skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's really a sad comment on the state of reporting at MIT Tech Review that..

I feel compelled to point out that the only connection between the "MIT" tech review and MIT is that the magazine licenses the name from the alumni association. It's how the alumni associations funds itself and every MIT grad gets a lifetime subscription to a version of the magazine with the alumni notes bound into the back. I doubt many of us read it. I don't know how many people other than MIT grads read it, but I would imagine vanishingly few.

A friend of mine calls it "the magazine of things that will never happen" which I think is dead on. It's a shame because the editor, Jason Pontin, as actually a good guy so it's surprising that the magazine continued to suck after he took it over.

There are many reasons to criticize MIT (don't I know it!) but you can't judge the institute by this magazine.
Two comments: an op-ed piece I saw in the Wall Street Journal the other day[1] made the point that the Department of Education's new regulations on for-profit institutions of higher education define levels of risk of student debt that would also give many "nonprofit" higher education institutions bad ratings. "We know this is true because if you applied the regulation to a law degree from George Washington University, a bachelor’s degree in hospitality administration from Stephen F. Austin State University or a bachelor’s in social work from University of Texas, the programs would all fail to meet the standard." Seeing the George Washington University Law School mentioned in that context made me go ouch, as that is not a completely slouchy law school, and I actually stayed there for a summer for one of my law school internships (I attended a state university law school) and later attended a student conference there. Even reasonably decent law schools are not a good financial risk these days for many students.

My other comment is that the article kindly submitted here, which I've already submitted to my Facebook friends, makes the interesting point that dental school enrollments have fallen sharply since more and more public water supplies in the United States have fluoridation. People today have much healthier teeth than they had when I was growing up. Dentists, by this view, are true professionals, as they are even willing to advocate public health measures that help work dentists out of a job. I admire that.

[1] "Making ‘Profit’ a Dirty Word in Higher Education" By Steve Gunderson Nov. 12, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/steve-gunderson-making-profit...
»But in todays CPUs there is no advantage using the short thing. You can add 64 bits or 8 bits, takes the same amount of time. And you look up what is the cash value of having saved seven bytes on a number. When you add that up it is zero. So there is no benefit.« [1]

As long as you are concerned with adding a bit of eye candy and interactivity to a web page this may be true enough to get away with the JavaScript way of making every number a double precision floating point number but there a other domains where this will not fly. And even in the world of JavaScript asm.js is trying hard to overcome this limitation.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo36MrBfTk4&t=42m17s
Maybe YouTube ads aren't the best, but the ads on the Internet can have much better targeting and performance tracking than TV ads.

>there are plenty of other things to do on a computer while you wait through the ad.

Yea, for example you can buy the advertised product with a few clicks. If you are quick enough then you can finish the buying even before the video ad finishes (sure it's not the most realistic scenario but it's possible). Or with a quick search you can learn more about the product to check how honest is the ad. TV ads cannot compete with this efficiency. The only thing TV ads can do better is reaching bigger and the less tech interested audience.
You can model functions as objects and run all sorts of function.call(args) methods, but if it is done out of necessity, it doesn't matter if it is done regularly or consistently with OOP -- OOP is just not the best way to go with this sort of thing.
Usually when I've had to use cross/outer apply it's been to work around overly normalized, and somewhat bad data.

Agreed on range types.. proper enums in T-SQL would be nice too. I'm really liking where PL/v8 is going, and would like to see something similar in MS-SQL server as well.. the .Net extensions are just too much of a pain to do much with. It's be nice to have a syntax that makes working with custom data types, or even just JSON and XML easier.

If PostgreSQL adds built-in replication to the Open-Source version that isn't a hacky add-on, and has failover similar to, for example MongoDB's replica sets, I'm so pushing pg for most new projects.

Maria/MySQL seem to be getting interesting as well. Honestly, I like MS-SQL until the cost of running it gets a little wonky (Azure pricing going from a single instance to anything that can have replication for example). Some of Amazon's offerings are really getting compelling here.
Let those people eat cake, and in the meantime protect me from my own misbehaviour.
I'm basing it purely on modern (Within the past couple of years) encoded 320kbps/V0 MP3s.

I have not done any personal blind ABX tests on AAC or modern ogg vorbis, so I can't really speak to them.

I'm going to keep 'archival' quality stuff in FLAC anyway, just so I'm covered for any advances in compression tech or whatever, and I stream to my mobile stuff, so size concerns aren't a huge deal for me. My ABX testing has just been for the sake of the mp3 vs FLAC argument.

