skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tl;dr of this is: DDR3 DRAM modules are not as reliable as once thought, and all the ones from 2012 and 2013 that they tested showed errors when exercised with the right access patterns.

What isn't mentioned is whether these would be the types of errors that the usual memory testers like MemTest86 could detect --- but based on the lack of any significant news stories in the past 2 years, I'd guess not. Perhaps this could explain why a lot of people who encountered weird hardware-ish problems could run MemTest with no errors but still crash with the right workload.

Their dismissal of one of the "potential solutions" is a bit of a WTF:

Manufacturers could fix the problem at the chip-level by improving circuit design. However, the problem could resurface when the process technology is upgraded. In addition, this may get worse in the future as cells become smaller and more vulnerable.

As their tests show, modules from 2008 and '09 are basically perfect, and most of the ones from '10 too. Why could this change in process even be called an "upgrade" if it results in memory that doesn't behave anymore like memory should? To me, it's clearly a serious flaw. Their "workaround" proposal of adding more complexity to the memory controller, and which doesn't actually guarantee a solution, just feels... wrong.

I think this is all really quite scary - programmers are used to, and all software depends on, memory as something whose contents should not ever change without being written to! While the majority of access patterns won't trigger this flaw, the one that does could have significant cascading effects. This paper really should get more exposure to the public.
I'm glad it wasn't just me. I had to go back and check the title again once I was finished to make sure I didn't miss it.

WTH, NYT? Editor's day off?

Best I can figure, "Income inequality can be correlated with different rates of marriage" could be both the title and the entire article.
Quill is a web content editor, and Squire is an email editor. They are very similar, but slightly different - e.g. Squire supports quoting and changing quote levels, and knows how to handle attachments.
A recent Jim Jarmusch & Tilda Swinton film, Only Lovers Left Alive, was set partially in a decaying Detroit mansion as the perfect home and city for ancient vampires wanting a quiet home. I found it an interesting commentary on Detroit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Lovers_Left_Alive
I'm 32 and started with QBasic in DOS in 1994. After creating a program that reached 1000 lines of code (which I considered enormous at that time) I started to feel the limitations of the language. I then got a hold of a compiler for basic which sped things up a bit but went on to teach myself C. I was blown away by the improvement in speed! After the equivalent of "hello world", I created a minimal basic interpreter as my first C project which taught me a lot about the differences as well as a wide range of tasks in C that had little external dependencies (didn't have to deal with drivers or graphics). While the patterns I learned in BASIC weren't ideal, it was enough to give me the love of programming and and a lot to appreciate about the power of C. Then I got into web dev and was writing CGIs in C/C++ (even to the extent of generating jpeg charts from dynamic data). When I later discovered PHP I was ecstatic that I didn't have to recompile every time and db interfaces were so easy! It's all been a fun learning journey. I now also work with Rail and Node.js and embedded C/C++, and no, I no longer use SSI or CGIs, most definitely not in C!
My younger brother recently graduated from college and got a software development job in Detroit. It's nice to see pictures that provide a feel for what Detroit currently looks like.

From what I've heard, there is a trend for bootstrapped startups to move to Detroit to take advantage of the low cost of living. Unfortunately the lack of public services in some places is scary, but it seems like things are improving post-bankruptcy.
I fly to Montreal once a year from Boston and 1.5-2 hours on either side is a gross exaggeration. The Air Canada flights to Montreal have a dedicated security line at BOS and it takes roughly 7 minutes to get through it. I've also never waited more than 45 minutes for customs in Canada. On the way back, US customs take about 20 minutes thanks to automated terminals they have installed.
What the Fate of the New Republic Reveals
Thanks for the feedback!!!

Yeah you can publish and fund on the Onarbor site. Currently as I scientist, I have to write papers and then separately write grant applications. This is duplication of effort and a complete waste of many people's time. Onarbor's solution is to combine publishing and funding.

I think the problem people have is that this is user behavior that no other site (to my knowledge) on the internet has. People like Peter Thiel say it is good to do something that nobody else is doing. But the fear I'm having is that people will never get it.
>> "there's no need to drag Techstars into it"

Techstars and/or its affiliates would have taken equity in exchange for their services. They're part owners of the company as as such bear some measure of responsibility for its actions.

>> "Techstars doesn't market itself as some bastion of credibility to consumers."

Yes it does. It's consumers are small startups in need of seed money and strategic advice. Brand name is very important, and one of any incubator/accelerator's selling points. If a startup can associate itself with a highly regarded seed brand like YC or Andressen-Horowitz it makes its valuations much higher down the line. If Techstars becomes associated with shady ventures, it will hurt its ability to find willing participants.
> Pg 26, quote: "Anything humans can do in 0.1 sec, the right big 10-layer network can do too". That is a very bold claim. It encompasses the entire fields of image and voice recognition as well as knowledge encoding.

