I'm in Xcode (or any other app for that matter), I can still use my Emacs muscle memory.

I'm not that young; 6 years ago I was 30, and I'm very happy I decided to learn Emacs; no regrets. It's still paying dividends today and will continue to for the foreseeable future.
For some reason I think of X-ray crystallography: A large number of different pictures go into reaching a conclusion which is much simpler to convey.
Exploration, Vision, and Risk [video]
High Altitude Balloon Keeps Going
Exactly, the wikipedia articles for BREACH and CRIME are good starting points if nothing else.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREACH_(security_exploit)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME
The Internet of Things Chip Gets a New Spectrum
It looks like we stone people to death less and don't burn witches and less likely to put your penis inside a metal tube to prevent masturabation.

Now, if somebody would teach more people not to put their dirty feet on seats that would be nice.

I definitely like your argument that all of those old books were written as a life rulebook, but it got kinda carried away after and I think we're due for update, like bible 2.0 or something.
They were doctors at MSF:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/world/africa/ebola.html?_r...
This is interesting and counter to my intuitions. Care to elaborate or point to references so I can educate myself? =)
Thank you for changing the title! The original one is cute now, but would freak me out otherwise.
Your assumption for those numbers is that it will keep doubling everywhere it goes, correct? For example, Nigeria seems to have stamped it out in Lagos, refuting the idea that it automatically breaks out exponentially in "3rd World urban environments".
Do not compress chosen and/or known plaintext. The compression ratio alone reveals information about the data. i.e., how similar the unknown data is to the known data.

> compressed data should not be encrypted?

That's really tricky to answer simply. "No" might be taken to mean you should store compressed data unencrypted, which would be much worse. Nor do you have to decompress already compressed data before encrypting. But if somebody hands you data to encrypt and store, don't compress it as part of the encrypting phase.
Sounds a lot cleaner to me to pass around Point or BlockInfo than separate xyz. Imagine a function that determines which of two blocks wins when sitting on top of a third one. 3 args instead of 12 or something. I can quickly see it being cleaner.

It's just a sad effect that the JIT is too stupid to optimize. There's no good reason dist(pointA, pointB) should be any slower than dist(ax,ay,az,bx,by,bz).
A large percentage of Americans participate in religious activities without even knowing it, but these results are pretty typical given how these surveys are usually conducted.
It also makes this claim, which seems suspect[1]:

>So if you need to check another position around the current one you have to allocate a new BlockPos or invent some object cache which will probaby be slower. This alone is a huge memory waste.

[1] or expose .equals(x,y,z) (assuming BlockPos is just an object wrapper around [x,y,z]). Granted, it kinda defeats the purpose of a completely-encapsulated object, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do when it comes to performance.
By your assertion, morally and ethically we're worse off without religion. That is an incredibly difficult stance to defend over the long term.

The problem with morality as prescribed by religion is that the authority on morality is provided by some ephemeral being whose wants and desires can only be gleaned from texts written thousands of years ago. Even if we accept that the Christian God is real (as requested by your lead in), we have no way to refine our understanding of his definition of morality under the religious model. We can only rely on the texts. These same texts prescribe things like stoning women who cheat on their husbands. These texts were "canonized" by a group of men who decided what was and wasn't the bible.

To posit that this is the best possible basis for a rational system of morals (to prevent things like tax fraud no less) is either not very well thought out or willfully acting in opposition to thousands of years of well documented behavior on the part of religious worshipers.
> better web browser

Hah, seems like an argument for vim.
We founded InView Technology with a few of the professors heading up Compressive Sensing research at Rice. We make Short Wave Infrared cameras with these techniques utilizing DLP chips. We also sell research platforms.

Our website is a bit thin but we have experience with imaging at XGA and 1080p. The spatial-temporal dimensions of the data with this sensor are quite different from pin-hole FPA imagers. You can trade off spatial resolution and temporal resolution with more freedom than readout ICs. You can also skip the image and go straight to information measurements for pattern/event matching.
I don't see any reason to believe that is the case. I think a more logical explanation would be that consumers aren't gonna buy a new iPad every year. I bought an iPad 2 for my parents and they're still using it to this day and have no issues with it. Maybe next year I will get them an updated version. But if you look at the iPhone, most people are on a 2 year upgrade schedule.
This is 4 years old, and I suspect Apple's position has only improved since then, but see http://fortune.com/2010/08/07/big-macs-on-campus/ . To your "dueling anecdotes" point, it's also clear from this article that some universities are much more Mac-centric than others, given that one survey of 5 universities showed 70% of incoming freshmen came with Macs.
These threads are amazing. I thought this was a reasonable explanation of my problem with this, and an attempt to show why people disagree, and how we can empathize better. But I get downmodded with no response. Is my opinion really so stupid that it doesn't deserve a response or to be read by anyone else? Is the idea that these things should be opt-in (or much more transparent), to protect privacy, so foreign, that I'm assumed to be trolling or merely anti-Apple if I espouse it? I expected at least "That's your ideological position on opt-in vs. opt-out, on which we simply disagree."

Maybe people got the message, irreconcilably disagree, and are sick of reading it again. I don't know why you'd still be in the thread, then.
I spent 9 years at IBM and learned that, indeed,
IBM does listen to its customers and try to
give them what they want. But I also learned
an unwritten rule: Customers should not call
on a Wednesday because that ruins two weekends.

At one point, Gerstner said "IBM is the most
inwardly directed, process oriented, arrogant
company" he ever saw. Well, likely it still is.

