skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the comment regarding the Born Rule, which is indeed a deep objection.

A further objection is aimed ad the claim that "we can be in a superposition" and it is: "If we can be in a superposition, why aren't we aware of it?"

This is a general question that any interpretation of QM must answer, and none does, which comes down to: "Why is there a classical world at all?"

There is a sense in which every interpretation of QM is an attempt to answer this question, but none do.

Decoherence, for example, simply asserts that we cannot be aware of quantum effects except via interference phenomena. Why not? Why can't we be directly conscious of the various incoherent components of the wavefunction in the same sense of directly that I am directly conscious of my cat sitting beside me? [1] I don't have to do any fancy interferometry or statistical inference to be aware of the cat, so why do I have to mess about with statistics and interferometry to be aware of the wavefunction, given I myself am described by one?

The fact that my multiple incoherent states do not interfere with each other is irrelevant unless you have some reason to believe that it is only via coherent interactions (interferecne patterns) that the wavefunction manifests itself to consciousness, and why would that be?

When I measure a gamma decay why am I aware of an event at a moment in time rather than a continuous probability wave? Likewise, why can't I be conscious of the wholistic universe that Many Worlds implies?

I've focused on consciousness here because there is no doubt we are directly aware of the classical world but are only indirectly aware of the quantum world, but there is very little reason to believe there is anything particularly special about consciousness in this regard. More likely, the brain, body, planet, etc, all "partake in" classical physics, none of which makes any sense from a quantum perspective.

That is: if all you knew about was quantum mechanics, you would never come up with Born's Rule or anything like it because you would never have any reason to talk about the results of classical measurement. You would not be aware than anything like classical measurement could exist.

So if we believe that QM is somehow foundational or fundamental to the classical world (and who doesn't?) then the fact that it gives no indication that the classical world even exists is something of a problem.

[1] To belabour the point: I do not mean "direct" in any Cartesian sense, but simply that there is a perfectly ordinary causal relationship between my cat and my awareness of my cat, which is quite different from my awareness of wavefunctions, which can only be via indirect means. We might have any number of additional senses, but all of them would be direct in this sense: none of them would allow me the immediate, simultaneous perception of a photon travelling through both slits at once. As Feynman said: this is the fundamental mystery.
stylefruits uses Clojure almost exclusively these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv4slaRydRM
Pretty much everyone actually thinks black holes are real.

IANAP.
Great post, thank you! Going to be embarking on that journey soon as I'm finishing up my own book (http://hellowebapp.com). Great breakdown of the process, and your thoughts/mistakes. The first thing I thought when I saw your initial grid was that there was going to be problems with reading text near the spine. Great job catching that and getting the finished version looking great!
I find unhealthy this obsession with "making a difference", more precisely the way it is often interpreted as it is in this article.

Voting is the essence of democracy. If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time. It makes a difference in how you take part in the decision making, how you are a citizen.

Concluding that "On average, a voter in America
had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election." can not be understood any other way than "your individual vote is useless", and it is completely ignoring the roots of democracy: every one vote counts the same as all the others.

You do not vote to "make a[n individual] difference", but to participate in a collective decision. Voting it is a collective act, not an individual one.
>Why does no one talk about Many-Worlds?

Because it is metaphysics: it generates no predictions that are not generated by some other interpretation of quantum mechanics.
He’s Glad You Asked
Ask HN: What browsers are devs at top web companies using?
I'm guessing Google employees, as a population, strongly tend to use Google Chrome as their primary browser.

Out of curiousity, if you do development work at a company whose product has a strong web presence, eg. Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, etc. (not Uber, Snapchat, etc.), what browser do you and your colleagues primarily use?

Cheers.
There aren't any known collisions for either of those algorithms.
The Semantic Web is developing a technology, like the Web is a technology. It is something that aims to be used by people, so to be implemented in real systems. Therefore it aims at giving smth to the industry. The theoretical argument of the semweb is absolutely meaningless.

Physicists study law of nature, there is no such thing in the Web which is a deeply human field. It's quite an insult for Einstein to be compared to the Semantic Web ...
SHA-1 can be considered near-broken at this point¹, as far as I remember. No actual successful attack like with MD5, but close enough to be theoretically possible in the foreseeable future.

There was fear that the attacks could be extended to SHA-2, thus we now have SHA-3 too. However, SHA-2 remains secure for now.

_____

¹ Wikipedia: »As of 2012, the most efficient attack against SHA-1 is considered to be the one by Marc Stevens[34] with an estimated cost of $2.77M to break a single hash value by renting CPU power from cloud servers.« I.e. it's quite expensive, but can be done in a reasonable time, especially by adversaries with interest and funds to do so.
A Short Letter to Everyone
Is there any chance the code snippets translated to other languages, such as Rust (when it hits 1.0) & JavaScript?

