skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why are supercomputers still popular?

Scaling.

A very easy out for me to explain is imagine if you could only simulate two molecules in a Molecular Dynamics simulation and both had to have 100 atoms or less. There's plenty of opportunity, sure. But what if you wanted to simulate an entire strand of RNA interacting with a protein? There are techniques and stable approximations to avoid the O(n^2) complexity of a molecular dynamics simulation but the next-generation hardware allows you to run the same simulations with the same limitations at a much bigger scale, or the previous-sized problem without as many assumptions. edit: There are other considerations of course; I am vastly oversimplifying with this example.

Also, the more simulations you can run the more uncertainties you can account for in Monte Carlo computations, so models can evolve to contain more details and less assumptions.

adding response to:
> That way instead of doing a "big bang" upgrade such as this, you just upgrade individual nodes as the technology allows and are almost always "current."

The problem is that programming targeting a supercomputer usually involves taking advantage of specific features of the hardware to get the bleeding edge performance. Mixing and matching hardware quickly makes deployment of the code difficult in addition to writing the code to reliably squeeze every ounce out of every chip.
Freenet is faster than that in aggregate, total node throughput can be in the 150-250KB/s range even if single requests are, as you say, potentially in the tens of KB/s. File transfers can be fast, static webpages can be loaded reasonably quickly if they are popular (in the sense of being frequently accessed by users).

Big security downside is that in the purely opennet configuration, your peer nodes are both untrusted strangers AND your own traffic is visible to them. There is NO "onion" effect going on, just reliance on the possibility that any traffic a peer node observes from your node is not necessarily YOUR traffic as all nodes are also routing requests for other nodes.
I wonder if the Navy will run into issues with the international legalities of blinding people?

From what I understand it is legal to kill someone (under self-defence like conditions), but illegal to blind them. However the US has been skirting a lot of international law by declaring everyone they fight a non-soldier which counter-intuitively allows them to do more harm.

I just ask because they talk about a "warning shot that gets progressively more powerful" in the article. Which to me means at some stage it will be in the range to do eye-damage before it can set the boat on fire.

Also interesting that they could accidentally destroy a satellite while targeting a drone.
Swift string interpolation with Nimrod macros
I feel exactly the opposite, I've downloaded the Developer Edition which they released a few days ago and I've never seen a browser so fast, it feels much faster than chrome on my machine, I can't wait to have all the beta improvements merged into the standard version !
Who are these people who regularly take photos at f1.8? At least with a full-frame sensor you'd almost always want more depth of field that that. Having a super-wide aperture may be an indicator of lens quality but it's not all that much use in itself.
In a sense, these are essentially arrays of nodes, they just happen to be Tesla GPUs (which you can think of as video cards that don't have a video out). The advantage of these over individual machines is that the I/O speed between machines is much lower than between CPU/GPU.
sajson allocates once: it turns out you can structure your parse tree such that each byte of input only requires one machine word of output. http://chadaustin.me/2013/01/sajson-why-the-parse-tree-is-bi...

https://github.com/chadaustin/sajson
That's why "SSL Everywhere" is security theater. To have "security" on pages that don't need to be secure requires weakening security on the pages that do.

Nah, you can still have separate secure domains with EV certs for taking credit cards. That way your customer's browsing habits and product preferences are protected from snooping by their ISP, the page assets are still cached and DDOS protected, and the credit card data is still sent to a separate domain without an intermediary.

The only thing still to worry about is your caching provider sending maliciously modified content that bypasses your secure domain.
Older version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103240
As someone in the AR space, even I wouldn't use glass, BUT it has been amazing for getting the word out about what AR is and that has been invaluable. Instead of having to explain to people what AR is, all I have to say is "You know google glass?" and they immediately get it.

I think there are a couple of big problems with glass:

1. It doesn't do AR substantively, which is the breakthrough feature, instead its basically just a semi-transparent floating screen

2. Its got a photo taking camera on it*

3. Interacting with it is cumbersome/clunky

To do 1 effectively, it needs to be full field of view or at least the bulk of the FOV, which is a major issue with lenses that close to the eye and why I think they acquired Magic Leap.

2 is a fairly simple fix but would need a whole new re-branding and google may have burned this bridge already.

3 is really a tough thing to figure out but I think could be done with CV gestures that aren't physical touch based, but rather view orientation based. So for example if you look down, you immediately get your apps displayed and you can use your hand to select/type in a similar form function as people do now with phones.