Actually, I'm not sure we can do those things in quite 0.1 sec. All I know about this is from around minute 9 from http://www.radiolab.org/story/267176-never-quite-now/ . One guest on the show even estimates thinking the simplest thought to be on the order of 0.25-0.5 sec.
Thanks for the mention, Christian :)

Would love any feedback on the service!
There's a deeper issue here that needs to be addressed. Consider the following review:

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Editor

There are well over 30 WYSIWYG editors that (fail to) normalize the differences between browsers to provide a consistent text editing experience. Much of this duplicated effort would be better directed at reviewing, publishing, and updating a standard draft for editable, browser-based content.

https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable

Even though Squire isn't meant as a drop-in replacement for web page editing, it still suffers from the same endemic issue that plagues all editors: browser inconsistency.
Interesting. It still has issues with the "oops I have too many words in the selection that I made into a link and I want to fix it." This is a problem in Gmail's editor as well.

The handling of bulleted lists seems a bit more robust but that may be I've just been trained out of my bad habits.
"This is the short-term goal to cool the fuel for the F-35; however, the long-term fix is to have parking shades for the refuelers," Resch said.

But what color are they going to paint the shades?
Ask HN: Are you a sociopath?
Do you care?
I'm a PHP developer (reasonably experienced, in my opinion anyway). The only practical downside of PHP is the standard library is a bit iffy, because breaking BC that much is a big deal. Many experienced developers prefer PHP, it's not just a language for newbie web developers to get their feet wet in.

I think the reason you see a lot of terrible PHP code is because it has low barriers to entry, a lot of inexperienced people who really aren't programmers can jump in and build crap really easily. But there is _a lot_ of good PHP code out there too.
Sony cyber attack traced to Bangkok hotel
Thanks for the mention, hoggle.

Actually, it for this same need (where I was becoming ADD by constantly checking HN) that I created HNdigest.com)
My Summer Vacation in North Korea
> We don't do PHP. If you are so great, why don't you do a Pull Request.

Your post seems rather hostile and I don't think it's warranted.

First, you call PHP poop.

Then someone expresses doubt that you use PHP at all.

I then linked this person to a repository in your github that is written in PHP.

Thus, my actions were disproving the implied statement in "I'd be very surprised if you really knew much about PHP."

At no point did I say I am "so great".

Calm your jimmies. They are rustled thoroughly and for no good reason.
Mechanical Insects Evolve the Ability to Fly Through a Window
Trust me it is.
The situation with flying is a bit more nuanced than you make it out to be. I fly to NYC and DC from Boston pretty regularly for business. With TSA precheck and dedicated security lines for the regional shuttles, it usually takes me 2.5 hours total to make the trip. Of course, that requires driving to the airport and taking a cab once you land at your destination.

These legs are serious business for the airlines that run them, as compared to Amtrak who isn't going to be able to do anything for you if you get stopped due to freight. For example, the flights to these destinations run once an hour. If you show up at the airport before your flight and there is a seat available an earlier flight, the ticketing machine will automatically prompt you to re-book for free. That flexibility is not something you're going to get on a train.

All of that said, for personal travel I usually take Amtrak. Most people can't risk the multi-hour delays that can result from train travel when they are on the clock. But when I'm on vacation, it doesn't matter to me either way and the train is a much more relaxing experience.
For programmers familiar with Ruby or Python, my experience is that the main points of confusion are all around what is happening in memory. What is a Ruby String/Array/Hash/etc., _really_? That sort of thing.

It might seem trivial to you, but the idea that you have a bunch of 1s and 0s in memory that the computer somehow "knows" is an integer or a character or whatever else is a HUGE intellectual hurdle for people who haven't considered it before. For that reason, I think it's a mistake to put a student in a situation where they're grappling with both memory and things like calling conventions simultaneously and for the first time.

I can't comment on Pascal, but I don't think C++ is an accurate reflection of the computer's own perspective on how work is happening. The main thing C does is make the way your program interacts with memory much more visceral.

There's the added benefit that the most popular interpreters for Ruby and Python (MRI and CPython, respectively) are written in C. This gives the teacher an opportunity to connect concepts in C _directly_ to already-understood concepts from another context.

All in all, I think the debate about which language(s) to learn is overstated, albeit one that programmers love to have for tribal reasons. The same concepts are embedded in all of them in different ways. The important thing is extracting, isolating, and abstracting those concepts.
"Real programmers don't use PHP" is reminiscent of "Real programmers don't use Pascal". Or http://xkcd.com/378/
I think every major city has the wealthy suburbs nearby like that, industries grow and the wealthy owners leave the cities for more space. Bloomfield Hills is ~20 miles away from Detroit. LA's rich and poor cities are much closer than that, and in NYC it's practically neighborhood by neighborhood with the absurdly wealthy cities farther out.
> If they have no data on you, I assume ad exchanges supply default advertisements, or there are bidders on default ads?