I saw that the Command pattern has JS snippets and Prototype talks about JS, but most patterns don't seem to talk about JS.

BTW, JS is a prototypical language wrapped in classical syntax. That syntax exists because of Sun & Java's intervention. I find that using most of the language constructs there lead to more brittle code than writing it yourself. Object.create() might not have been in the language since the beginning, but it's here now, and it's what should be used.

"You don’t see many games where each monster is a unique snowflake, like “sort of halfway between a troll and a goblin with a bit of snake mixed in”."

You don't see many games where that's the case because classical programming makes it hard to do that. Programming with classes makes you think of homogenous classes of stuff, and that leads to homogenous stuff.
I work for ThoughtWorks and we have a number of client's who use Clojure in production. This is one example from Australia - http://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/ioof
Shift work dulls your brain – report
> The first thing I thought when I saw your initial grid was that there was going to be problems with reading text near the spine.

First time around is always a learning experience. What's funny is I measured the inner margin distance on a couple of books and also followed CreateSpace's guidelines but I guess I tried to push the limit a bit too much.
Stanford MBAs in tech are fucking weird. I worked with a few, and had one for a CEO for 2 years. The gist of it is that they all sucked at tech but thought they didn't (trying to manage engineering teams in ridiculous micromanagy self important ways), were all very self centered, and all came from very wealthy families, being able to raise a few hundred thousands from "friends and family" (!?) and spending 4 day weekends in Tahoe and LA even though "we're bootstrapping so I'm only taking $30k a year right now".

I know, I know, anecdote != data. Having talked about it with friends, I know I'm not alone. I even see it mentioned in HN comments every once in a while (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083219).
I second that. I'm so used to VI that I literally felt like a fish out of water when editing code with 'vanilla' Visual Studio. VsVim has saved my butt; I'd be lost without VsVim.

Now, with VsVim, I get the best of both worlds: IDE functionalities like refactoring, and excellent code completion, and the familiar VI key-bindings to edit the code.
This Time Isn’t Different
Cool, it's something that Microsoft SQL Server (Enterprise edition) offers out of the box (Peer-2-Peer replication). The only problem with P2P replication is that, at large scale, requires massive amounts of bandwidth to keep everything synced, and it gets worse the more nodes you add.
Pretty much everyone actually thinks black holes are real.
I am a physicist.
I also give my thanks. This was very helpful for me at the beginning of the year.
We use Clojure, ClojureScript and Datomic at https://www.cognician.com.

I wrote recently about our newer generation efforts here: http://www.stuttaford.me/2014/09/24/app-and-dev-services-wit...
No one has yet shown that SHA-1 collisions are possible, as with this MD5 technique, but it's known that SHA-1 isn't as strong against potential attacks as it was designed-to-be.

That knowledge has driven adoption of SHA-2, and was partial motivation for the (completed in 2012) competition to design SHA-3. I don't believe any weaker-than-designed problems have yet been found with the SHA-2 family.

In 2012, Bruce Schneier reported on an analysis by Jesse Walker of Intel about when SHA-1 collisions might be practical to create:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/when_will_we_...

That analysis suggests: "A collision attack is therefore well within the range of what an organized crime syndicate can practically budget by 2018, and a university research project by 2021."

But it also notes non-commodity approaches (GPUs, custom chips, etc) could achieve SHA-1 collisions sooner/cheaper.
These thefts that are occurring over tor are almost definitely using Poodle
This does not account for the full effect of the act of voting. The greatest influence on human behavior is the behavior of other humans. By voting you are making voting the standard of your community, and those who vote because of your encouragement likewise encourage others. Consider how much easier it would be to not vote if your best friend says he won't, or how isolated you might feel if all your friends vote.

Behaviors within communities can change rapidly, sometimes as a chain reaction to obscure individuals - studies show that "influencers" do not have all that much more influence than anyone else. Your vote could influence thousands of others to vote, who in turn could influence millions.

Your vote may not matter, but the act of voting does matter.
“Dancing Iridescence” Lian Li PC-Q30 by Mosquito, PART 3, Final
I think he was referring to Hawking radiation - which is far more controversial in physics circles and a major WTF idea for non-physicists - and other theoretical black-hole behavior, not existence of black holes themselves.
Library of free stock photos that can be used commercially
Every time you map a large set to a smaller set, you are bound to have collisions[1]. In other words, all hashing algorithms which map input data to a bounded string will have collisions. Depending on what you're using the hashing function for, it just becomes a matter of how feasible it is to either find a collision or find the data which yielded the hash.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

Edit: source
Depends how things are replicated. In Dynamo style replication everything isn't replicated everywhere. Based on consistent hashing, and how vnodes etc are configured, a key lands itself in more than one nodes so that things are generally available. So scale-out in a dynamo-like system happens more gracefully.
This is not new at all, I remember playing with MD5 collisions in 2006, but it's good to be discussed from time to time so that we know we cannot trust such things.