*I make the distinction about photo taking because if the camera was only used for CV/tracking on device and had no "photo taking" feature, people would be less worried about it. And yes I am aware that images are still taken, its the distinction in what is happening by default that the public in general cares about.
It's obviously not consumer ready but Google has been saying that all along, I don't know why everyone acts like it's already failed when they clearly state this isn't ready for primetime yet.
What's interesting to me is that even if the animations were gone and we were just shown static images I'd still be able to grok the explanation of Markov Chains based on the way he explained it. Very impressive.
The engine was supposedly exactly the same on WP7, on WP8 the entire browser is the same with the exception of the UI (obviously). Google Maps UK worked fine on both the mobile and desktop site views of IE on Windows Phone.
And here's a two-line web browser written in bash:

#!/bin/bash
firefox

To clarify: If you're using a third-party rendering engine, your effort doesn't count as a "web browser". HTML parsing, CSS rendering, javascript support etc is the hard stuff - back/forward buttons and tabs aren't.
This 21-year-old is painting the most insane sci-fi vehicles on the planet
The general reason comes down to inter-node bandwidth. Things like Google's search or SETI are able to use standard interconnect (or the open internet in SETI's case) because the problem, link counting and signal analysis, can be broken down into individual pieces that don't interact very much between sections of the computation.

Things like physics simulations, weather etc., have a lot of interaction between any divisions you could try to draw to be able to split the information between nodes. To work with these problems you need a faster interconnect between processors than ethernet provides, infiniband seems a popular choice but I'm no expert on the details of their architecture. These problems also need to move in relative lockstep meaning loosely connected systems don't work as well or at least don't provide any real advantages. Node homogeneity makes these tightly coupled processing nodes easier to manage.

Occasionally there will be upgrades to a super computer but generally they're run 24/7 until they're too far behind the technology, both in speed and lower power consumption, that it becomes cheaper to completely replace it than to try to do an upgrade that will replace more than half the cluster's total electronics to begin with.
What bad vibes are you talking about?
Link for those interested: https://bitbucket.org/zserge/jsmn/wiki/Home

jsmn is pretty awesome, and contrary to this (std::string, std::vector) actually puts you in charge of allocations. It's also in C.

In a similar vein, and also possibly already mentioned:

- yayl (C): https://lloyd.github.io/yajl/

- microjson (C): http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6262
I would argue you don't even get coolness.
Like these? http://www.kivasystems.com/solutions/
Scientists will order Philae to ‘hop’ in final bid to save lander
So you want help or not? If that description doesn't apply to you, fine. But in the commenters experience, they'd encountered all that.

Frustration can make anybody testy. But unless this topic is a rhetorical question, then it'd be nice to respect honest responses that add to the conversation.
Why would you take hits for doing something in a language you like?
They need to be able to access netflow data at the entry point.

To put it another way, let's say someone is posting bomb threats over Tor on Google Plus. Google cooperates with the FBI and deterministically perturbs all traffic going into the Tor network. What router does the FBI get netflow data from in order to find the bomber?
Yes, because you rarely need upvar, but when you do, only tcl has it.

Also, i know of no other language with macro like substitution along with real local variables.
I don't think that "driverless" segways have much of a niche in most versions of a driverless future.

The potential for segways or at least segway-like-transportation-vehicles are, it seems to me, in a rail-dominated world. The fundamental problem with rail infrastructure is that rail only takes you to stations, and that stations are expensive (along several axes) but since you can't take your car on the train, you're limited to a very small radius around the station. Segways would extend that radius dramatically, making a functional rail infrastructure de facto cheaper.

Most versions of "driverless cars" futures destroy rail-based infrastructure. They take all the advantages of rail and give them to the (already more popular) cars. At that point, your car can drop you off right next to your destination (and then go park itself elsewhere if necessary), so why do you need a segway?

The versions of "driverless cars" that don't destroy rail-based infrastructure, I think, make "driverless segways" unlikely as well.
> but why would anyone even use ruby when targeting the Windows platform?

Ruby presents itself as fun-to-code-in programming language.

And it is very much so. That's why a lot people like using it.

Having to setup a whole new environment just to have their fav code tool at hand or having to boot a virtual machine each time just to use it it's much more inpractical, introduces overhead (e.g. sending files on which to work on with Ruby to the VM) and basically, for reasons I am sure you know, does not feel the same than having it installed locally.