To be clear on what happens here: the ad exchange itself isn't usually interested in identifying you per se, it's the bidders. So for example the ad exchange might send the bidders a bid request that has some information like this:

Country, user agent, time zone, website that will be showing the ad, size/location of the ad, etc.

Then it's up to the bidders to try to figure out how much this impression would be worth and then bid appropriately. Even if they can't 'identify' the user as someone they've seen before, they might still bid on the ad because the website showing the ad might be relevant to the product they're trying to sell. If the only information they have about a user is what is passed in the bid request they would probably bid lower.

I don't know what the behaviour is for when an a bid request doesn't receive any bids, but it would be exchange-dependent, and likely rare on the major exchanges.
I personally like Readactor. It is light weight and cross-browser. After using it in an app which started to make money, I finally paid up for the premium and it was worth it.
Db.py – an easier way to interact with your databases
Poe wrote on both.
> Detroit is the perfect microcosm of the US wealth polarity trend.

Au contraire, Detroit is a perfect microcosm of absolutely abominable government and culture. Sure, this has led to wealth disparity, as anyone with the means to get out, has. But the root cause is awful governance.
Do you still live here as well? And to what version of MLK Jr do you refer -- some sanitized and vague liberal hallucination, or the radical Christian egalitarian he was?

A lot of things have hurt Detroit. Include corporate malfeasance, changing labor markets, political corruption, bad planning. But I beg you to clarify if you must insist it is minds.
A fairly important point that was left out is the license. If the original developer puts some form of license on the code, then people may be afraid to fork and maintain the project on their own because no one wants to try and understand the murky waters of licenses/copyright/etc. This mentality puts the onus of maintaining the repository on the original dev despite their intentions on making the code open source. In my opinion, if you are going to open source your code but with no intention of maintaining it, then make a fully open license in plain English that says anyone can take ownership of the code.
Bounds checking is "essentially" binary instrumentation? That's an... interesting claim.
Apple's $1bn anti-competition trial might collapse
Obligatory "everything today is terrible and it's those kid's fault" quotes from every single time period, in every single culture, since the dawn of recorded history.
There is actually, and it's nice! http://cratejoy.com
What do you want to do with Python?

My personal experience is that "learn language X" is more difficult and less productive than "learn to do Y with language X."

Figure out what you want to accomplish with the language and worry about the rest along the way.
Your explanation is way simpler to understand than the lengthy original article.

Maybe one addition: the value of 'this' inside a function FN can also be set by a caller of FN by using the form FN.call(this-ptr-value, arg1, arg2, ..) instead of FN(arg1, arg2, ..)
I'm not sure I buy the premise of this article. The supply of Bitcoin in the market is not directly related to the mining rate (the "constant supply" the author refers to) -- instead, it depends on how many people are looking to trade Bitcoin at any given time.

Monetary policy is a mechanism to control long-term value of currency, for example to limit inflation or maintain a certain exchange rate with a foreign trade partner. It's not intended to (nor is it able to) damp out short-term fluctuations in foreign exchange markets.
You shouldn't be surprised, it does exist.

http://www.subbly.co/
My pleasure. Shoot me an email at jordan at birnholtz dot com if you'd like any notes or supplementary texts (or just a friendly chat about the subject).
Did we read the same article? She's not condemning all left-wing activism. From the article:

> My current political worldview falls under the umbrella of leftism [...] What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics.

Furthermore she points to concrete political action as the way out. Again, from the article:

> Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals. Would they actually work?

BTW, I'm very familiar with the kind of cultish activism that can consume the lives of young people -- indeed from her description, it seems to have hardly changed since I was a student in Montreal. McGill is perhaps at an unusual nexus, because many students there are from comfortable backgrounds in English Canada, but are suddenly ensconced in a province with a different activist tradition, that's far more left-wing.
Ask HN: Pay for a PM service where you migrate the data to an onpremise instance?
I have a built a task management service called Taskfort (https://www.taskfort.com) where you can either run an on-premise version or sign up for a cloud account. The premium cloud account allows for private boards and data migration. I wanted to add the data migration so you aren't locked into the cloud service. If people like the general concept, I will be tackling other projects with the same structure.
iCloud Activation Bypass released
Very few train riders are large-city-to-large-city passengers. The most successful train lines may terminate in a large city, but it is the density of the route that matters, not the termini. There are plenty of very successful routes in the world that are between two small cities, or only with 1 large terminus. The LGV Mediternnanee, from a demographic standpoint, isn't much different than a line from Indianapolis to Chicago line, and the Nagano Shinkansen line not much different from a Seattle to Portland line. And yet both of those lines are extremely profitable.

