skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... This ends up similar to NFL Quarterbacks. Even the worst quarterback in the NFL is exceptional, but everyone wants the best one because it's hard to win a Super Bowl with the worst quarterback in the NFL. ..."

This reminds me of Moneyball and Billy Beane. Then I found Kirk Goldsberry doing the same for basketball. [1] It's going to happen to programming.

[1] Mark McClusky, 'This Guy’s Quest to Track Every Shot in the NBA Changed Basketball Forever' ~ http://www.wired.com/2014/10/faster-higher-stronger/
Predicting Physician Gender Using AzureML and F#
Did they hard-code the rules of backgammon into the software, or only the board state? I think there's a sort of conceptual ladder
visual input --> game state --> games rules --> game strategy
and it's very important to specify which rungs the software started on.
Yes, I have it installed on a Sansa Fuze player. Waiting to get Jolla 2 handset when it will come out, and then will probably play it there. I'm sure though that VLC would handle it just fine on any Android device as well.
The kind of funny where you deplore your best friend to burn all your writings after you die but then he publishes them anyway. "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod
Yep, they were acquired by Paypal.
This is actually a very cool idea. Are you planning on adding more services as you go on? I would love to have this kind of an app on my iPhone to quickly browse through & get notified of new posts.
Agda and most other dependently-typed languages (e.g. Coq) weren't really designed for "real programmers": they're research-oriented systems for real computer scientists to explore cutting edge ideas in logic and PLT.

If you're interested in a "practical" dependently-typed language, check out Idris:

http://www.idris-lang.org/
I think this underestimates how many people are DJing. You don't have to be a professional to want to warp a couple tracks together, and this is a case where more samples help. Many of the 'only professionals need this' arguments fall apart; DJing is a popular hobby.
There's no faith required; the planner is guaranteed not to do that. The "normal" way is to create a composite type containing each of the columns you need, and then "unpack" it to separate columns. Horrible? Yeah, but it's possible.
Recently learned this language in a functional programming course. Very cool language. The Curry-Howard Isomorphism proves that programming languages are equivalent to mathematical proofs and you can really feel it here. I could see this language being very useful in math-y applications such as cryptography and verification.
Nice. Got a link for this one?
It is public actually. Check out visadoor.com.
previously submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135839
> Some of us just enjoy list[en]ing to music on decent equipment

The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music.

Of course your favourite Pink Floyd sounds better on a decent stereo rather than a clock-radio, but if somebody is forever chasing the proper "colour" for their speakers, or swapping amps for the perfect tone... they might be an audiophile.

edit: s/you might be/they might be/
> a key-value map on common hardware that runs in constant time and is sublinear in the number of entries in the map

Counterexample: Cuckoo hashmap, at least for lookup.

Calculate both hashes. Index the table via each hash. Check both table indexes to see if either match.

The only timing information this leaks is the length of the input string, and that an adversary already knows.

Now, there will be some cache information potentially leaked, although there are ways around that too. But this is constant time disregarding cache, and is sublinear.

As for the question of "a nice constant-time comparison algorithm for (say) 160-bit values", it's relatively easy. Do a pairwise comparison of constant-size chunks of the value, mapping <, =, and > to 01, 10, and 11, respectively. Then recurse as necessary. Of course, this assumes you have a constant-time comparison function for a single chunk.
> Stars are not a fundamental element of human life experience

Well, I disagree... You're body is composed of matter that originated in the core of "a star", so you wouldn't be able to "experience" your life without this small detail.

Another great quote by Carl Sagan is: "We are made of star stuff". And he's damn right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bm479V8qPs
Morea Framework: Easily generate educational websites
They're silly for listening maybe, but for editing (or so I gathered) they're quite valuable because the extra bits give editors a lot more room to play with the sounds and frequencies and such.

It's not always about the audiophiles, you know.
I don't know if the alternative is functional programming or structural comparisons, and I wasn't arguing that in this particular case. I agree about naming things, but I don't consider it an OO exclusive.

What I'm saying is that there are a couple of assertions, more or less accepted in the industry, that may be flawed or simply false, and that may have led to the current mess of software design:

1- That OO decomposition and design reflects "how we perceive the world".

