skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those that don't know, Prolog allows of parsing in very nice ways and very easily using Domain Clause Grammar.

parse(Output)--> [Input],
{member(Input, [ab, cd]), atom_codes(Input, Output)}.

test(In):-
phrase(parse(L), [In]), writeln(L).

?- test(ab).
[97,98]
true .

?- test(cd).
[99,100]
true.

?- test(xy).
false.
No. That was/is just FSF FUD.

You have always been able to build anything on top of it without concerns about patents from the implementation. This claim was so hilarious that it is incomprehensible that anyone ever believed it.

You have also been able to reimplement .NET CLR and core libraries without fear of patent litigation (from Microsoft). They have placed the CLR and core libraries under the legal estoppel of the community promise since 2007 (IIRC), in addition to publicly granting patent license to anyone creating an implementation of NET CLR and core libraries from the specifications. This latter was part of the process under which C#, .NET CLR and core libraries was standardized under ISO. A precondition for the standardization was that any necessary patents (for implementation) be offered on RAND terms (reasonable and non-discriminatory). Microsoft has always offered the patent grants free.

The community promise was created in response to FUD from (among others) FSF that Microsoft would just sue anyway (despite patent grants), and with their vast army of lawyers and deep coffers they could bury in court. The community promise creates legal estoppel, whereby a case by Microsoft would be dismissed if you acted "in good faith" by relying on the promise.

Open sourcing Parallel LINQ has no bearing on the patent status of anything building on top of it. If you believe the FSF FUD, you will be ensnared in .NET technology and Microsoft will sue you out of existence if you ever become successful. If you do not believe the FUD, you can continue to take advantage of LINQ, Parallel LINQ, .NET, C#, F# etc.
The Ethics of Autonomous Cars – The Atlantic
How the heck is it in "everyone's best interest" when the customer gets screwed by paying a higher fee for a longer route? Not only does the customer have to pay more, but he's had his time wasted as well.
This article is worthless, and I was thinking HN needs a flag option... and then I realized it already has one! I clicked it of course ;), and you should too!
> There's no reason those shouldn't be resident daemons

Well, you can blame OS vendors for that. But would it be practical even if implemented? For a system that will never execute Java code, why would a JVM daemon be running in the background? Even if it were a daemon, it would still require spool-up time to interpret the first byte-code down to machine code before the built-in jvm optimizing compiler could kick in and compile down to native machine code.

> hypervisor for managing those

We do have similar things now-days, but it's worth considering that your OS does a lot more than just simply execute other code. But again, there's a practicality issue trade-off. Containers aren't exactly easy, and it's unlikely that even today's implementations will be the last attempts that get it 100% right. (BTW, Xen requires a Kernel, and for the sake of argument, your laptop does not require anything but the kernel to boot (actually less, you can boot raw binary machine instructions), the rest is convenience for the user).

> why are we using processes that share mapped memory allocations (i.e. threads) instead of just having processes push information to one-another's inboxes over sockets

Sockets still have overhead. IPC can be achieved in a number of ways, some better than others, and some better in certain circumstances. Why bother opening a socket when my program consists of only a small handful of child processes all running on the same host and only require very small amounts of communication (such as a keypoller subprocess)? Message queues are fine for sending basic messages around, but even a message queue is unnecessary if I can pass the info into the child process as I spawn it. Why over-complicate things if not necessary?

> a 2-4x difference in overhead, minuscule compared to the speedups over the past decades.

That is, of course, relative. I think some large projects would argue a 2-4x improvement in compile-time, for example, is a dramatic time savings. If we snubbed every 2-4x performance improvement, we'd still have performance on the scale of 1984.
conversely, look at companies like facebook, google, and walmart who have all made the decision to open source their code. software and non software companies alike recognize that contributing their work to the world adds value to their own product.

i think in the future you will have more non technology first companies, like walmart, with strong software divisions promoting and funding open source software. they dont need to make money directly off selling the software when they can make money off what the software does.
Definitely something I'd like to see maintained. If nothing else, this has been categorized very well.
Ori FS does replication and atomic snapshotting:

http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/

Some of its underlying architecture is very similar to git. Check out Section 5.4 of the paper: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2530000/2522721/p151-mashtiz...
How can $273 million in profit be a bad sign at all? Sometimes I don't get oeconomics.

Because in the context of the 75 billion in revenue needed to generate the 273 million in profit, thats a profit rate of 0.0004%. So every tiny false step puts the company in the red.