As you said the fact that you are advocating that people should not be able to use Ruby on Windows just feels a bit of a *nix nerdy-bubble biased thought.
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U.S. Navy Deploys First Laser Weapon in Persian Gulf
Apparently the Russian government doesn't see them as a threat of any serious sort. Otherwise I bet they'd have been operating a lot shorter than DPR's original silk road.
To me the fact that it doesn't really do AR is the major problem. It only does what my phone does, with a slightly more convenient interface. It really needed a whole new set of features and benefits, not just somewhat improved versions of the existing mobile ones.
I was looking for something like this for a project once. I settled with imagemagick and ffmpeg. Maybe this has what I want.
No, certainly I don't think them malicious, I'm just surprised the option doesn't exist.
> My understanding is that you can use yield only inside generators.

Async/await has identical limitations. You cannot call an async function from a synchronous one. Asynchrony poisons the entire callstack—everything that calls you must also become async.

> Did c# actually require all the code to be changed into generator functions/new syntax to support await/async?

I'm not sure if C# has this limitation, but if not, it's because C# has threads. If you call an async method from a sync one, it can just pause the sync one and run the async one on a different thread. JS can't do that.
TurboPFor – DIRECT ACCESS Integer Compression
It's astounding the crap [upvar] lets you get away with, ESPECIALLY making your own loop constructs. I'd be boned without it for doing request parsing without the ability to share a string buffer by name, for instance.
If you'd have any contact with init system, or one of services systemd integrates, you'd definitely know what you need from it, so apparently you don't. Systemd
will integrate many things that were not integrated before, but that's opaque for app developers. If you write any kind of daemon that starts with the system, you may want to add systemd config file defining how to start your app,
but that's probably where your contant with systemd will end.
TurboPFor - DIRECT ACCESS Integer Compression w/o decompressing entire blocks. Instant access to individual compressed array elements X-Times faster.
From the video in one of the links it seems that it's still nodes containing both CPU (POWER) and GPU (Tesla) (some number of each). But instead of PCI-e, it uses a new high-speed bus (NVLink) which allows for direct GPU-GPU communication and for the GPU and CPU to share memory at the same speeds (doesn't rely on PCI-e to connect GPU to CPU).
Anyone else waiting for Layer to become a thing?
Between a few companies I've worked at we've been waiting for Layer (http://layer.com) — Does anyone know of any alternatives to Layer and if Layer is coming out of closed Beta soon? Anyone using it in Beta?
How did you set up the FF sync server? I just did a quick search and I think the instructions I've found were mostly outdated. Do you have a link or a name for the port?

I also enjoyed hetzner for a while and if I'd want a ZFS install I'd probably go with them as it's definitely very nice how they do it. But as I've just previously commented I found a slightly better price for my minimum needs with vultr.com (5$/per month) and ZFS is not important to me on this box.
In my limited C# experience I found `int?` to be really nice, and an operator to non-null it sounds even nicer.

I wonder if there is any chance of Rust getting an abbreviation like `?` so you can write `int?` instead of `Option<int>`. I'm just starting to explore the language, but it seems like a lovely addition.
Native code will be supported across the board for Windows 10 devices,

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETAsOpenSour...

Unless Windows Desktop is meant as store applications.
Nibbler – check a site's accessibility, SEO, etc.
The vast majority of these changes are very understandable. The only one that is complex is the ? operator, which compresses only code that is very uninteresting and harder to read.

Comparatively the string trick, read-only properties and lambda syntax for simple methods seem very easy to digest.
The ultimate image optimizer for use by web developers and publishers
When did I say that I wanted help?

In case it isn't clear, I neither need nor want the kind of "help" that is being offered in this thread, thanks.
If it's a state sponsored spy, the background check would not find that out. I thought it was a given that nations would recruit people to be spies, but they'd have a normal, successful, career. I would be shocked if every big country doesn't have well placed people in various top industry positions. In fact, as a Canadian, I'd be upset if Canada isn't doing that. It seems so easy, cheap and potentially highly effective.
See my comment above, but the idea would be that you build your architecture, from the building to the town/city level, around the more efficient segway-sized form factor as opposed to the bulkier car-sized form factor that's better suited for distance travel.
There will be a video? I would love to see that.
Same here. As a bonus, it makes it easy to create a bare-metal OS installation image that includes your app.

I'm running a script right now that generates an ISO that turns a brand new machine into a server running our app with a template DB in completely unattended fashion.
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When I was nine I wanted to be an astronaut, buy the twin towers, be part of a band, an inventor, a scientist.
If you have the technical and OPSEC wherewithal, it appears that running you own "private" (PublishServerDescriptor 0) exit node has become an extremely attractive anonymity tool.

There are lots of downsides to this (epistemic attacks), but if your anon use case makes sense for such a setup, it is a valuable tool to have in the toolbox.
I always thought "face Segway" was the perfect name for Glass.