So, AAC and Vorbis might have very well solved the problem of compressing some of these instruments.
Being a partner at a big city law firm is pretty much where the big money is made. And there's doubtless an OK living to be made as a partner at successful smaller practices. But it's become a tough business.
That's very standard, yes. It's pretty much what everyone charges, it's so standard even Authorize.net charges that for merchant payment processing.

The interchange pricing plus fee is just that isn't it, a fee plus the interchange fee? Comparing a partial fee to a full fee doesn't seem fair, or I'm missing something.

So yes, 2.9% + 30c is pretty standard. Don't really know of any exception (apart from native digital currencies. Bitpay does Saas payment processing at 0% fees for example).
The highest representable frequency really is the Nyquist rate: you only need 1 bit of sample depth to generate a digital signal whose corresponding band-limited continuous signal is a sine wave that oscillates at that rate.

Sample depth roughly tells you how far away a sample can be before the magnitude of the ideal sinc function used to reconstruct the continuous signal falls below your quantization threshold. That distance in turn gives you an idea of the frequency resolution you have... You could in theory run an FFT over that many samples and detect that the corresponding change was not just due to quantization noise.
It change the semantic on the loop bound, and thus what the compiler can/cannot do when optimizing the code.

Using uint limits the optimizer...
When you're storing an integer, ideally "MAX_INT" is not something you have to worry about.

If you're doing compression you should use some sort of raw bytes type.

At least I think that's the platonic ideal.
But in your example the program doesn't represent the code itself but a program written in some new language. I said that current type systems are good for writing compilers, but not so good at describing their own behavior other than data transformations.
So have said companies fund research fellowships/projects producing PhDs with the skillsets they want. Then pay enough to entice them to join the company. The US DoE does this specifically because it cannot hire non-citizens.
What if the H1B visas were not for foreigners, but for US people from other states? Would people still be making the same arguments? California companies hiring cheap midwest talent and disadvantaging the rightful locals of their jobs and high salaries.

People are still people, no matter what country they're from. To restrict immigration for work means you're saying some people, through no fault of their own, deserve to earn less money by working in their own country.

Any time you say "I'd hire a local over a foreigner", you're effectively being racist. It might not be their race specifically, but their nationality, the identity of their parents, their wealth (to do their own immigration), etc. This is still discriminating based on something the person has no control over. It's still saying "people similar to me deserve more good things in life than people I can't relate to" or "people in my in-group deserve to be treated better than members of out-groups".
This is true for a signed addition as well, since you are not allowed to overflow.
Write a password library that uses bcrypt. Compare hashes with strcmp. Put it on the internet. See what happens. :)
People get so hung up on one of them being fundamentally better than the other when in fact their fundamental differences and the tension that creates which is actually a decent compromise between a free market and a totalitarian state. "Free markets" are fully capable of leading to mass amounts of suffering. This "strife" we experience between different systems in friction is actually healthy I think.
so, carrying that to its logical conclusion, does that mean that at some point we will create displays w/ such a high resolution that they will, in some sense, be creating a "universe" which is indistinguishable from that which they are displaying? or, i guess that would mean the display essentially is what it is displaying. is that even possible in our universe, or would that be akin to creating energy / matter from nothingness?

clearly the display would blink "let there be light"* at startup.

* http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Will Ello Survive?
Relying on containers for security is a recipe for none.
I run an LSAT prep business. You'd be surprised how determined some undergrads are to go to law school, despite the objectively terrible math.

They'll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say "School X will let me in!". School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.

When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.

But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.

This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.

http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered

2008-2009 was the high water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15 likely will be less than 100,000.

Which is good. The industry's been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you're extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won't close).
I would not call common law simple. It is the precedent of all of the prior decisions made by the courts.
Are your choices between variable-width "int" and fixed-width "uint_x"? After all, in C you can just declare something "unsigned" and it's the width of int.

However, I think this is a problem. The expected value ranges of your variables don't change just because your memory bus got wider - maybe you can use more than 4GB memory in a process now, but it's a mistake to plan for single array indexes being more than 32bit.

If you do try to be more flexible, I'm sure this would introduce more bugs than the forward-compatibility it'd add. Especially if 'int' is smaller than on the platform you tested on. That's why languages like Swift, Java, C# always have 32-bit int on every platform.

> casting errors, usually in the form of a misplaced parenthesis, are pretty small and can take a very long time to find

Agreed, but writing casts also adds unwarranted explicitness. What if someone made a typo and put the wrong type in the cast? How do you tell what's right? What if you change the type of the lvalue or the casted value? Now you have to think about each related cast you added.

What's the alternative? Well, the compiler should just know what you mean…
* Python offers more encapsulation without classes than say PHP if you use importing properly, so a codebase without classes is not a big deal (I prefer OOD though).