The numbers basically show that amazon rides a conceiled loss leader strategy for many years now. Thats traditionally a quite risky move, because once you've crushed competition and saturated the market, you've reached the point where you have to make profit or go insolvent. But generating profit would involve raising prices, which would give the competition more breathing space - amazon essentially has to give up market share to not go bankrupt.
I don't think the parent said it was creating a "subprime crisis". I believe his point was that people with poor credit are buying a vehicle under "sub-prime" terms, meaning high interest rates and other onerous terms, that somehow binds the driver to Uber. That's a pretty shady tactic if true. Can somebody validate this claim?
The best reason I can think of is labour protection for the drivers. Even though the US is pretty laissez faire when it comes to employee protections, Uber and similar completely strip all rights from drivers. The almighty Rating determines who gets fired, with zero transparency and zero second chances. Imagine working as a waiter, but if your tip percentage drops below a certain threshold, you're fired and banned from the restaurant business forever, even though you might just have gotten a bunch of asshole customers in a row.

Also, if the bar to entry into the profession is simply to have a car and a smartphone, it will quickly become a race to the bottom in terms of wages.

All of this is good for the consumers, they get a lot of power over the drivers, they can threaten to give them a bad rating and so on, but there should probably be a balance.

Then again, it's not like the existing taxi cab unions and medallion systems and regulations are a guarantee of a good environment.

And on the third side, this profession is going to be eradicated by self-driving cars within fifteen years, so who cares?
Interesting that the patent grant from Microsoft is much more sane than that from Facebook:

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT :

If you file, maintain, or voluntarily participate in any claim in a lawsuit
alleging direct or contributory patent infringement by any Covered Code, or
inducement of patent infringement by any Covered Code, then your rights under
this promise will automatically terminate.

vs

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS :

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice,
for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or
other action) alleging (a) direct, indirect, or contributory infringement or
inducement to infringe any patent: (i) by Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or
affiliates, whether or not such claim is related to the Software, (ii) by any
party if such claim arises in whole or in part from any software, product or
service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates, whether or not
such claim is related to the Software, or (iii) by any party relating to the
Software; or (b) that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or
unenforceable.
> If we are comparing this to visual information, perhaps it would be best to draw parallels with video.

But it isn't. We perceive pitch more like we perceive color than how we perceive motion. "Motion" in audio is well below the frequency of pitch. Same goes for video really, but in video the framerate has nothing to do with the color, unlike how the sampling rate has to do with sound frequency in (cough most) digital formats. If color in video was sampled the way pitch is in audio, we would have framerates in the high terahertz range.
Perfect is the enemy of good. What you're describing happens just as frequently in regulated markets (the police works fine for a certain sector of this country and not so great for another...), its just that regulated markets offer the false promise of perfection. At the end of the day there's no magic, its people at the end of all these services. So what's important, as Milton Friedman used to like to say, is not finding the right people, but getting the wrong people to do the right things.

The people that visit Las Vegas don't vote in Las Vegas, so what incentive is there AT ALL for the government to protect the customer? This is basically the worst edge case for a regulation: the regulators only receive votes from one side of the arrangement, so who do you think they'll bias? Unless taxi abuse got so bad that it actually affected tourism, then I assure you it will always slip between the cracks. On the other hand, a business that cares about solely this problem will actually figure out a way to solve it.
"intolerant of failure" is almost the opposite of how the majority of people give money through crowdfunding. You really have to use these platforms more. The whole idea is a culture of benevolence.
Ron attributes to malice here that which can be more easily explained by indifference. I think Physicists have largely given up on trying to correct media's portrayals of QM as they either see it as not being important or because they see it as tilting at windmills.

The majority of experts I know feel like it's futile to try and correct the media's representation of their field. I think QM has it doubly hard as it has all the issues of other technical field, while suffering from both the problem of its ontology being foreign to the lay-person and certain key points of its ontology are still debated within the field.
This is a good interview process for a coding gig. I am a devops engineer who is mainly a system administrator. I code but I code as a tool not as a goal. So for this kind of positions looking for coding performance does not give good indicators. Or you can not do this kind of experiment for other kinds of positions.
If Uber has anyone statistically competent on staff, they'll normalize your scores and compute an individualized scale for you. I.e., let i = individual rider, j = individual driver. Then they'll use a model like:

score[i,j] = a[i]z[j]+b[i] + noise

Then they store the z[j] for each driver.

So if I consistently rate drivers between 2 and 4, while you consistently rate drivers between 4 and 5, then a[me] = 3, b[me] = 2 while for you a[you]=4 and b[you]=5. If you rate a driver as 4 (i.e. z[j] = 0), then Uber will tell me the driver is rated a[me]0 + b[me] = 2.

Uber can then rate their drivers internally based on z[driver], not the individual ratings.

