skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the trade-offs we've continually made in computing is between general performance and legibility of performance. Caches (i.e. the memory hierarchy) is one example of that, but we also have pipelining and ILP. Moving up into software, we see this with garbage collection and (more dangerously) with databases. PostgreSQL is great at taking complex queries (many, many joins) and turning them into things that (often) can be very quickly executed. Of course, there's no silver bullet. If your join is a full Cartesian product over two or more large tables, you're screwed. If you assumed that the table was set up with certain "obvious" indexes and it wasn't set up that way, you can get burned on that.

We've built systems that are very fast, but almost no one knows why they are fast and when those speed advantages go against us (which is quite rare) it's often unclear why. For the most part, all of this has been a huge win. It might make reasoning about performance from first principles ugly, if not impossible, but the economics favor it. That said, we're at the point where the only way to reason about performance in many real-world systems is empirically, because there's just so much going on in terms of memory hierarchy, network traffic, etc. that is hard to predict in advance. Combine this with the myriad variables, some in the physical world, that can influence performance... and what we end up with is that results that seem meaningful (30 percent faster!) might be artifacts of differences in configuration.

That said, I don't think the term computer science was coined with performance measurement in mind but, all that said, the field is not really a science. It's a mix of mathematics, microeconomics, design and engineering... with a lot of science involved, but most often not scientific under the original, strict definition of the word. Science is about investigating the natural world and finding the right answers; CS is about making answers. And they're both extremely important, but fundamentally different.

Also, just to underscore how difficult CS is, I tend to think of it as a branch of mathematics that lives on an unfair playing field. Reasoning about arbitrary code, in even the most trivial ways, is known to be impossible (Turing, Church, Rice) and much of CS is contending with the obscenity of arbitrary programs (i.e. often having to quantify over the space of programs) and, typically, that means limiting what can be written while still retaining as much power as is needed.
NTP's "author" --where author is defined as author of the original RFC (958), every subsequent RFC (1305, 5905, etc) and reference implementation-- is Prof. David Mills. Prof. Mills is one of the unsung heros of the internet.
> information asymmetry and choice overload

In the industry, we call it "patient education."
I noticed that google street view has stopped to work reliably in Firefox in Ubuntu (not tested elsewhere) but still works fine with Chrome. This thing really looks intentional.
well I disagree...their deck could've been one or two slides with the numbers they are pulling. I almost feel like they knew the rest of the deck wouldn't be as important.
I'm no medical professional so take my statements with healthy skepticism, do your own research, etc, but as a father myself I share the concern and my understanding was that common viral infections like the flu, common colds, ear/throat/sinus infections, whatever, do not cause dangerous fevers (>105ºF). Your temperature regulation usually has to be impaired in some other way like being in hot conditions, overexertion, or a combination of them. Obviously in infants the story is different due to physiological immaturity but the fever response to infection is a positive indicator of the body's thermal regulation working correctly and treating a fever is simply for symptom relief and possibly even detrimental to treating the illness.
Show HN: Pure CSS buttons with fluid animation
Rust by Example has been adopted and should be updated in a timely manner now, so hopefully none of it will remain out of date for too long.
Because he basically said the same thing live in the crowd. He's vocally against this project.
I love this story.

This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo
Well, overall I would warn against it, although I get why it sounds appealing. The reasons are multi-fold and I'd happily share more personal details on why via email, but the main reason why I say no is that you wind up missing a lot of dates and are constantly resetting expectations (this isn't abnormal in Software but it gets far worse).

Effectively you compete for the every team members time to get things done as no-one is 100% committed to the co-op. e.g. developer X gets a project from the co-op for 40 hours of work, he commits to do it by Jan 9th, 2015 say, but he also takes another project outside the co-op that has a delivery date of 12/30/2014. He winds up getting hung up on his first project and so you start resetting expectations for the client. But multiply that by 3-4 people doing the same thing, and what you will find is that keeping clients happy is a royal pain in the ass. And it gets worse when rates come in to play, e.g. the private gig now tells the developer he'll pay $1000 on top of his hourly rate to get Z done by 1/5, etc. So now the co-op starts suffering because people are over committing, even though they are well intentioned.
My comment was a prompt. It was to inspire interesting discussion and debate. It wasn't meant to persuade. It also wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list.

I'm just happy some interesting discussion came of it.

That 2x2x2 table isn't complete, by the way. For example, "The NSA came to a different conclusion other than the most politically desirable one" falls nowhere within it.

