skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of situations in which reference cycles would be perfectly sensible (and not at all "sloppy") ways to organize your data if it weren't for reference counting.

For example: suppose you are writing some code that analyses a strategy game. You have (let's say) an object representing a position in the game; each position object has references to the positions you can move from there to. If repeated positions are possible, then you have a reference cycle.

For example: you have a tree-like structure in which things contain other things. It's convenient for each thing to have a reference to its parent, and for each thing to have references to its children. Boom, reference cycles everywhere.

For example: you are implementing a programming language that has closures. So each closure object has a reference to its lexical environment, and some of the things in that environment may themselves be closures defined in that environment. Reference cycles. (The same happens if you have classes, and methods have references to the class where they're defined.)

Of course, all these things can be avoided. Often you can pick some subset of the references (e.g., the parent pointers) and make them weak references, or you can restructure your code to make some of the references go away (e.g., positions don't have references to their successors, they have methods/functions for generating them). But the only reason to do those things is that you need to avoid reference cycles. Refcounting isn't (in these cases) kindly helping you improve your code by forcing you to avoid sloppy constructs; it's taking what would otherwise be perfectly sensible code, making it sloppy, and then forcing you to do something else to avoid the resulting memory leaks.
I think in this case more power might be a good proxy for less complexity: power should correlate positively with expressiveness, and expressiveness should correlate negatively with complexity. More expressiveness lets you build more powerful abstractions with less code.
> I'll chalk this one up to the PR/marketing person

This entire web server is a marketing hype since day one. I imagine they are trying to build a pro product and support company out of this.

It's a web server with event loops and some fancy memory allocation. Shouldn't Node.js have taught us all by now the perils of event loops and insanely tweaked HTTP parsers? Sure, it looks great for "Hello World" benchmarks but falls right on its face as soon as you have an app of significant size spending real time on CPU.
Thanks for the suggestion. We’ll be taking a crack at descender-heavy links [1], so this may come in handy!

[1]: https://github.com/EagerIO/SmartUnderline/issues/1
Two Pieces on Surveillance
A key feature that is missing is having the option to open a private window with all extensions disabled.
To rule out root causes. If the data showed increases and serotonin, decreases in stress hormones and improved sleep quality and the patient still replies "bad" to the question "How do you feel?" Then obviously a serotonin imbalance is not the problem (which is all SSRIs are designed to do).

If the patient still feels bad and the data shows no serotonin change, then the doctor can conclude that maybe serotonin is still the problem, but Zoloft isn't the right drug to fix it (or the dosage was wrong).

In other words, more data = better ability to get a real answer.
If it means you can squeeze more requests/sec out of the free tier of Heroku, I'm all for it!
In the case of Rails, all of your Gems, Rails and application code are loaded pre-fork.
There was an interesting talk during the last HOPE about FOIA requests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIZNcCUDOHg
> The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.

What? That's exactly what happened here.

The Chagossians were forcibly removed, because a government(s) claimed "the right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates". If the Chagossians don't have that right, then no one else can come in and force them out.
We had this one recently too: http://www.thesneakychef.com/free-recipe-no-nut-butter.php

It's made from peas. It's not quite as close to the real thing as the one that's made from soybeans, but it's pretty good.
> I am all for Mars, 100%

I recall a pretty good article shared here a while ago about how Mars makes no sense as a target compared to Mercury. You can put people on the dark/light edge of Mercury and find a pretty good temperature. A tiny solar panel can generate gobs of power. There are minerals worth mining on Mercury.

Because Mars has no magnetosphere all habitable structures will have to be well underground to protect against radiation. It's really not more habitable compared to other solid bodies as you might expect.
It occurred to me that HN may be populated substantially by people without kids or people who are not separated/divorced and I became curious so I thought I'd ask.
Congrats Leftronic! Very well deserved.
You're probably right - even though I think people do want their own bubbles, attempting to provide them might just result in more complaints when the filters inevitably fail.