* If your python code is organized in such a way that your classes will end up having no instance vars or methods, pragmatic advantages to using classes are limited. In other words, if you're switching to OOP, make use of that paradigm or it will indeed feel like mere boilerplate.
There are use cases where you need the choice, but most people do not need the choice.

Most programs written in the real world (enterprise-y Java apps) do not need strong control on GC, choice of integer types, or many other things offered to them. Reducing choice will increase code/tool quality.

I think that we should make the uncommon choice reallllly hard to put into place. Make it a pain to configure the GC, give specific integer types really long names. Just stop people from premature optimization and leave these tools to people who know what they're doing.
"fund raising is not equal to sucess" my best quote
20+ years ago I had a thief break into my car in front of my apartment. When I called to report it, I (jokingly) asked the lady taking down the details if there was a fine or anything for shooting thieves. She got all exited about that. Here in New Hampshire gun ownership is pretty common and crime (perhaps coincidently?) is fairly rare.
I grew up in the White Mountains mentioned in the post you are responding to. I am still bowled over by the stars, by the moon, any nature, really. I suggest the difference is merely that we are different people, not that where we were born formed our appreciation.
So, we have to define, in your opinion, what would make a pair of headphones shitty.

If you are going to reduce them to the basest level of what the purpose for a speaker or headphone is, to reproduce the input sound, then yes, they are shitty, because they are not good at that.

From a purely objective standpoint, you are going to have to judge them based on that. Why would you want the speakers or headphones to make a different sound than what the signal is?

If you want to move away from an objective measurement of what makes a headphone good or not to something that's purely subjective (i.e. 'I like how they sound'), it's impossible to answer that question.

The Solo2 are a pair of Beats headphones that actually measure really well - they're good at the base purpose of a transducer. But they're $250. You could buy a pair of Sony MDR-7506 that measure similarly (IIRC, a bit better, even) for $85.
> presumably the worst-case amount of time.

Determining the the worst case amount of time is far from trivial. What's the slowest amount of time it takes lookup table based AES to decrypt a block?

The only answer to that question is to measure it a bunch, then pick some percentile and hope your margin of safety is sufficient. Or you could use a constant time algorithm to start and rely less on hope.
There is nothing I hate more than a philosopher who doesn't know physics and information science. (Actually... there are a lot of things that are worse, but they do still annoy me quite a bit.)
Google Chromecast Leapfrogs Apple TV
In MS-SQL I've done similar things with CROSS/OUTER APPLY, which seems to be about the same things... It's usually to work around wonky data and has some overhead.

In my own case it was so I could create a view that would give me a denormalized view of most of the data for a given record... most of the fields were in a common PROPERTIES table with some funky data in it... Sometimes normalization goes too far.
That is all very well, but could you provide references for the cost (including any programs it replaced) and the downward progression in literacy and maths in the USA since 1979?

edit - Just looked at budgets. You are picking the peak. Which makes me somewhat doubtful of the rest of your analysis. In 2009 it was $32 billion. In 2010 it was $56 billion. It peaked at $71 billion in 2011 and has been almost flat since then.

edit2 - heh, actually the peak was in 2009. Do not trust wikipedia. http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chtt=Department+of+Educati... http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-fed...

Still, the general point holds, it has not been remotely steady at $70 billion.
It's ironic how companies and countries want to operate globally, and in the same sentence they come with something like this.
I've spoken to some Stripes about it, getting on top of IRC is definitely something they're working on and some hints of that are showing with the new developer support position.

I'm always happy to help out, Stripe's a fun and easy platform to develop upon, and its always fun to see what other people are building, see how they're using Stripe, etc. I definitely think I've learned as much helping as I've taught.

I will take an invite to the infamous Taco Tuesday though :p
I think you should also consider requiring a standardized form for the posts. For example, line 1 = Title, line 2 = city, line 3 = remote/no remote, ect... It would make searching through the posts easier and developers like myself could create more accurate browser extensions for filtering posts to match users' requirements.
Kind of.. it's more expensive than a direct join, but you can do more with it. AFAIK it's syntactic sugar around a correlated sub-query... It may be slightly more efficient now too. It should probably be used sparingly and over limited result sets.
> If anything, the cyclical hype/backlash Docker is getting proves that it is popular and that it works for some people. Consequently, the exposure it gets displeases the people for whom it doesn't work or whose philosophies differ. This feels like Politics 101 if you ask me (I know you didn't :) ), and I'm still surprised by how vehement some people get about this, and about software philosophies in general (particularly considering the average shelf-life of most software).

Frustration is palpable when there's so much marketing of a technology that genuine engineering discourse suffers.

