skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very difficult for the algorithm to optimize the hexagons. If you change the number of vertices from 6 to 3, it runs slightly faster but the results are much better.
Legal? Clearly they can and will do what they can get away with.

"They’re compliant, and they’re, they’re doing ok now but she’s spending a lot of time on the phone.”

My god that sickened me to read that.

My assumption is that it's Constitutionally illegal, and probably violates FCC regulations, but that it would be held "currently legal" by having had some law passed that declares it so. If it's something like that, then it would be "legal" until or if ever found to be unconstitutional.

Those cops are possibly operating under the umbrella of some current law that can be interpreted in their favor, and so are at almost zero risk of punishment.
The Scholar (2010)
More accurately, Google's implementation of the Java Security Manager. The JVM running on GAE is modified by Google. This is why there is no Java 8 on GAE and probably never will be. It is a metric ton of work for them to port their changes to each new JVM release.

Managed VM's are the new direction because now you just install the latest Oracle or whatever VM you want. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/
> "Maximizing shareholder value" has indeed gotten out of hand.

None of the examples you give show this. What they show is that, because of flaws in corporate governance, things that do not maximize shareholder value are being done in the name of "maximizing shareholder value".
The argument put forward in the OP is rather strange, as it compares the stated goals to the actual outcomes. This is similar to saying 'experts are less knowledgeable in their specific field than average people', when the reality is that the people who claim to be experts are simply exaggerating their level of knowledge.
Developing Keyboards for iOS
I had a similar experience. When I went to France I bought a laptop, they only sell them with AZERTY layouts. Now, at work they had a QWERTY keyboard for me. Without realizing it I could write in AZERTY at home and QWERTY at work without any problem whatsoever.

The difference between both layouts is not that big, but enough to be felt.
>Putting things the other way around, USAF is about 40% of U.S. military by value, so we can assume it takes about 300 billion a year to operate. A plane's life is about 30 years. It makes up 9 trillion. And there are about 6000 aircraft it in. So each consumes about 1.5 billion over its lifetime, all accounted.

Now you're ready to compare our AF to someone else's.

>Why is the difference of 'per aircraft lifecycle cost' so important then? Only plane for which it is comparable (actually greater) than USAF total spent per airframe is B-2A,

Because you can compare each platform's "efficiency" at a given mission, as you state in the last part of your post. It relies on getting in lots of wars though to get enough data to make reliable comparisons, "fortunately" we've got that part covered.

>will make it a good buy anyway.

That remains to be seen / demonstrated. The way it shakes out so far is that there is a lot of doubt as to whether the AF will be able to keep enough of them in the air, or enough pilots trained for them to do anything other than make cameo appearances. The unit cost keeps rising, the performance keeps getting revised down. This thing is going to be like the Space Shuttle (IMO), too expensive for what it does and never able to to fulfill all of its intended roles.

EDIT: removed annoying double-double-negative
I'm afraid I feel the same about results of this as I do with basically all attempts at tone-mapping. It makes the world look like a bad late-90s video game. Depths of light and darkness are what make a scene appear real.

Maybe we just need to wait for HDR displays before we expect to see the full details of HDR imagery in a realistic way.
> Google at some point stated they will always prioritize long term interests of their users vs. short term interests of their shareholders (paraphrasing)

They say that, but they don't actually do that. If they were prioritizing the long-term interests of their users, they wouldn't be giving away their core services for free and funding them with advertising revenues. That may seem better for users in the short term, but in the long term it means that only services that promise advertising revenues are available; services that lots of users like (e.g., Google Reader), but which don't generate enough advertising revenue, get shut down, no matter what the impact is on users. The best thing for the long-term interests of users is for Google to charge users directly for services; yes, figuring out how to do this for something like Google search is a hard problem, but what is Google for if not to solve hard problems that no other company is in a position to solve?

More here:

http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html
Everything you said sounds logical. But, it's a wide swath of information. What books/articles are you sourcing to piece this all together?

I will say that it is a complete mess. A lot of businesses today treat their customers and employees like garbage. On the other hand a lot of of the existing unions are parasitic so I understand criticisms on both sides. I can only suggest that it is because we have a very bad form of corporatism run amok in the US. Where regulation does exist it tends to support large companies (which I suppose is not much different from the picture in the 1970s).

The left is afraid of big heartless business. The right is afraid of big inefficient government. We have a wonderful mix of both. Both sides are too busy screaming about the splinter in the other's eye that they miss the log in their own.