We're getting there with reduced SHA-1[1] (that is, less than 80 rounds, that means less than 2^80 theoretical operations[2]). But the cost of finding a collision decreases over time[3], and this is why everybody says SHA-1 is obsolete.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/413.pdf
[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.h...
[3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/when_will_we_...
The linked bug's access rights are limited; Mozilla won't show it to me. Is that the right bug?
I'm not the OP but:

The analytical gradient is actually a general tool used in multivariable calculus. It's vector-valued, in that if you take the gradient of a function of three variables: f(x, y, z), then you'll get a 3-vector back. Vectors are defined by two characteristics: a direction and a magnitude. The gradient's direction is the direction of greatest increase and the magnitude of the gradient is the instantaneous rate of change.

The gradient is being put to work here in order to optimize a function using a process called gradient ascent. Intuitively it makes sense that in order to optimize your function you'd want to "move" in the direction of greatest increase at every step. However, the size of the step that you take is tricky. As you point out, in this case, we can increase the objective function value more if we double the step size. However, you're not actually doubling /the gradient/.

If you look at the expression that you wrote you should see:

x + 2 * dx * step, y * 2 * dy * step.

What you've done is double the step-multiplier, not the gradient itself (<dx, dy>). This means that the optimization process jumps further at each step. However, the step size that OP chose is somewhat arbitrary to begin with, so it's not clear why any particular choice would be better or worse. The reason that the step size matters is that if your step size is too large your optimization process might jump over a minimum location or something similarly bad -- there are pathological functions like the Rosenbrock Function [1] which are notoriously hard to optimize with gradient ascent. In practice, you'll often choose your step size more intelligently based on a few different tests, or vary it as the optimization process progresses.

In this particular instance, the surface that you're trying to optimize is pretty simple so basically any step value will do the trick. It may take a different number of steps in order to compute the global maximum, but most reasonable step sizes will get there.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbrock_function
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6259391
If the URI RFC mandated https://[fingerprint], I'd agree with you. But the TLD is the entity we trust with the responsibility of delegating domains in the juridical sense anyway.

If they say I own Google.com, I own it in every possible way, and I should be able to generate certificates for it. That's regardless of whether we use a CA model or a DNS-delegated one such as DANE.

I would be perfectly fine with a model where we store certificates directly in WHOIS, but that would be slower and less practical that just using DNSSEC, which is already deployed.
Fool me twice? Zerigo claims free plan “here to stay”. Really
According to an email I got a few minutes ago, as Zerigo approaches the 1-year anniversary of abruptly reneging on their free and paid DNS plans with scant notice, and without letting current contracts continue en force, they are now promoting "new simplified pricing".

Zerigo is also promising, and I quote: "Return of the free plan! Enjoy, its here to stay."

I do not recall ever enjoying hitting the 'unsubscribe' button on an email more than just now. Very happy with Route 53 - and appreciate Zerigo nudging me in that direction 11 months ago.
The ebooks I read are almost all technical books. Lots of code, diagrams, equations, images.

I may be biased because of my particular collection, but what I've felt is the PDFs in my collection "look" attractive and compel me to keep reading. I can see the creative effort that has gone into them by their authors and editors. Different colors for different kinds of text, syntax highlighted code, good fonts, diagrams fit correctly, proper indentation, proper word wrapping, chapter headers, footnotes at bottom of page, image wrapping and alignment in a way that improves readability - etc. They justify the word "e-books", in the sense that they feel like paper books.

EPUB/MOBI on the other hand I guess are subject to layout rules of the particular reader and screen size, and for me, they don't look so attractive. In most of my ebooks in these formats, code snippets for example are not syntax highlighted and so don't make easy reading. Image wrapping is all out of whack - an image is on one page, but its explanation which kind of assumes the image is visible right there by its side, is actually on the next page. Little details like that.

I agree with you about having to zoom and scroll a lot. But the readability of PDF makes zooming and scrolling worth the effort for me. I guess ebook UX too is just as subjective as website UX.
Privacy activists say GCHQ 'in denial' about mass surveillance. :)

(Seriously, they're lying to the Prime Minister about it, and they're still doing it. They've gone rogue.)
> Your vote may not matter, but the act of voting does matter.

I don't even believe so.

Consider someone who has no family nor friends, and lives isolated 50 miles from the nearest village with a voting urn. Her vote has no social value. Does it have no importance at all?

Your vote matters, as long as it's counted. Thinking in "ceteris paribus" terms concerning votes is completely ignoring the collective nature of voting.

Even if the final count was to have a single vote difference (say 1000001 for X to 1000000 for Y), all the ones who voted for X are as legitimate as the others to claim to have "made the difference". So even in that edge case, there can be no one to be held "responsible" for the collective decision, and all of these votes did matter in the same, unmeasurable, amount.
For me it depends on the type of book. For anything that is primarily text, I always prefer epub. If I have the option I grab that and use Calibre to convert to anything else.