Docker and Joyent are businesses, and they're selling an idea to make money. If how they're selling the idea runs contrary to someone's "software philosophies", that someone has to contend with countering not just an intellectual argument, but also considerable (and often emotive, not educational) marketing.

This article — written by the CTO at Joyent — is essentially just marketing linkbait:

- It's titled with the catchy "Docker's Killer Feature". Killer. Feature.

- The first paragraph includes the phrase "CoreOS ... declared war"! People love wars! See also: "War on Christmas", "War on the Family", and Fox News.

The rest of the article is marketing filler. There's no deep dive on the API — having read the article, I don't even know whether Docker's "Killer Feature" is:

1) Actually an API vended by a library.

2) Some sort of IPC protocol.

3) A network protocol, or

4) Underpants!
I don't think the post is about passwords in that sense, but of some kind of authorization tokens handed out by the server after authentication. E.g. in web frameworks an opaque session cookie that's used to index into server side session storage doesn't seem like a horribly exotic design choice.
New York, but about half of them are not in this state.
I'm going to disagree a bit here. Tech Review does tend to focus on the possibilities of technology and to highlight potentially exciting research. Almost by definition, a lot of this stuff is never going to amount to anything commercially interesting. I suppose that TR could insert more implicit or explicit disclaimers to that effect but I find it a good source for insights into what's going on in the labs.

Personally, I think that Jason has brought a lot of positive changes to a magazine that, for a long time, tended toward a technology policy wonkish orientation.

So I think it's fair that a lot of what's written about "will never happen." But I'm not sure that's really avoidable if you cover cutting-edge research.
These businesses benefit greatly from our strong economy/infrastructure/judicial system, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to favor American workers over foreigners. There's nothing racist about that.

I don't have a problem with a company hiring foreign labor, but I do think there should be strict limitations as long as our unemployment rate is >2-3%.
NOTICE – SITE CLOSURE IS Now IN PLACE IN MEMORY OF PHILLIP HUGHES
How the US government is illegally seizing the content of our communications
This is very similar to the algorithm OpenBSD uses in timingsafe_memcmp().

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/string...
Given whenever I stand near someone on a train with them I can hear a fair amount of their music (not anywhere near as bad as Apple earbuds though), I assume they can't be that great - that or the listener has very bad hearing.

I have a set of Sennheiser HD 202 which don't have anywhere near the same leakage and cost £35. I haven't tried Beats so can't say much about audio quality, but in my experience high leakage usually means that the audio is poor too. It also means you will listen to music louder to compensate, which leads to more distortion.

> I am finding it hard to believe that they are actually shitty

In that case the marketing team have done a good job :-)
All this talk about "numbers" is kind of silly. It doesn't do any good to call something a number if it is only being used nominally.
Dart vs. Node.js vs. Go for Building a Web App
Which platform/language and/or framework(for the selected choice) should I use to build simple,fast, versatile, and feature rich web apps?(by feature rich I mean many useful packages to enhance user experience). I know JavaScript and some Java(taking AP course).

P.S: For Node.js, ES6, TypeScript, and other JS alternatives may be included. Just so no one starts hating on JavaScript's original syntax design flaws.
Just the position of the pieces on the board. They did give it some other features to help it. I forget what they were though, but just simple stuff that was calculated directly from the board state.
The author confuses sampling theory with reality.

Sampling theory says you can reconstruct a signal by sampling it at least twice per cycle. So 44.1KHz is an adequate sampling rate for an 22.05Khz signal.

Unfortunately to make Digital-to-Analog conversion work according to theory, you must first construct an ideal analog filter which filters out everything above 22.05Khz while leaving everything less than 22.05Khz unmolested. That's not possible in reality. If 20KHz is the goal, you have a measly 2.05KHz to make the filter ramp from kill-nothing to kill-everything. I'd imagine real-world CD players with cheap filters probably kill everything above 15Khz.

In reality you want a lot of headroom between half the sampling frequency and the actual max frequency you want to pass unmolested. Even 48KHz only grants you a 4Khz band in which to let the filter roll off.

Second, significant playback timing jitter can render the LSBs useless. At 44.1KHz with 16bit sampling, the max difference between a pair of samples of a 22.05KHz max-amplitude input is very roughly 2^15. What does that mean? If your jitter is more than 692ns [1] you have just lost an LSB.

Sure, 24/192 is serious and unnecessary overkill. The advantage is that it has lots of headroom. The disadvantage is that it takes more space. If you were designing a new format today in our era of large hard drives, why wouldn't you waste a bit of space?

This isn't gold-plated monstrous-cable properly-broken-in HDMI snake oil. The current format isn't perfect; an upgrade is a reasonable idea.

[1] 44.1KHz period is 22.6ms; one part in 2^15 of that is 692ns.