> Nationalized and regulated businesses were stable, but seemed inefficient. They had no incentive to take risks to improve. The history of the Reagan era is well known, so that doesn't have to be repeated here, but reviewing the history of deregulation is useful. What seems to happen in deregulation of regulated monopolies is that a large number of new companies enter the field, and prices go down. Then most of the new companies go bust, and the winners consolidate. The result tends to be deregulated monopolies.

How do you combat this? Both seem less than satisfactory.
What do you think of the F-16?
I love NYC! That's tempting :-)

Thanks a lot for further specifying the cross-consistency guarantee. Basically the system I'm developing is a lot more like Amazon's SQS, it gives guarantees about message durability / replication, but only provides weak ordering, for three reasons: 1) What you said, scalability. 2) Availability since the system is available into the minority partition as well. 3) My queue is fundamentally designed with the idea that messages must be acknowledged by consumers, or they are reissued after a job-specific retry time (that can be set to 0 if you really want at-most-once delivery, but it's a rare requirement). When you have auto-re-queue strict ordering is basically useless since it is violated every time a consumer does not acknowledge the message fast enough.

However not strict ordering does not mean random, so it tries to approximate a FIFO using each node's wall clock timestamps. This means that while messages may be delivered in random order, usually what is queued first is served first, which is no guarantee at all from the POV of the developer, but is a more general guarantee about the fact that if there are N users waiting into a web application for some thing to get processed, the first in queue will likely be served before the last.

p.s. sorry for errors, writing with my daughter pulling my arms :-)
You're right but at least I'm not stupid.
> It conveys, she told me recently, both a European sensibility

What?
Ghostbuster's Theme on eight floppy drives
No, unless by "excessive regulation" you mean the fact that the industry is exposed to the same liability for unconsented harms done to third parties that every other industry is; because exemption from that liability is what the industry keeps lobbying for as the thing necessary to make it worthwhile to invest in new plants.

But usually, this kind of liability is wHat libertarians promote in place of regulation, not something anyone calls excessi regulation.
If there is nothing else I've learned from Hacker News it is that there is a non-trivial percentage of the startup community who not only don't care if a tech startup breaks the law, but they actively support and encourage it. Besides that, companies treating contract workers as employees in this way has been a thing for a long time, and I suspect it will take massive disgruntlement to fuel an equally massive lawsuit in order to get any of them to change.
Totally makes perfect sense. It's not a good plane to fight the hypothetical wars against adversaries that the US might never engage on the battlefield. Though it is actually hugely effective against the current enemies of the US. And for that reason it should be retired from service. Makes perfect sense.
There's also a video of light changing mediums on the YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCukPHZgmrDonqpLzUQHr9QQ
(I think the video with the mirror is also better on YT.)

The motherboard article is better:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fastest-camera-ever-cre...
although I still don't really understand how does this works.
Apparently the sensor(s?) moves with the light??
Sure. Here are a couple of recent news articles.

> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/28/army-says-no-to-m...

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-th...
Extensive discussion from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8705216
> "Depths of light and darkness are what make a scene appear real."

But sometimes you also want to see what's going on. You don't have to turn the filter up to eleven. The fact that this filter performs so well even at exaggerated settings bodes well for its usability at tasteful, restrained settings. And it will probably make it a lot easier on cinematographers, so that they have to worry less about carefully lighting the set and can rely on being able to balance things out in post production.
THe B-1 is another great example of a plane built for a mission that no longer exists. We still fly them, but it was a true boondoggle of it's time.
> There's an occasional call to "end the double taxation of dividends". Taxing interest paid and stock buybacks at the same rate would be equally effective. This would be a good time to do that economically, because interest rates are so low.

I'm in Australia where there's a system of dividend imputation. That means that together with dividends one will receive franking credits representing tax that a company has already paid. This has another advantage of really benefitting shareholders on a low income, few as there may be. The corporate tax rate is 30%. The highest marginal tax rate for the median income earner is 32.5%, meaning dividends, as paid out, will typically attract an effective 2.5% tax. Wonderful.

For someone receiving 70c in dividends and earning under $18k a year, they will get another 30c back through their tax return.

It's a pretty nice system and it's astonishing to me that the vast majority of other countries don't do this. It also means that domestic shareholders are advantaged over foreign ones.

Then there's also the government restriction on mergers/acquisitions among the four big banks, which provides stability, consumer benefits, a nice dividend for the shareholders - it provides an actual desire by the banks to create value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_imputation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_pillars_policy
Computable Wisdom
#([31 28 31 30 31 30 31 31 30 31 30 31] (dec %))

> Why is it any better/faster than a simple switch case like this in Clojure

It's not about better or faster. It's fun to think of things like this. :)
I flew with negative groundspeed in a Taylorcraft once. That was a "fun" day.
Surely the future of the Web will be a decentralized one, without a single point of failure. No matter the policies or laws we have in place, this will continue happening somewhere. We need to fix this from a technical point of view if we truly want everybody to continue using the Web.