Then again, there does appear to be a confligt in the way the HN community seems to be growing, with the site itself still geared towards providing a relatively low amount of content through a single channel. Stories overwhelming the site and reposts are a known problem, and probably almost no one bothers watching past the first page of /news so those top 30 slots might as well be the entire site. Although, many of the most obvious remedies to this would make the site look more like reddit, and we can't have that I guess.
I bet NewRelic spent at least $1m on T-Shirts & RC Helicopters
The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up Fight in Age of GPS
I'm digging into cmake, because it's the one supported by clion, and I don't think I'm going back to make.
The federal reserve would then have to create new money to replace what was destroyed or it would cause deflation (which is very bad), so what you're suggesting is equivalent to giving the money to the federal reserve.
Ask HN: What Customer Service do you use?
I'd like to know what customer service helps you give get more organize on knowledge base and in satisfying customer request/issues/troubles.
speaking of linear algebra, i just ran into this oddity: manual affine matrix calc differs from what css-transform computes. why?

http://jsfiddle.net/dfqhw64q/6/
Well said. Basic human rights.
I think the native look and feel is important because the emulated interface always seem to have flaws and added to the training cost of users. Each new version of Windows would bring problems for the emulated interfaces where the tools using the native widgets didn't have the same problem. Worse, something like Squeak which is basically running a foreign OS in a window with garish colors.

I know a lot of enterprise apps go off into the weeds, but their success is driven by external factors. Successful tools really need to appeal to a broad group of developers.

I really think a native widget version of Smalltalk that included the database access could have done a fine job, but it always seemed with Smalltalk that the NIH syndrome was so high and they could build their own things better. Its like they didn't respect any platform they were running on.
Not bad. Might want to check out http://www.mashupbreakdown.com/ and see how they did it.
Google chrome didnt like this download at all, telling me its a virus.
Re: A) You said either trademarks should go away or apple.gripe should become acceptable. Definitely a false dichotomy, but my comment was targeted at either/both of those possibilities.

Re: B) I completely disagree. I frequently visit mail.google.com, and I trust that I'm not getting phished. I'm going purely on the basis of the URL there. I wouldn't feel the same way going to, say, mail.google.me.

In order to trust a URL, you must be sure that your client system isn't compromised (and nothing in between). If it is, you're vulnerable to much worse than phishing. Phishing is likely unnecessary at that point.

It has nothing to do with the URL being secure or insecure. Using web-enabled computers on a daily basis means that we're trusting our systems not to be infected by unknown/undetected malware. We don't have any alternative, so we take the risk.

There are many ways to be slightly more certain that our DNS records haven't been tampered with nowadays, but we're still basically trusting hackable systems all the time.
Amazon's Best Books of 2014
In case you are wondering who is behind it: https://smartystreets.com/
Sweet deal! Looking forward to what's next for the Leftronic product.
First example on that page shows a straightforward solution in under 10 lines of code.

Convert the map values to a slice and then use the stdlib package sort to organize the data.
Nice! I hadn't seen that before.
Foo.Bar with Google?
I was Googling some Python topic when my search results page suddenly split in the middle with some text saying something to the effect of "You speak our language, would you like to take a test?", linking to http://www.google.com/foobar/ .

I followed it and was led to a pseudo-shell, where I then found some coding problems. I can return to the page to continue working on them.

I've searched around and haven't found anyone else talking about this. What is it?
While I agree regarding the revenue growth, as someone who uses the service heavily in production, there is significant lock-in and the product is great value. If they continue to innovate this could be a good bet (one i will consider making personally)
This brought a smile to my face. Dope sneakers tho!
University Presidents Hate This Man
This is an unsolvable problem. As good a job as you're doing, YC is the sponsor of HN and just because of that there will always be this perception. The only way to get rid of this issue would be to completely divorce YC and HN, something that may for a variety of reasons not be possible and for a whole pile of other reasons not be desirable.

You're doing an absolutely super job, probably far better than most or all of us here will ever realize simply because moderation when done properly is all but invisible so don't sweat it, this is a thing that is as far as I can see not solvable in the current set-up. Those lines were drawn long before you showed up and within those lines you're doing the best you can.

FWIW I too recall several instances of users that were banned imho unjustly as well as some threads where the pro-YC bias broke through but over the vast amount of content generated here those are very very few instances, not by far enough to claim systematic bias or to be used as evidence for some nefarious plot. More like genuine mistakes and things done in the heat of the moment. And on later reflection some of those were reverted.

(If you want I can probably dig them up for you but you're busy enough as it is.)
This Vox NetNeutrality article is wrong
Not really -- the direct parent of my comment was making the point that ethics are indeed a reason to obey prisoner's dietary desires. As I pointed out -- they are not.
> It seems the surveillance state is more often used against us than for us for a variety of reasons, mostly due to corruption, which we still don't have a fix for

There is no fix for "corruption".

Imagine there's a ruler with only one subject. Would someone inevitably ask him for a favour? "Could you have your peon mow my lawn? -I'll buy you a beer some time!"

Would the ruler want more subjects? -Of course! It just means more benefits for him, more opportunities for making money at his subjects' expense! The possibilities are limitless!