This is mostly due to simple competition...the existence of passenger airliners, regardless of how competitive the train or airline offerings are, reduces market share. I guarantee you that the most profitable ticket sales on California's HSR fairy tale will be between (LA|SF) and (Fresno|Bakersfield|Modesto). Not between LA and SF.
Not the most well-written article for NYT, but interesting point and good visual. I think the "real reason" according to the author is simply that they have more money (as opposed to having better morals, culture, or whatever). It makes sense that marriage is unattractive if you're a working class male who doesn't think he could support a family.
Every university professor's web page is like that. They all look awful.
Or watching your loved one's paycheck be taxed higher because they married you

I'm pretty sure that's not normally how it works. Married couples have the same deduction (well, it's doubled, but they file only one return) and tax rates on a couple are lower:

Income between 40,000 - 40,050
Tax if filing single: 5,935
Tax if married filing jointly: 5,111

Income between 80,000 - 80,050
Tax if filing single: 15,935
Tax if married filing jointly: 11,864

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

Please notice that two single people making $40k each pay $5,935, while one married couple making $80k pays $11,864.

$5,935 * 2 = $11,870

As for no longer qualifying for low-income grants or programs, most of those take marital status into consideration much like the standard deduction- a family making $10,000 is going to qualify for a lot more than a single person making $10,000
Latest “Fine Jewelry Designs” for Girls
They didn't shut down if they were making a few million a year. They probably didn't scale nearly as well as they thought and never broke into a profit/subscriber number.
I see, thank you for the information!
Simple:

1) Richer people are mostly smarter. Smarter people see through the toxic culture and seek to marry.

2) Wealthy people are often so because they do things that help build wealth and success, Ie. marriage. Smart people descended from smart married people are more likely to follow their parents warnings about the destructiveness of the toxic culture which attacks marriage.
Did you file chargebacks?
"Anything humans can do in 0.1 sec, the right big 10-layer network can do too"

Actually this was argued by Connectionists in 1980s. It is called Feldman's 100-step rule:

The critical resource that is most obvious is time. Neurons whose basic computational speed is a few milliseconds must be made to account for complex behaviors which are carried out in a few hundred milliseconds (Posner, 1978). This means that entire complex behaviors are carried out in less than a hundred time steps. Current AI and simulation programs require millions of time steps.

Feldman, J. A., & Ballard, D. H. (1982). Connectionist models and their properties. Cognitive Science, 6, p. 206.
That was my assumption. It appears Detroit could potentially be reliant on a wealthy entrepreneur to take a "leap of faith" or have a third party offer some sort of financial incentive to encourage businesses back. I'm not too well versed on US law but is the federal government able to help in this vein?
Valgrind can only catch bugs that are exposed while the program is running under it. In most cases (when you have a good testsuite), this is sufficient. However, especially in the case of security vulnerabilities, you might have a bug that is only exposed on specific or malformed input that non of your testsuites check for. For example, if you are parsing input from an untrusted source, and that input has a length prefixed field. Unless your testsuite includes a message whose length prefix is longer than the actual length, Valgrind will not tell you that you will potentially overflow, because you do not do so in any of your tests.
Try to solve a real world problem using python. I'll give you more details/answers once I'm at my home.
It isn't necessary to dream up scenarios of unethical action on the part of anyone for this to happen.

Startups fail. Fact of life. We talk about "burn rate" and "runway" because it is easier to say than "The number of days you have to find a working business model or secure additional investment, after which you have to fire all of your employees because you cannot make payroll."

When startups know they're going to fail to make payroll, they fire all employees. Fact of life. Fired employees are the worst affected people when a startup collapses, by a factor of lots. They don't get to call up their credit card company and chargeback forgone wages for the last three years.

When you're the non-technical CEO of a subscription commerce company, and you find yourself in an empty office without employees, if you're hypothetically aware that subscriptions are still active -- which you very well might not be aware of -- you have very limited options for actually fixing it. You might as well ask my dad to do an orderly shutdown of Appointment Reminder given I get hit with a bus tomorrow.

Could this have been handled better? Yeah. There's a reason that when startups ask for advice on what to do in their remaining hours of life we always say the words "Prepare and execute on a plan to effect an orderly wind-down of the business." It's not exactly something people are born knowing and might not be at top-of-mind while they're going through an enormously stressful event.
> The author critically misunderstands the way that `this` gets set...

I don't actually. (I'm the author) I know that the this key word is executed at run time to figure out what this is. It is true there are simpler ways to explain this and this blog post isn't that. I link to such a post at the bottom of my own. These are just some examples. There's also more to that blog post than what everyone is discussing, like returning from a constructor and global this in node.js and accessing this in eval and more. Anyway, I didn't submit this to HN and hadn't intended to. I also didn't intend to sit here tonight and put on a thick skin to deal with all this criticism for something I wrote months ago.