As soon as it looks like normal glasses I'll consider trying it. Or even better, contact lenses.
As a native English speaker fluent in mandarin, I agree.
>Upsides: Much more secure than Tor, (since it doesn't try to be a low-latency mixing router) not funded by USG.

Most academic computer science is funded by the American government. Does that mean that all academic computer science is backdoored by the military?

To put it more specifically, most compilers researchers I know have at some point been on a DARPA grant, because DARPA has money and academics want money. I'm sure plenty of LLVM contributors have been paid from DARPA grants. Is LLVM backdoored?

===========================

On an entirely different point, how is Freenet even comparable to Tor? They address totally different use cases (Tor is an anonymizing TCP overlay; Freenet is a distributed censorship-resistant store), and have very different threat models.

Further, it seems very unlikely that Tor (which is a piece of very well-maintained software with some of the foremost privacy researchers working on it) would have fewer bugs than Freenet, which is a sprawling Java program maintained by one man. Further, the security of Freenet in abstract hugely depends on having a functional small-world network, which requires Freenet to have been widely adopted to start with.

The comment parent's request was vague, but you simply cannot replace Tor with Freenet because they do totally different things. It is nonsensical to compare them because they address different threat models and accomplish different goals.
That comment was appalling and was killed, appropriately, by user flags. (The karma threshold for flagging is only 30, so you'll soon be able to do it yourself.) To the users who flagged it: thank you. Community members like you are helping HN get better.

Please don't post comments like this, though, complaining about the relative status of comments or stories at some instant. These are off-topic and tedious, and nearly always turn out to be wrong in the end. It just takes a while for community action to balance out.

If you see something inappropriate, here are better things to do: (1) downvote and/or flag if you can; (2) email hn@ycombinator.com, because we probably haven't seen it yet; (3) resist jumping to general conclusions about HN.
It's not the ability to predict the future that defines life. It is the ability to create it.
How does this work? I assumed the ORTC stuff was incompatible with SDP based browsers (FF, Chrome), thought I'm sure those tokens can be translated. I'm more so curious how Safari is supported, as without a plugin I didn't think it had support for WebRTC.
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Python's new wheel (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel) package format might help you avoid having build tools (ie, for numpy)
Creating a SQL complex query report, with visual design approach, via pipeSQL
Perhaps they should be allowed to work remotely after graduating? You would think having a 60-100k job in sight would reduce recidivism. No idea what the stats are though.

Society gets to continue punishing them for whatever they did, and the inmates gets something meaningful and productive to do.
Pushbullet is a huge security risk. All SMS verifications go thru their servers. I asked them if they'd ever implement encryption (zero-knowledge), they haven't responded yet, and one could wonder why...
Thanks for clearing that up for me. I hadn't researched it yet, so that is good to know.
The only real similarity to PCIe is that they're both high-speed differential signaling standards. This article has a good overview of what is known: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7900/nvidia-updates-gpu-roadma... .

For an example of what the signaling might look like, see https://research.nvidia.com/publication/054-pjb-20-gbs-groun...
Xan's face lights up talking about tänzer like you may expect from her writings here. It's not hard to see why. This is impressive work.
I have an uncle that spent the better part of a decade in prison because of our idiotic drug laws. While he was in he learned coding (DBase if I recall--it was still popular at the time). He never used it after he got out. Why not? He has a marketable skill now, right? Sure. But nobody wants to hire an ex-con regardless of their skill.

I think projects like this are great but we also need to address the problem of being able to find a job for these guys after they get out.

Or, you know; get rid of the drug laws that put him there in the first place.
I haven't found Freenet latency to be bad for most keys these days. For example, I mirror my blog in Freenet and it's on the order of seconds rather than minutes. Even an image gallery I tried has reasonable response. Uploading data on the other hand is very slow.

Here's my blog key if you want to try:

USK@1ORdIvjL2H1bZblJcP8hu2LjjKtVB-rVzp8mLty~5N4,8hL85otZBbq0geDsSKkBK4sKESL2SrNVecFZz9NxGVQ,AQACAAE/bluishcoder/3/

And the image gallery:

USK@2LK9z-pdZ9kWQfw~GfF-CXKC7yWQxeKvNf9kAXOumU4,1eA8o~L~-mIo9Hk7ZK9B53UKY5Vuki6p4I4lqMQPxyw,AQACAAE/pitcairnisland/0/
The Aquabats!! "Nerd Alert" (prolly no music video) is my quinty geek tune.