Now take a bunch of rulers with 320 million subjects. Would Comcast ask them to make it difficult to compete with them? Competition is bothersome you know. It forces you to provide better quality at lower prices, even though you'd much rather just fleece a captive audience!

"Corruption" is a bit of a misnomer. It sounds like something is wrong, but actually it's just an element of a system with rulers and subjects working as intended.

> There's no shortage of stories of homeowners or landlords with videos of vandals and robbers only to be told to piss off. The police don't want to mess with the gangs unless they have to or it looks bad if there are too many minority arrests that month.

You're seeing another aspect of the system working as intended.

If you're a ruler, do you really care about your subjects' well-being? -Of course not. You'll pretend you do because you need them to refrain from overthrowing you, but your subjects are just tools to you.

Your "Royal Guard" (=the police) are meant to protect your power and to enforce your edicts, not to help your subjects. They behave accordingly.
The Science of 'Interstellar': Black Holes, Wormholes and Space Travel
How would one use this on Heroku? It doesn't support static file transfers allegedly... and per Heroku they require your app server to serve them by default.

https://github.com/heroku/rails_12factor#rails-4-serve-stati...

Any ideas?
"The Player of Games" is one of my favorite books.

It's such a shame that we lost him last year while still quite young - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks
I still doubt good quality macaroni causes people to get out of prison and not steal more cars.
I spent some time curating a hacker news thread, it's one of the most read posts I ever put together:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+To+Sell+Your+Company

It's a bit more nuts-and-bolts than Justin's (excellent) post here, add to taste for best results.
I'm the author of the packet editor Hexcap. http://www.hexcap.org

Hexcap is an ncurses packet hex editor and generator, and it's open source. It uses the dpkt library for packet encap and decap, as well as dnet and pypcap for capturing and transmission. It's probably not as fancy as WireEdit, but then again the intended audience is different. I started writing Hexcap, in ESR's terms, to scratch my own itch.

I'm a grad student which means Hexcap goes for long periods without updates. But when breaks roll around I usually find time to hack on it. If this kind of thing interests you, I'd be interested in hearing about your opinion of Hexcap. Typical FOSS disclaimers applying, YMMV.
Yeah I agree, I am however somewhat surprised that they didn't manage to provide him with vegan meals. I mean it shouldn't be that difficult im sure they already offer vegetarian alternatives.

Very interesting show!
Font to help dyslexic people
Science Says Lasting Relationships Come Down to 2 Basic Traits
Its not just Uber, I often get "reminded" of an upcoming quality survey where anything less than perfect is equivalent to a tragedy.

I believe this is yet another case of managers using data without actually taking the time to understand the domain, or use it to identify problems and develop solutions. The approach seems to be nothing more than a facade of customer service.
Your claims:

1)"destroys the split between client/server that allows a diverse set of clients to exist"

2)"destroys the ability for clients to be versioned independently of the server"

3)"destroys the ability for clients to manage data in a way that it can't be read/captured/stolen by the server"

In response:

1) One could create any number of clients to interact with backend software that they control.

2) No idea what you are talking about here; perhaps you can explain more specifically the problem. I don't think this matters. At all.

3) The whole idea is that the user controls the client and server so the data is supposed to be able to be read.

All in all, I'm curious what a solution to the privacy issue would look like that would satisfy your criteria. Any proposals?
More time for Scrabble, hopefully? ;)
I don't find it pragmatic to revise history, I don't believe the Native Americans should get .us
Driving while tired (including driving for too long without a break) is careless. If you are tired enough, I believe the impact on your reactions can approach that of you being tipsy.

I have driven after working 30ish hours straight and think it's something best avoided.
Is Y Combinator a slave trade?

No.

Don't trivialize the slave trade so you can make a weak rhetorical critique of YC.
It's not. I use Chrome all the time. It may be the zip file which spooks it. The zip contains an .msi file + a folder with pcap examples. If you wait a couple of hours, I'll put a separate .msi for download.
Who is more dangerous? The traffic moving at 70 mph (which is 5 mph over the legal limit) or the car that merges into that traffic at 40 mph? In my view one is doing something technically illegal while the other is doing something technically legal but batshit insane. An automated system would ticket all the safe drivers in this scenario.

"People who can't drive safely" and people who can't drive "within the law" are two separate groups with limited overlap. And I 100% reject to your idea that they "don't have to drive at all." Driving is a necessity. (And if it isn't, let's get those idiot drivers off the road...)

Complying with "public safety measures" is not the same as driving safely. Everyone has a responsibility to do the latter and should not be penalized for it for not doing the former. I keep away from other cars and stay with the flow of traffic. That makes me a safer driver (even if traffic is doing 5-10 mph over the limit) than the guys who drive right next to each other doing the speed limit or less.