If the book has a lot of graphics or other content that doesn't translate well to a smaller device (I read the vast majority of books on my kindle, a few on my Galaxy S3) then I prefer pdf. A book I bought on using Gimp falls well into that category. I don't even bother trying to read it on anything less than a 19 inch monitor. There are too many large images and layout is too important.

Comics I prefer in PDF or CBR - either way. Though it still falls into the same issue that I haven't found a good experience with comics on my Nexus 7 or anything smaller. They are the only thing that has made me feel the desire to purchase a larger tablet.
ｉ　ｗｏｒｋ　ｉｎ　ｃｈｉｎａ，ｆｅｅｌｓ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｈａｌｆ　ｍｙ　ｊｏｂ　ｉｓ　ａｄｄｉｎｇ　＆　ｓｕｂｔｒａｃｔｉｎｇ　ｓｐａｃｅｓ　ｆｒｏｍ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔｒａｎｇｅ　ｔｙｐｅ　ｆａｃｅ　ｈｅｒｅ．
This is actually a Really good question, I should really expand on this in the guide.

The simplicity of the example is deceiving you, in the sense that in a more complex circuit (than just x * y), it will no longer be the case that just simply marching along the direction of the gradient in huge steps will necessarily lead to good outcome.

All we can do is work very locally. You are at some specific point (x,y)=(-2,3). The gradient is telling you that the best direction (in this 2-D space) to go along if you're interested in increasing your function is in the direction (3, -2), which is the gradient at that point.

Now if you remember there's a crucial parameter step_size, and the update will take the form (in vector notation):

(x,y) += step_size * (dx, dy)

all that the gradient is saying is that if step_size is infinitesimally small, your function will increase, and that this direction is the Fastest increase. If you try any other direction with infinitesimally small step_size, you will do worse. However, there are no guarantees whatsoever on what happens when the step_size is larger. In practice we use step sizes of 0.001, or whatever (small numbers), and it works only because the functions we deal with are relatively smooth and well-behaved.

However, after we take the small step we have to right away re-evaluate the gradient because suddenly the direction could be all shifted. Sometimes doing gradient descent is compared to walking blind on a hill and trying to get to the top: you can sense the steepness of the hill at your feet (the gradient), and you make steps accordingly. But if you make too large of a step and you're not careful, there could have been actually been large drop.

TLDR: x * y is very simple example, this certainly wouldn't be the case in more complicated circuit.
I have worked in Yousee IT Innovation labs through 3.5 years where we had both clojure and datomic running in production.. The main part of the applications was integration type components coupled via hypermedia REST APIs. One of the most flexible application layout's I ever been working on. Lein and GO deployment..: http://yousee.dk
While that may be true to a certain extent I'd be willing to bet a sizable amount of money that the majority of founders that YC funds are in fact white, male, hailing from a wealthy family, graduated from a prestigious college, and are under 30 years old.

And while you or other YC partners may defend that fact with the fallacy that it's just a numbers game, as in those are the majority of applicants, I can't help but remind you that age discrimination and class warfare is rampant in the valley.
Sheesh. Read the C4 paper. See if you can point to a single place in the paper where we mention transactional memory. Or a need to invalidate an operation in the middle of some transaction. Or any form of emulation. C4 simply doesn't do or make any use of that stuff.

You seem to conflate Vega's [very cool] hardware transactional memory capabilities (SMA, OTC) with GC. Vega never used transactional memory for GC purposes. It used transactional memory to support OTC and transparent concurrent execution of synchronized blocks. Nothing to do with GC, and nothing to do with C4.

And yes. I can assertively "claim" that the page mapping and protection schemes in C4 are not analogous to the transactional memory support in Vega, and have nothing to do with caches or memory controllers. Vega (just like C4 on x86) used page mapping and protection schemes for GC purposes.
Yes of course, but not because we can create approximate analogues of them in the laboratory.
NUM – Insanely Hard Math Game for iOS
as an angel investor, mba founders is a big warning sign. so there's that.
> In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied, conditional on your state being necessary.

While perhaps correct on paper it isn't if you do not assume all else equals.

If my probability of making a difference is 1 in sixty million, and I reason that voting isn't worth my time, and everyone else does the same, then it all breaks apart.

Truth is, every vote makes a difference with a probability of 1, when considering the fact that a ballot's outcome can turn upside down due to voters not showing up, votes for odd candidates in protest or (when they're ignored) blank votes.

See what happened in France when Chirac got re-elected facing extreme right wing contender Le Pen.
Hah, reminds an epic stage dive fail of an acquaintance of mine - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hB562aEDk (skip to 0:45). He broke his arm then.