That's why I didn't try to enumerate all possible scenarios, especially the less plausible ones. That would be uncharitable to readers, as well as talking down to them.
Ask HN: Provide chat support on paid plan
Why do SaaS companies mostly offer email and phone support at paid plans, but not chat support?
There is definitely a bizarre market dynamic in higher education right now. That doesn't mean that a degree is useless for learning (some more than others, I'm sure). However, because of the effect of 'prestige' on school values, there are a lot of undesirable effects on the academic market. It is a weird economic conundrum that colleges are putting out more producers (graduated possible professors) than can find work, while at the same time college prices are rising. It's like farms breeding too many dairy cows and at the same time there is a milk shortage, because only milk from a few non-expanding dairies is considered good enough.

Since the perceived value of a degree when it comes to the job market has much more to do with a school's reputation than it does with the actual educational accomplishments of the degree holder, what I would do is use the $1 billion to create a new university which would do all it could to spread the prestige away from the schools where it is centralized.

In other words, there are only a few Harvards or Cambridges in the world. If there were 1000 schools of this perceived quality, no one would bother even knowing their names. You might look one up to see if it was on the 'list of quality schools'. In theory, accreditation is supposed to be like that. But in the real reputation market, Harvard and say, Eastern Carolina might both be accredited schools, but there are significant differences in reputation. I would gladly wager that the best student at ECU is a better student than the worst at Harvard, but the Harvard fellow will benefit from his schools reputation in a way that the ECU fellow will not. And this is why schools with less prestige cannot offer effective price competition with more prestigious schools, regardless of actual quality of education per dollar.

This is a problem when it comes to the ever-increasing cost of college, because the reputation effects keep faculty from just going off and making their own new college to compete with their current employer. If the Harvard biology department all took jobs with Example State, this would increase the prestige of Example State, but the professors would feel more of a loss of prestige than Harvard would. Even though it's the same department, with the same professors!

So, I'd hire a bunch of prestigious faculty in a specialized area, to create a school which could compete with the Ivys for e.g. 5% of their student body. I'd build reputation for the school by sponsoring contests and conferences which accentuate the dominant position of the new school in its chosen area. And I'd aggressively recruit the best students in that area from other schools, by offering easy credit transfer, better student aid, etc. Until people in one particular field say, "Harvard? It's not like you went to Fiat Lux Dave University".

Rinse and repeat (with as many $billions as available), until sanity returns to higher ed costs.
This really made me mad. Minnesota and Illinois were willing to pay for the whole project from Minneapolis -> Milwaukee -> Chicago (granted WI would need to pay recurring maintenance) and they refused...
There are no good comedies these days. If you put a price tag on your life's worth and then calculate the dollar value of an hour of it, will you invest all that money into watching a crappy comedy, really? Although the time spent watching may have some health benefits from the laughter, I think meeting friends and having a social conversation, which is often accompanied with even healthier laughter is time much better spent. I personally want to "invest" in a movie only if it enriches me in some way. Unfortunately, these movies are so rare nowadays.
Not true. Can you imagine the economic impact if this stands as a case study on how lax security standards could be at large, trusted private institutions? That all it takes is one pissed-off employee with a cursory background in computer security to cause billions of dollars in damages and rampant fear?

It's much easier to address public fears with an easy scapegoat than to owe up to the overall frailty of network-driven industry. Could you imagine the cost of creating "the TSA of networks belonging to important private entities?"
Sony hackers leak “The Interview” script, among others
Freight currently makes better use of US rail infrastructure than passengers do, because freight is less time-sensitive than passengers and the geography of the US makes that a problem for rail. It does not make sense to penalize the most efficient user of a resource to benefit one of its least efficient users.
Please look at your website with iPad for example. And then please get rid if of that share bar that annoyingly covers the content. Thanks.
> I don't agree its ecosystem is better than Javas, neither in size nor in quality.

Size is a fact:

http://www.modulecounts.com/

And Ruby is definitely not faster than JavaScript.
http://jmockit.github.io
Using our own motivations as a model, it is more likely that we will ultimately build a super-super computer that can house/serve everyone's (enhanced) minds. Everyone will simply upload their "being" to this computer and that will be the end of anything we know as humanity. Any humans left behind will devolve into nomadic tribes, having more in common with animals than super-modern humans. Any ETs visiting Earth looking to find intelligent life will find nothing but a big box with a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign on it and an automated security system to prevent anyone from doing so.

In other words, when we can all live out our fantasies, what need do we have of reality?
"My guess, there are some serious, institutional-shaking smoking gun emails between media execs, lobbyists, gov't."

Wouldn't those be released in the SPE exec. mail dumps?
Both, plus doing. I like watching a video to get an overview of what I'm learning is and what it does, then I start my own project using what I'm learning and read up on things that I need to know to get my project finished.
There's that wonderful point in a project where you can point--point directly at!--a fix to a fix to make legacy thing work. I love that point. That's the point I start looking for new work and resenting my forerunners.