It is of course possible that Uber is completely statistically incompetent, but I doubt that.
Flawless satire.
If anything, google is mostly c++ shop.
I'm not sure what you mean by submitting "early", or what experience you're drawing on here (your account has submitted zero stories!), but am pretty sure that the odds favour a user who submits a lot that is good [1] and that the latter is where the emphasis should be. We're also working on systems to amplify this effect, so it is going to get more true with time. The point as far as karma goes is not to be attached to any one post, but rather to play for the long run.

1. What counts as good on HN: stories of intellectual substance that many good hackers would find interesting.
What conversation? You don't have to rate the driver in their presence, and I've never once done so.

Occasionally I'll have a driver demand a 5-star rating, which of course earns them an automatic 1.
The author in the article you linked to is too far on the "Mercy" side of Mercy vs. Justice. Five stars is my default, but I don't have a problem giving out 2-stars. In a nearly endless labor pool, this is appropriate consumer behavior, and I see it as improving rides for other consumers.

Downvote me like the other commenter who expressed this, bitches!

//edit: At the time of writing this, sneak's comment was in the downvoted greyed-out font.
Really? If that's the case then presumably you didn't take the photos in your article, so you should be attributing them to their owners. If you did take the photos then either you're doing more than just recounting a bad experience, or you take the weirdest holiday snaps ever.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460688(v=vs.110).a...

Parallel LINQ is an extension to LINQ (Language Integrated Querying). The "parallel" hints that it is a way to process results in parallel - using multiple threads, possibly on multiple CPUs/cores.

It allows you to express patterns like fork/join in a very elegant, fluent way.

If I have a set of Orders each with a collection of OrderItems, and each OrderItem* has a Consolidate method (I know, contrived, but bear with me).

Orders.SelectMany(o => o.OrderItems).AsParallel().ForAll(Consolidate);

will "consolidate" all of the order items in parallel (or with the optimal degree of parallelism given CPUs/cores).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc#t=1985
(Douglas Adams talking, fairly humorously, about extinction)

"ending the human race" is such an interesting thing. Put aside that bone-headed nazis will tell you that humans have more than one race: We do extinct other species in incredible amounts (ask any greenpeace flyer). If we were extinguished by our own invention seems sort of fair.

But by the off-chance that an AI figures out that we are actually worth being, then there might be an realistic chance that it will actually help us survive our own mistake.

A bit of a gamble but if curiosity kills the cat then we are lucky to be alive anyways :)
Because it is (close to) impossible to write an objective measurement system that can tell the difference between a legitimately good school (as defined by the rather abstract things that we as a society want education to be) versus a school that is good at gaming metrics. And when you introduce a direct profit motive tied to metrics, it is highly likely that executives will find a way to maximize profit while minimizing cost, which likely means gaming the metrics and doing little else.

Government institutions and private nonprofit institutions have this problem already (at least somewhat) with U.S. News and World, but they are at least theoretically controlled by foundations/trustees/the state, which have in common the property that they profess an interest in education itself, not education as a means of extracting money from people.
What I mean is that all else being equal, public is more efficient than private. The same team doing the same task with the same information, constraints, and money will be able to provide better value to the consumer in the public eector than the private.

The caveat is there because a handful of strategically placed idiots or geniues could easily make more of a difference than the fact that all the money stays within the system.
> Is that really the taxi's "fault" though? I mean it is in everyones best interest to get paid the most.

In a competitive market, no, you're right. But that's a self-solving problem because customers will select the option which gets them there the fastest for the least money. The problem is customer-abusive behavior, which is a hallmark of a captive market; when a consumer has no viable alternatives, they basically have to put up with being scammed, shaken down, and otherwise abused to the limit that they can tolerate (see also: regional monopolies in last-mile internet service).

The issue at hand is fundamentally the lack of competition, which is enforced through government action. If you're going to maintain a state-granted monopoly, then you're going to need to be subject to state-imposed restrictions on how you can use that monopoly.

Of course, even making it illegal doesn't seem to be stopping taxis from doing it.
And who's going to earn a lot of money with it? Yes, Goldman
I just had my first Las Vegas cab experience, it was at 11:30pm. The taxi driver picked us up from the airport and took us to our hotel 30 minutes away. He was pretty helpful and seemed to know the area quite well. Then we got to our destination and he demanded that I pay cash, even though the taxi had a touchscreen terminal behind the front passenger seat for paying with card.

He said that he needed the $55 fare in cash because he needs to take some money home and it is midnight. I told him that I didn't feel comfortable, he was apologetic, explained he needed the money and so, to save trouble, I went into the hotel and got out the cash for him because I just got off a few hours plane ride, I didn't want to deal with this nonsense at this time of night.