Thanks to relatively new technology like Bitcoin, I'm more convinced than ever that decentralization of information is possible with little latency to propagate changes across the whole network.
Why would one reimplement something if it has already been done (correctly), is released under Apache 2 license and is maintained ?

You don't necessarily have to reimplement every library, as long as you can use them easily from another language. Why would you want to do that, anyway? Because the other language is much better than what you already have.

Personally, I only work on one project right now that still uses Java, and it uses it as an applet on a web page, not in a server/enterprise role. The effort required just to keep basic functionality working in that environment is absurd these days, since it seems every major browser developer and Oracle themselves are doing their best to make the platform unviable as quickly as possible. But even if they weren't, this is a project that uses several very different languages for different components in the overall system, and Java is so underpowered compared to every other language we use that I won't be at all sorry to see it go.

The more I think about it, the more Java seems like a perfect example of what I was talking about before: a weak language that is now chosen primarily for its established supporting ecosystem and not because of any great technical merit.
I always found lock picking fascinating, but I've never gotten around to actually trying. I'm guessing I also sleep better at night in ignorance.

Silly meta question: the story was published in 2005 but appears online now. Does that merit a (2005) in the title?
Thanks for this interesting talk and best wishes for the success of your company. Here are a few questions it raised for me. What references would you recommend for someone who wants to know more about machine learning algorithms from a technical point of view? Does the coming economic upheaval you envision with its exponential growth depend on the assumption that machine learning will be applied to the design of computers themselves? The reason I ask is that the applications you demonstrated concentrate on pattern classification, which doesn't seem to me like it would be much help for the work of electrical engineers and computer scientists (albeit a game changer in other fields). Are you aware of any evidence to the contrary?
Recent news article regarding the deployment of US tanks and armored vehicles requiring "close air support."

http://news.yahoo.com/us-army-may-station-tanks-eastern-euro...

Army families pay close attention to the deployment of A-10's for good reason. On one side, A-10's provide critical assistance against enemy tanks and armored vehicles (combat leverage). On the other, it means soldiers (family members) are being deployed for possible ground combat.
Lyft should sponsor her voicemail.
Just an fyi, Pierre Sprey is a bit of a controversial figure. He has argued that the army should abandon the M1 Abrams and go with M48's. Both war's in Iraq should have unequivocally shown that numeric superiority can be defeated by a more technologically advanced foe.

http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/07.pdf

China has since dramatically intensified their efforts in modernization learning from Iraqi mistakes from Dessert Storm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696255
Thanks! You answered the question the best I could have asked for. You're very inspiring. I have a feeling the best is yet to come for you. From the sounds of it, you work in an academic field, and if that's true then I can say that the school you work at is lucky to have someone so passionate about their field of choice. You will make a great mentor. If you find yourself around Vancouver ever then you need to look me up. First round is on me.
A Soft Murmur - Ambient Sounds to Wash Away Distraction
Interesting tidbit: it looks like the über folks acquired the http://www.uber.nyc domain recently. The .nyc domain actually started registering this year and the auction for uber.nyc (which I was a part of) ended at $3,200. I was surprised that Uber (the taxi company) didn't try to get it.
I saw an A-10 at an air show around 1990. I looked pretty impressive to me. The thing could almost fly sidewise while the pilot pivoted with the nose obviously tracking a fixed point a few hundred yards out. Scary stuff if you knew what you were looking at. No gun at the show, of course, but easy to visualize what was happening: approach the target slightly off to the side, then start a spin while strafing with the gun. From the ground target's POV, you are moving past faster than most cars on a freeway, while the pilot has the target locked into view during the spin for about 2 seconds, then breaks away again at about 200 knots.
Emacs isn't for everyone (2010)
Confessions of a mortician
There are bits and pieces of programs like that, but as you mentioned, they aren't very widespread, and tend to be opt-in programs.
For mass production aircraft, efficiencies should be okay. F-35 is already a mass production aircraft, with about 150 of them flying or i various stages of production, so little doubt final production run will be at least, over a thousand given any further possible cuts.

Shuttle was killed by a lack of market: if it was actually flying 50 missions a year as planned it would provide decent costs and justify most missions - but there appeared to be no market for that. USAF had a second thought on manned military space station (Keyholes and Lacrosses did the job better and cheaper - Soviet Union came to same conclusion scrapping their Almaz project), and civilian satellites became so reliable there was no need to launch many of them, or to repair them on orbit. It was never a technical failure, just overestimation of potential market size (same will happen to SpaceX reusability plans i believe).