2- That if there is merit to this notion that we naturally decompose/understand the world in terms of objects, has-a and is-a, that this maps to the set of formalisms we usually call OO Design & Programming. For example, it's obvious to me "message passing" is a (sometimes useful) abstraction completely alien to how we perceive the world -- nobody thinks in terms of sending messages to the objects. A message is something you send to another sentient being, preferably a person.
By '"hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC"' the parent post means something like 24/192 vs 16/44.1, not the amount of compression. It has a higher resolution than the other example.
Sorry to sound silly, but I've only seen real milky way in Americas, but never in Asia. It's a common knowledge to me that you can see it, but it doesn't quite match the reality for me.
The Importance of Feature Engineering
If the only thing NASA had done were the two voyagers - for a trillion dollars it would still have been on the cheap.

The trove of scientific data they have gathered over the years is insane. And for the 60 years it exists, a trillion dollars is not much.

> One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D

Or borrow the money, or use wall street magic, or whatever. Also one of the recurrent critics of the current system is that corporations are slaves to the quarterly reports.

The problem with NASA in recent years is not that they spend a lot of money, but that they don't dream big enough.
C++: Passing view types by value is better than by const&
I think you'd be surprised how much "respecting women's rights", given a broad interpretation of that notion, is localized the US and a few other countries. Surprisingly big swaths of Europe have issues with it.

(A fair critique of what I just said might take into account the attitudes of, say, rural Missouri; however: immigrants don't as a general rule come here from Bangladesh to settle into the Ozarks).
You mean Kafka implored Brod, and /then/ he deplored him, posthumously...
The news is also a reality TV show.
Should have gone with unsigned ints, YouTube!

EDIT: Which is the solution they apparently implemented, converting signed to unsigned at some higher layer.
Question already came up a few days ago in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8672761

> Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?
You could look at pattern and TextBlob.

For machine learning turn to scikit-learn.
Here's the original research paper if you're interested.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602

I'll just quote their introduction instead of trying to summarize the paper:

"Our goal is to create a single neural network agent that is able to successfully learn to play as many of the games as possible. The network was not provided with any game-specific information or hand-designed visual features, and was not privy to the internal state of the emulator; it learned from nothing but the video input, the reward and terminal signals, and the set of possible actions—just as a human player would. Furthermore the network architecture and all hyperparameters used for training were kept constant across the games. So far the network has outperformed all previous RL algorithms on six of the seven games we have attempted and surpassed an expert human player on three of them."
The question in that case boils down to: what exactly does a human do that we cannot do any other way?

Or, to put it another way, assume that there is some category of computation above TMs. This stance assumes this, and also assumes that humans are capable of it but cannot build anything that is capable of it. My question is: why?
Languages that use types for elaborate proofs always seem to me like they only prove the most uninteresting properties of programs, namely the parts that deal with data transformations. Not that data transformations aren't important, but the properties they need to preserve are usually easy to be convinced of without any assistance by the compiler.

At the end of the day, programs are written for their side effects (unless your program is a compiler, which is the classical example of an "interesting", non-trivial data transformation, and possibly the only example). What I'm most interested in is proofs that, say, in a concurrent environment, a function that closes a socket will never be called as long as there are pending tasks to write to the socket. Or, because I write concurrent data structures, I'm interested to prove that a certain function will eventually release all locks it acquires. Are there any such languages?

I've heard of effect systems, but I couldn't find enough information on them. Are effect systems capable of the kind of proofs I'm interested in? Are there practical programming languages with powerful effect systems?

EDIT: Some Googling yielded this: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4768 tldr: Not yet.

EDIT: At least the lock proof seems to be implemented as one of Java 8's pluggable type systems: http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/current/che...

It lets you add a type (Java 8's pluggable types are intersection types) to a function called @EnsuresLockHeld(locks...) that proves some locks will be held when a function returns and even @EnsuresLockHeldIf(locks..., result) that proves a function grabs certain locks if its boolean result is equal to the one specified in the type.
Deep learning is not just neural networks, but rather the application of these in deep (i.e. many-layered) architectures, broadly speaking.

This enables hierarchical learning of increasingly complex concepts – building new concepts upon less complex concepts from previous layers. Deep architectures are thus able to learn high abstractions, as in [1], for instance.

If you have not yet done so, I would strongly urge you to read some papers on the subject from the last decade (e.g. Hinton, Bengio or LeCun),
or even just skim through the Wikipedia entry [2].