Once I got an offer from IBM but turned it down,
but with the offer came some advice: "You might
think that IBM is an electronics company or a
computer company, but you'd be wrong. IBM is a
marketing company. IBM would get into the grocery
business tomorrow if they saw a good business
opportunity.

You might think that in IBM research comes up with
new ideas, manufacturing turns them into products,
and marketing sells them. Then you would have
everything exactly backwards. Instead, marketing
sees what they can sell at a profit and has manufacturing
make it, and manufacturing goes to research if they
need help.

What a product sells for is what the
customer is willing to pay, and that has nothing
to do with what it cost to make the product. In
good cases, the profit margin is large, but at times
it may even be negative."

Once I met with some guys who were doing some
data analysis for the CEO and top level managers.
Their explanation was that long the top managers
would meet each year, announce their great results,
predict even better results for the next year,
and then beat those predictions. Then, for no
obvious reason, at the annual meetings the
top managers were not meeting their predictions,
and that went on and on, for years. The only
explanation was that God had ceased to smile
on IBM."

Sure, IBM could have done Google. IBM Research was
long just awash in people who could have done
Google as a fast toy off the backs of their hands.
But had they done so, manufacturing and marketing
would have ignored the results. Marketing just would not
have seen any big, traditional IBM customers in
bank and insurance company back office paper
pushing asking for a Google. Instead, a Google-like
product in Research would have had to have been
championed by the CEO or just left to die -- no one
else with any product authority would ever touch
any such thing.

Google? Well, that's about the Internet. Okay,
early on the Internet was ARPANet. Later it was
NSFNet, and then, or about then, it was run for NSF by IBM. So,
right, in the early days of the Internet, IBM
literally was running the whole thing. Or
they had the ball in their hands and an open
field to the goal line but all by themselves
fumbled the ball, dropped the ball, tripped over
the ball, fell on the ball, lost the ball, and
ended up face down in the mud. Bill Gates,
Larry Ellison, Page and Brin, Zuck, Bezos,
etc. picked up the ball.
Emacs (and eww) can look much better than that.

On my Mac for example, the text in Emacs is just as good looking (and in fact is indistinguishable from) the text in a native Apple application like TextEdit or Terminal.app.

Either the resolution of this screenshot has been scaled down in a way that makes diagonal lines jagged, or this particular Emacs has been configured not to use anti-aliasing of text.

Some Linux users prefer or at least are used to it that way.

On X, anti-aliasing (in the form of XFT) did not become available in an Emacs release till the relatively late date of Jul 2009. (It became available in pre-release versions of Emacs about 15 months before then.)
They actually reference this in the article as the source of inspiration. Its clear that neither of you read it.
xkcd is a pretty great programming language. You draw the feature that you want, and then the internets implements it somewhere, somehow.
Show HN: Pixate now free for academic use
Our guarantee to the customer with regard to the upgrade process is that we will use our best efforts and accumulated knowledge to make the right decisions about how to manage the thorny questions around the upgrade process, to which there are no universally correct solutions, so that they don't have to do so.

Of course, it's very easy to say some nice-sounding words like that. The real evidence can only be demonstrated over time, after many successive trials, through building up an ongoing relationship of trust with our customers and repeatedly demonstrating that we make the right calls most of the time.

With regards to breaking Postgres changes specifically, they are rare and almost always announced well in advance, giving us ample time to message the users, prepare them, and manage the transition.

I see this stage of the database market as analogous to e-mail in the early 2000s. At the time, most people read e-mail delivered by a custom Sendmail, Postfix, or Outlook installation. Many felt that the numerous gritty details of running an e-mail server meant that every site needed its own mail daemon, customized to its particular needs.

There were a few email-as-a-service offerings like Hotmail, but many admins felt they were too limited for serious business use cases.

It turns out that most businesses actually just needed GMail -- a really well done email-as-a-service platform. Sure, there are still some places that really do need a custom e-mail setup, and they continue to use custom software. For 80% of all businesses, though, a Google Apps GMail account is more than adequate. They trust that GMail's admins will make the right call. We aim to do the same for databases.
On potential therapeutic strategies for Ebola
Wish I had more than one upvote to give!
I think this thread is my best shot at getting this question answered.. I've been using Emacs 23.x for the last several years because the buffer-switcher behavior changed in Emacs 24 and I have no idea how (or if it's even possible) to get the previous behavior back?

In Emacs 23 and below (for as long as I've used Emacs), I would change buffers by hitting F10-b (F10 brings up menu, b is shortcut for Buffers).

Then there is a nice little list of open buffers and the first letter of the filename is usually the shortcut to switch to that buffer.

This made it really fast to switch back and forth between multiple files (I want to go to index.html == F10-b-i ; now I want to switch back to about.html == F10-b-a), it was very simple.

Emacs 24 changed that behavior and so the quick switching between buffers based on the first letter of their filename went away.

Does anyone else know what I'm talking about? Is it possible to get the previous behavior in 24? I'm slowly finding packages that won't compile in Emacs 23 anymore b/c they depend on new Emacs 24 elisp functions. I only ever use Emacs from inside a terminal (emacs -nw), so that's why I'm navigating buffers by the F10 menu.

EDIT: Well, I may be an idiot. I just downloaded the latest 24 build and it seems to be working as before again! Not sure when this changed, but maybe this is now a non-issue. I feel a bit silly, but maybe this will help someone else?
Marc Andreesen getting trolled by Paul Krugman, a modern master of trolling.