I told the man behind the desk at the hotel and he explained that it happens all of the time. He said a lot of the drivers pocket the cash for themselves which is why they demand cash. He then advised us not to hire taxis and to use a hotel recommended private driver service that is the same cost (no doubt a nice referral fee for them). An ulterior motive there, but I don't doubt that this happens all of the time.

This experience, other experiences from colleagues and friends as well as online paints a picture of a pretty broken and corrupt taxi system in Los Angeles especially. While I am not a big fan of Uber (ethically) I do like the idea of ridesharing and the rating system. If Lyft, Uber and other companies were operating here, perhaps things would be different.
Xhprof is maintained by Phacility. They did pick up on this[1], but it's not as easy as one might think.

[1] https://secure.phabricator.com/T6675
First life: The search for the first replicator (2011)
Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cover letter and resume.

Also, a lot of job postings are terribly written, extremely vague or otherwise problematic, so it's not a one-sided problem. It's hard to know if you're meeting the employer's needs when their posting is asking for someone who could engineer a mission to Mars on their lunch break and will work for $50,000 and 1 week of vacation.
It depends what you mean by layout. If you add/remove/change the fields in the records, Drill can handle that. It can also handle a situation where you move from one format (say JSON) to another format (Parquet) and have mixed formats in a directory.

Drill is described as schema-free, but the data doesn't have to lack schema. Some data (Parquet, Avro) has schema, while some data (JSON, HBase, MongoDB) doesn't (ie, each record could have different fields). Drill is designed to allow queries on any data. Also, Drill leverages the structure that's embedded in the data without requiring IT to redundantly define schemas in a centralized schema repository. In other words, if there's a schema embedded in the Parquet file, why require the user to then go and maintain the same schema, explicitly, in Hive metastore?
Exactly. I really don't understand all the hubbub that people raise over Uber's rating system somehow being broken because:

1. Many people, like the writer, only give our 5 stars. (Simple: their votes don't really count much.)

2. People have different scales. (These can easily be rescaled.)
Totally agree! KeepSafe is taking this exact approach to hiring right now.
https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html
Show HN: Chat undercover, reveal yourself if you want
> If you wanted to do something like that in a declarative way, though, consider a spreadsheet with an intelligent evaluator. The spreadsheet is a declaration of a dependency relationship. When a number is changed, the numbers depending upon it change.

Seems like you're talking about functional reactive programming (or reactive programming in general).
Zillow Accused of Subjecting Female Employees to “Sexual Torture”
> You could buy a pair of Sony MDR-7506 that measure similarly (IIRC, a bit better, even) for $85.

Or Superlux HD668B which can be found for $30 last time I checked.
Button Hover Tweenmax
For a single rider that's not pressed for time, sure a taxi is going to be 10x costlier than rail, but add in multiple people (esp. kids) and a healthy dose of luggage and suddenly it's 2-3x as expensive and possibly quite worth it.
"First of all, what does sample rate has even remotely to do with hearing range?"

The sample rate (among a few other things like the quality of the low-pass filter) determines what's the highest frequency you can perfectly read from a signal. Since most human beings can't hear frequencies above 20 kHz you simply need to choose a sample rate that can represent a 20 kHz signal perfectly and that's something like 44 or 48 kHz.
Even if you abstract away the indexes, when working with datasets that large you have to worry about whether the standard implementation makes the same class of error.

For example, using Java's binarySearch on arrays of length over 2^30 was broken until 2006[0][1].

[0]: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

[1]: http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5045582
> C still doesn't have a module system

There's package manager-ish: https://github.com/clibs/clib
I'm not a XNU hacker, but it looks like they haven't. Their time_t typedef seems to be a __darwin_time_t [1], which in turn looks like to be 32-bit signed long [2].

As far as I know, the only major operating system that has dealt with Y2038 is OpenBSD [3].

[1] - https://github.com/opensource-apple/xnu/blob/bb7368935f659ad...

[2] - https://github.com/opensource-apple/xnu/blob/bb7368935f659ad...

[3] - http://www.openbsd.org/55.html , http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2013081307224...
If I make any business decision that turns out poorly for me, I'm going to want a refund. It doesn't mean I should be entitled to one.

This is, ostensibly, what contracts should cover. The medallion issuer should be subject to a series of conditions under which the medallion purchaser is entitled to some sort of recompense if the issuer breaches those conditions. Entering into a purchase contract for an item that is literally the life and death of your career, agreeing to terms in which the other party basically says "trust us, we'll do what we promise so you aren't completely ruined" is a terrible way to do business.
would be awesome if any of the dotnet open sourcing would allow to port linq to python. i would use it in a hearbeat.
Interesting project! Can you tell a bit more about cronitor.io? Is this a side project or a full time project? How many users are using your service? 100, 1000, 10000 ?