"second system" syndrome is very real, but nobody in management ever seems to appreciate "Look, technology has progressed in the last five years since this was written...we can do more with less, pleeeeaaaase let us fix this.".

Nobody looks forward to working with legacy code. The business logic is usually wrong, the business itself has changed, the original developers are gone, the market talent composition has changed, etc.

I'd honestly rather see a business embrace the ablative nature of code and instead build itself with the assumption that, every 2-3 years, chunks will be rewritten. This is an argument in favor of services and better documentation and tests, by the way.

EDIT:

And even worse is when the manager/CTO/whatever admits that the code is going to need rewriting--but not yet. Because that means that a) you're going to be wasting effort temporarily fixing something you know will be thrown out and b) tacitly admitting that they are too scared of change to embrace it and too short-sighted to figure out how to balance business requirements with technical debt.

I've been burned by that multiple times.

A man-month of unpaid overtime for rewrites, not a nano-second for legacy support!
yeah, universities can be sneaky about that

http://registrar.berkeley.edu/feesched.html

looking at this, it isn't too bad at berkeley.
PHK has been working on a rewrite of ntp sponsored by the Linux Foundation. He has posted a couple of entries about his progress so far: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html

In the meantime Miroslav's chrony is a good alternative: http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/

If you are looking for the fixed version you can grab 4.2.8 from archive.ntp.org which is still responding to requests: http://archive.ntp.org/ntp4/ntp-4.2/ntp-4.2.8.tar.gz
If it's dominant then how can it not be natural?
It's really hard being a founder, and as bosses what we want more than anything else ever, is to pay our staff more. It's the number one thing after customer satisfaction. If you aren't invested in the company or the lifestyle or are expecting a decent payout, your boss will understand if you decide to leave.
that means nothing. that could easily be explained away by people using speed dial in their browsers more, or autocomplete in their address bar instead of googling facebook to arrive at facebook.
The public universities in the U.S. are quite good as well. It's not about quality of education.

When a society is expanding, pre-existing social class matters little, because the focus is on the future rather than the past. When it's stagnant or contracting, like Silicon Valley, you see the importance of pedigree start to grow rapidly.
Your reasoning is at least as good as Ray Kurzweil's.
US navy tests 'GhostSwimmer' drone-fish
Now: Obama Live Sony Hack
Is anyone else bothered by the idea of being enclosed in a tube with no possible way out for hundreds of miles?

I guess it's no worse than an airplane but for some reason it makes me feel claustrophobic?

Perhaps there's a way to add an escape hatch every mile or five?
Freight boast some positively incredible efficiencies, so I'm assuming high speed rail simply loses it by holding the pedal to the metal the whole way, so to speak?

It's a cool comparison to me: you can either slam the accelerator/brakes for the duration of a trip or you can fight about 7 miles of head. Both are so extreme I don't really have much of an intuition on it, but I think it'd be fun to find out.
Show HN: Sirius MVC coffeescript framework
Illegal Skyway: Chinese Homeowner Bridges 2 Highrise Condos
Ha, well calling it hopeless was not meant to be a qualitative assessment, merely a concession to reality. And no, I never tried the Dvorak. I'm way too lazy and set in my thirty year-old ways.
Just do the simple math. Your company received $2mm months ago and has 15 employees. This is ~$134,000 per employee for a year. We'll imagine they will push towards a Series B round within 12 months. They are receiving $1,000 per month in revenue. I'll assume you mean gross revenue here, net would be a different calculation entirely.

With that math in mind, imagine the salaries, benefits, employer paid taxes, equipment cost, and office (per employee). Assuming that is 100% of their costs (we didn't even talk about infrastructure costs, marketing, accounting, legal and the meriad of other costs associated with running a startup), does this add up to more than ~$134,000 per year per employee? I would imagine the answer is yes. So, yes, they can't afford to give you more. Frankly, they can hardly afford the employees they have now. In my view, that's a really tight budget.

What should you do? Well that is a really personal question. If I were you, I would decide if you would like to stay or not, but don't blame them for being good at figuring out the math of the situation. They are on a shoestring budget, I have zero doubt of that. I would most certainly tell you that "we can't afford it" right now, if I were them.