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532886/how-google-trans...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning
Hi guys, I had very good experience with following architectural pattern:
1. Cache full dataset on webserver
2. Use triggers to create "table of changes" od Ins/Upd/Del
3. Update only changed rows identified in "table of changes"
Experienced great scallability and performance. Great for codebooks but also for real data if they fit into RAM and app is not update intensive.
So I decided to make library of it: freshdbcache.com
Feedback and opinions welcome ;)
I've been poking around the frontend code to see if their broadcasts could be embedded, and the answer looks like no.

https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2

the magic happens on

https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2#fil...

you provide a user id an name, and the player JS will feed everything as appropriate.

the current issue involves cookies and CORS issues.

- you can't watch steam broadcasts without being signed in

- steam uses your cookie to generate a viewer id

- there are two steps to getting stream data:

- 1) fetch json containing a manifest link,

- 2) load the manifest link

- both steps check your cookies to verify the viewerid you claimed matches your actual viewerid
Wasn't a cello (I keep remembering hearing "cello attack") supposed to be problematic on mp3?
Great advice. I've wasted so much time bouncing around or cutting conversations short because I thought I had to be everywhere. One real conversation is priceless.
Three Ring: For teachers to capture student work in real-time
Not at all. The fact that Franz Kafka is my favorite writer makes me think of Franz before Apache every time ;) But I must admit that I was very curious about a Franz Kafka siting on HN ;)
I totally get you. I usually have the logic of the code already sorted out before I actually start coding though, so trying to recall those things usually just makes it a little more interesting for me than just typing everything out.

It definitely adds a lot of work in having to consciously write neat code the first time around, although I also enjoy thinking about something like what ordering of import statements makes the most sense.

Anyway I'm just glad there's an option for everybody =]
> Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking.

Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant.

God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
I'm not sure if they will meet your standards, but Idris and ATS strive to be practical dependently typed languages:

http://www.ats-lang.org/Examples.html
http://www.idris-lang.org/
Wow, you are just radiating ignorance; I don't even know why I'm wasting my breath. Nonetheless,

> Oh dear. This is a new use of the word elegant I have not encountered before.

The Peano numbers are elegant because they correspond directly with induction. Agda is first and foremost a proof assistant, so it's natural that we lean towards things that help as write our proofs. This is not "Lisp-style" at all, it's a mathematically consistent way of defining natural numbers. The idea extends further with ornamentation to model lists and other data structures.

> Having defined an entirely unworkable method of representing integers because their standard library apparently doesn't do so (?!) they then go on to prove things like 1 + 1 == 2.

I don't know what's "unworkable" about Paeno arithmetic. Yes, it's not the most efficient representation, but you're working in a proof engine, so that is secondary to our concerns. Furthermore, Agda has {-# BUILTIN #-} pragmas that let us switch out this data type with something that is more optimal. We don't use "the number system actually used by humans" (whatever that is) or machines, at least traditionally, because they just make the proofs harder.

> Perhaps in another few decades someone will have bothered to make a dependently typed language that doesn't use untypeable characters as part of its syntax, and has an integer type built in

Yea, some of us did "bother" - you're looking for Idris. But I'd really rather you didn't join us.
It doesn't end there. For most people, I strongly suspect moving around your furniture would affect your sound reproduction more than changing your equipment.
I felt the tone was authoritative.
Maybe it depends on the song as well? Classical music is supposed to have a much greater frequency spectrum - meaning, the effects of MP3 encoding becomes apparent when played on high fidelity equipment.
The advantage of methane is that it can be produced natively out of the martian atmosphere. Heat + Metal Catalyst + C02 + H2 = Methane + O2

Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.
Dieter was known to me via Google+. Brilliant, abrasive, idiosyncratic, and with few pretenses to convention. I don't know that he'll be well known in the hacker community, but know he left an impression within a literate and creative group on G+.

As with much of his other online presence, there's little at his G+ account now. He'd written prolifically there, but would periodically wipe content.

The themes he raises are some that I believe will be familiar to some, perhaps many here.

Eileen O'Duffy's G+ post provides additional information and remembrances.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EileenODuffy/posts/fGSu9L5PfNX
It should be noted that NLTK is a library intended for didactic purposes. Efficient implementation and/or state-of-the-art algorithms are not priorities.
And don't forget there are multiple copies of the same video there.
All of these points are orthogonal as to whether source code is required for a security audit.
Of course it is about talent and not pay - in order to get to a discussion about pay candidates need to be tall enough to ride this bus. Unfortunately, in the native "candidates" tend to flunk that.
> Would certainly be interesting if true :)

Yes, except it's psuedoscientific crazy talk.
I have seen the exact same bahavior ("get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget") occurring in large multinational corporate companies, where individual departments are very, very away from the top decisionmakers and spend a majority of their effort on budgets and infighting, and not on company results.