Electronic tracking doesn't keep us safer. Case in point: The shortening of yellow light timings beyond legal limits in order to increase revenues from red light cameras.

And even those red light cameras we have now have humans making all the decisions. I've triggered those cameras many, many times while making perfectly legal right turns on red.
This is an excellent point; reality-show-manufactured drama would rob this achievement of the gravitas it deserves. Humans are given to pettiness on occasion, it would be a tragedy to elevate and preserve those petty moments when memorializing a new human epoch.
Hey everyone, any feedback on my site/idea appreciated..
That is, if it doesn't get denied for supposed "National Security" reasons like most of us who filed FOIA's for our data out of the NSA.

(the secret with FOIA's is that the government still gets to decide if they want to release the information)

I, like most, got a blanket denial from my senator (D. Dianne Feinstein) via email stating they cannot disclose whether or not they have any data about me.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/06/1221694/-NSA-Reject...
I'm about halfway through the Culture novels. The stories provide so much to consider/discuss and I highly recommend them.

The thought Banks continually returns to in this interview is how as a species to overcome xenophobia. I think this problem should be overcome before people start building true AI, because just imagine xenophobic AI.

A great interview. Now I can't wait to pick up the next Culture book!
zoho offers free email for a domain with up to 10 users. i tried using pawnmail, i think it's better to use zoho because of the mail forwarding feature.
Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/217/
Ask HN: Where can I find a good tech/marketing writer?
I'm looking for someone who can fill in some content on our homepage, maybe 4-6 small paragraphs and some bullet points. I'm a programmer and I've tried filling it with content and I don't think my writing skills are up to the task, and dont put the product in the light it should be.

I need someone who can understand our product from a technical view but also offer skills that can sell and market the product.

If theres someone on here that is interested, or can point me in a direction of someone or service who could do that, I would be very grateful. Keep in mind this is a pretty small job and would need to be affordable.

Please email me jasoneswan @ gmail or reply here.
If nothing else, it would be nice if learning about this inspired those who own .io domains to contribute to a fund for the Chagossian people. I'd certainly match the $60 I paid to register my domain to a support organization if I could find one that looked legit.
Curing cancer may not be limited by money alone, there are some things about cancer that make it extremely hard to eradicate. Think of it this way: you can probably reduce the incidence of cancer (but not of all varieties), you can possibly cure cancer with mechanisms that we can theorize about but which we have no practical implementation of, nor do we have a path to such a practical implementation where money would be accelerator to get us from where we are to that implementation (for instance: repairing and/or excising cells using nano bots, easy to think about, very hard, possibly impossible to implement).

Finally, the better you get at repairing cancers the more cancers you will be repairing because as we age our cells copying mechanisms age as well and that's one possible source of cancer. So cure one cancer, cause the organism to live longer and deal with a whole bunch more.

Cancer is to some degree systemic, it is a side effect of the way our bodies work. I'm holding out for a cure or even a vaccin for HIV/Aids but I'm skeptical on a 'cure for cancer', even though having such a thing would obviously be good.
This situation doesn't really seem like it's "history" in the same sense, considering it happened so recently, governments are still actively working against them as they attempt repatriation, and the TLD issue is fresh.
Why not let the cops simple shoot the man once convicted ? Isn't that retribution, deterrence and prevention all in one ?

People should know a-priori the consequences of their actions. Otherwise it is very likely that there is will be manny shitty prisons and some VIP cool prisons.
Give Me Bare-Metal
$40 is expensive for a domain.
I think it's a great company but their risk factors section in their filing is fairly alarming:

- We have a history of losses and we expect our revenue growth rate to decline. As our costs increase, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve and sustain profitability.

- These investments may not result in increased revenue or growth of our business. We also expect that our revenue growth rate will decline over time. Accordingly, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to offset our expected cost increases and to achieve and sustain profitability. If we fail to achieve and sustain profitability, our operating results and business would be harmed.
Philae Lander Nears a Cosmic Touchdown
I don't find it useful to play Human Rights abuse Top Trumps.
I lived on Bitcoin for 24 hours
I feel compelled to add: the accusation seems baseless. Over the several years I've been participating in these forums I cannot remember a single instance of anyone getting hellbanned or otherwise penalized just for criticizing a YC company.
If you submit a FOIA request on yourself you will probably be denied.

FOIA Requests are only for organizations, businesses, investigations, historical events, incidents, groups, or deceased persons.

Privacy Act Requests are for yourself. You must include Form DOJ-361 or equivalent when submitting.