My main point was that overall USAF expenses are pretty high, whatever aircraft are in use. So we shouldn't be scared by high per-airframe costs, if F-35 is say 40% better than some 'average' aircraft of comparable role, say F-16, that will be already okay even if F-16 'direct' costs are only 10% of F-35'th. Because indirect costs are high anyway, over a billion bucks per airframe. There is little doubt it will be at least 40% better (because of lower vulnerability and situational awareness) IMO.
I think this is a mostly useless complaint due to lack of specificity in two key respects. First, it fails to identify what in the HN "commenting policy" is supposedly to blame for the problem, and second, it fails to propose a change that would resolve the problem that could then be the focus of a discussion of whether the change is a net improvement.

Other than the fact that the author clearly doesn't like that the one particular story was flag killed, there's no substance and just a lot of nonspecific complaint and emotional language.

That's not to say that I don't think that HN tends to focus on stories of interest to white upper middle class to upper class people with deep interest in technology and/or the tech industry, but I don't see the article offered here as offering anything constructive with regard to tthat.
Well, sure... But I wonder if such a specific name is more confusing than useful because the analogy is off in so many ways.
I'm on the exact same boat. I'm trying to learn things like LXC, Docker, etc...

I like to watch these screencasts: https://sysadmincasts.com/

I also follow http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin

Try interacting with the community there since it's more focused on this.

Good luck!
Fascinating---do you have a pointer to the story or some discriminating keywords?
Ask HN: How can I remedy scatter brain and information overload?
This may seem like a silly question but it's something that's been affecting me for a while now. With the sheer amount of information available in the world today I have simply become overwhelmed. My mind is in a constant racing state. It's calm but not calm if that makes sense. While I could very well be thinking about nothing or something specific like writing this message. My mind seems to have multiple levels. One of which is directed to what I am actively doing and one below it which seems to process information in a never ending manner. I am not actively thinking about these things but it's there. Articles and books to read, shows to watch, things to do in my personal life and at work. Career advancement. All of these things just never stop but I could be calm. I can sleep fine, they don't cause active anxiety. They just linger in the background. Shooting around saying me me.

It's getting exhausting. I like to be informed. I like to know what people are talking about and like to be able to have a point of view. I like to have an opinion and be able to argue it. But I have realized it's just getting to be too much.

Currently my instapaper account has some 800 articles I have yet to read. Kindle has about 10 books I want to read. pinboard account has about 100 unread articles most of which are small books.

Any advice on what I should do? Do I just purge them?
How about:

def move_pos(x):
if random() > 0.3:
return x + 1
return x

def move_cars(positions):
return map(move_pos, positions)

I do not believe that functional programming benefits from brevity, except at the top layer. Unfortunately, functional programmers often expand their equations which, having examined them thoroughly, they understand implicitly, but can give too much information to the reader all at once.

Though, I have to agree, the FP community really hasn't been able to demonstrate how to do it without losing efficiency, and yet many proponents claim we should abandon all other paradigms. All of these articles seem very biassed towards FP.

I enjoy functional programming, but I prefer to work in imperative languages where I have a choice between paradigms.
Bangkok's coworking spaces
one of the best of hacker news!
thanks. that's a good point about clients not valuing time as much when its not hourly.
It looks like an airplane instead of a Buck Rogers spaceship :-)
Judge Orders Vinod Khosla to Open Gate to Martins Beach
The BPG spec says, "Arbitrary meta data (such as EXIF) are supported." This isn't good enough. Modern formats need to specify how ICC profile format information is to be embedded, under what circumstances, and smaller space alternatives (similar to DCF and EXIF color space tags). Otherwise this is like JFIF, where it's the ICC spec and not the JFIF spec that describes how ICC profiles are to be embedded. To replace JPEG and PNG, the BPG spec needs to define such things itself rather than deferring the work to others or making it optional. Image color space data isn't optional if high quality is to be taken seriously, and for that matter the encoding of copyright and image provenance information needs to be defined in the spec also.
If everything German reminds you of the Nazis, you're going to have to get used to being reminded of the Nazis an awful lot.

And that's on you, not people who use German words.
I think the colloquial meaning of "expressive power" is the ability of the language to express something the way the programmer would like.

OK, that seems like a reasonable definition.

An expressive language, in this sense, would be Python.

Expressive relative to a language like C? Yes, definitely, Python is much more powerful in this respect.

But expressive relative to the start of the art, the best that other languages have to offer? I don't think so, not really. There are plenty of concepts I would like to express in my code that I can't incorporate neatly or at all when I'm working in Python, but at least for now, the best implementations of many of those concepts aren't found in mainstream languages.