It's not a symptom of public vs private, it's a symptom of lack of oversight, agency problem, and 'too big to manage' problems.
The problem with the point system is that someone can qualify to immigrate but not be able to find a job. That happened in Canada a while back. A ton of foreign trained doctors were working manual labor jobs because they couldn't work as a doctor.
That I agree, yes.
I don't understand, don't professors have tenure?
> ...be willing to build people up. Promote from within and let people grow into the role they want to have...

I think this is one of the missing pieces in modern companies. Very few places really want to train you up and all the procedures and processes either expect that (1) your school/course should have taught you or (2) you should have already taught yourself.
> That's a trillion dollars that has been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality.

There, fixed that for you!

The old canard that space exploration has been a total waste of money just keeps popping up. Yet, our economy and the world itself have been dramatically transformed by the innovations and improvements coming out of the space program: solar energy, CAT scanners and MRI for medical applications, ceramic shielding, computer miniaturization, software methods, weather prediction, new kinds of materials, better propulsion systems for planes, food preservation, insulation, on and on.

There are many more. And then there are all the people who were inspired by the space program to go into science and technology fields.

I'd say $1 trillion, if accurate (the entire Apollo program cost about $200 billion in 2005 dollars) would be a bargain.

Compare this with, say, the Dept. of Education created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. It's cost about $1.5 trillion over 35 years, and for what? Literacy and math skills have declined almost every year since then.

Let's shrink federal spending in the entitlement and defense sectors, and put more money into space exploration and basic science, and I'll bet you we'll all end up living richer and better lives (and longer lives, too).
In Canada currently. The salaries just suck compared to states. Yes the visa hoops are less but living expenses in cities like Vancouver will suck everything out of your pocket.
Looks like a good idea, I would love to take this further and have it link into Facebook / Twitter messages (Even if you cannot approve etc.)

An app that shows an overview of what my child is doing online...I'd pay good money for the peace of mind that would bring...but maybe I am just paranoid.
I liken containers to adding an extra row of seats on a commercial aircraft.

Right now the airline (host) operates one aircraft (server) and can fit X number of seats on it (split due to both consumption but also overhead from the seat's depth (hypervisor overhead)). If containers have lower overhead than hypervisors then it would be akin to an airline buying thinner seats and getting an extra row in.

However it does remain to be seen how much more efficient containers are over hypervisors, and also how secure they are (there are lot's of unanswered questions on the security front).
Fantastic. This is exactly what I wanted earlier in the week. I ended up just writing some python to do the looping for me as it was only a few thousand rows and I was optimizing for developer time (i.e. mine).
> Many have come to believe this, but is it true? I don't perceive all of reality as a strict hierarchy of things constructed out of templates, with "is a" and "has a" relationships between them.

The strict hierarchy thing is more a feature of the class-oriented programming of C++ and its close relatives (an artifact of what made sense when approximating OOP in something merged into the existing syntax and type system of C) than it is inherent to OOP.

Unfortunately, the popularity of C++ and Java means that its hard to tell when people are talking about "Object Oriented" if they mean it in the general sense that existed prior to those languages which they are one of many approaches to facilitating, or if it means it in the narrow, static-class-oriented sense which evolved out of the particular approaches of those languages and their close relatives, which is something different.
It's not just that. The difficulties in sending a human to Mars and safely returning him/her are way beyond anything we have ever tried. It wouldn't be that bad to send a human to, say, Phobos, but Mars poses some extra problems, not the least of which is how to land.

An atmosphere too thick for retro rockets and too thin for parachutes is a major impediment.

So until I start seeing progress on those issues, I will see this just as sci-fi.
Christopher Chabris is a very perceptive researcher on human perception, and I'm glad to see this submission here. The lead example of faulty memory in the article is very interesting, as it points to the problem of belief-motivated recollection of "facts" that never happened. This is important for all of us, as the article notes.

"Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to much bigger problems than a misattributed quote. Memory failures that resemble Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo."

As I have written about this issue before here on Hacker News, the problem with human memory is that each read operation is also a write operation. We never go back to our memory of any event without rearranging our understanding of the event, often to the detriment of recalling verifiable facts. When in doubt, look it up. And be in doubt often when relying on your own memory.