Now, if they are making $1,000 per month net revenue, then they are profitable. That would be a different situation entirely and they could actually give you more.
Well, I totally agree about Adam Sandler, but we need to demand quality. If we keep watching (i.e. paying for) subpar movies, movie studios will keep making them - cha-ching! I'd rather watch one quality comedy than 10 crappy ones. And the humor these days is getting very primitive - nothing sophisticated like in the British flicks or, let's say, Louis de Funes. These are comedies, the rest is idiotware made for people who're brain-dead to enjoy them as well (wider markets). I recently started to show my kids Charlie Chaplin movies and they love them. We need to keep raising the bar, not constantly lower it.
systemd-timesyncd implements SNTP, which is not the same.
>The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.

http://marcrogers.org/2014/12/18/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlike...
the level of obfuscation is impressive. i wonder if similar obfuscation for javascript exists? The one from google doesn't seem to quite work right and end up breaking my script. The paid version from jscrambler seems to work but seems like a large waste of money to obfuscate one file.
Will it work with LIVE video streaming?

For example, can you use ffmpeg to pull live video via rtsp, re-encode and pipe to nodejs for it to stream down to browser and to be consumed by html - with or without a plugin?

Any working code sample?
>The language encourages people to write better and more maintainable code.

Python lowers the barrier to entry for programming. Nowadays lots of business analyst types and such are getting into programming because of Python. As a result I have seen some horrendous looking Python code out there which performs quite poorly.
Obama Says Sony 'Made a Mistake' Canceling Film
The Acela shares track with commuter and freight trains, as well as running on regular tracks, as opposed to tracks designed for HSR which is why it averages only a paltry 80 MPH. In comparison, the TGV in France averages 157 MPH (its top speed is 357 MPH), and Japanese bullet trains average somewhere in the neighborhood of 162 MPH.

The 'thelantern' link provided above doesn't go into detail if the plan involves laying all-new tracks to properly support HSR, or if existing tracks to be re-used.

Even then, parity with driving is an achievement. Drivers in traffic have this annoying habit of texting or worse while driving, even when illegal. I can put up with sitting next to someone texting on the train since they're not doing so while weaving in and out of traffic.
True, but the ones who are worth their salt know how to take advantage of new libraries and approaches, and how to structure their code so that it is easy to port and maintain.

Those devs are, naturally, in the minority.
You're right, it's been a while since I used it.
Those are valid complaints, but they are kind of on the same level as saying "I have to type 'int' to declare an int, what a drag!"
Excuse me, but a lot of people quite like having an actual reality instead of a pointlessly mutable existence.

Just because Greg Egan wrote a book about it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
do you think Meteor.js will ever use PostgreSQL 9.4?
I'd be happy if the setuptools bdist installer could create a single file that works in 32 and 64-bit Windows and would take care of running 2to3 during the install. The situation now is too painful for me to bother making Windows installers any more.
It would be interesting if the reason we haven't detected signs of other life is that we're quarantined until such time that we create AI.
Make Your Own Snapchat Geofilter
This ignores the negative impact of keeping smaller groups limited by preserving their language. In Guatemala, many of the "Indians" have their own languages it dialects, some of which are incompatible with each other. There's little opportunity for use of these languages apart from the town they live in. To be involved in commerce, read about current events, or even be treated well, you need to have great Spanish.

My parents have a medical clinic in one if these villages. When the government started making some of the classes be taught in the local language, the parents were upset, knowing that this would hurt their children. They viewed it as another way to keep the "indian" population back. And they're correct.

So while there may be good reasons to preserve languages (like preserving art, or historic towns), someone should be funding that directly, rather than externalizing the costs on to these indigenous groups.
So, it's not fantastical, it's ambitious... Fantasy implies an impossibility.
I'm a Dvorak typist and I use AutoHotkey for rebinding. It works like a charm and you can configure program-specific bindings.

For a Linux alternative you can give IronAHK a shot.
https://github.com/polyethene/IronAHK
You rather ironically left out the most historic event this week, the US normalizing relations with Cuba. To say the news this has been a busy newsweek is an understatement.
It's not about invading Korea, it's about justifying new laws that would provide tighter control over the Internet as a way to "keep us secure".
We have actually built a system to automate our internal sales process (http://customertrialportal.com). It is ideal for software product trial management, sales followup and license issuance. If you are looking for one send us an email.
This is one of the hidden gems within the article:

"Selling to your existing customers is orders of magnitude easier than selling to new customers.
We’ve never really strictly enforced the quotas differentiating our tiers from each other, so I had poor visibility into how many people were over quota, but it turns out that it is almost 10% of the user base.
I built out capability in our billing system to upgrade a user’s account without forcing them to log in and initiate it themselves.
Then I built a screen in our admin dashboard which shows all the accounts that are over quota and links them to their contact details in the CRM."

How great is it for a customer to hear that they've gone over but it's OK? So many companies would put a sting in the tail of the contract and charge overages (frequently at nasty rates), or just suspend their account until it's upgraded. Instead it's being used as a perfect opportunity to upsell an existing, qualified - and therefore presumably very happy customer - on a bigger plan.