skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If there are infinitely many universes then I think it would make it less likely we're in a simulation

I'm not sure how this logically follows...why would this make it less likely?
>For the philosopher physics is a bridge to reality,

The claim that physics plays that special role within philosophy is itself a philosophical claim. If you want to justify it you'll have to study some philosophy!

More generally, your attitude is one that's typical of physicists these days, who tend to approach the philosophical literature with a huge superiority complex. That's not an attitude that was shared by the 20th century's greatest physicists.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is probably a good mantra to have when your code can kill people.
Nah, you're looking at it completely wrong. There are many small steps that could improve people's lives. Many of us could get to 100 if we simply could monitor our bodies more closely, for example, and perhaps fix "small defects" that are detected early:

http://tricorder.xprize.org

Some people live to be well over 100, so if we could closely identify why they live longer, we might learn a lot there too.

We know so little about the human body that one day we say eggs are bad for you then the next, they're ok to eat again.
New Dating App Promises to Help You Find Love Faster
The Javascript-for-comparison would help the case better if it didn't look unfairly poorly-coded. (And it doesn't express quite the same logic, though I don't think that makes it look worse here.) I'd have written

function RecordValidator(sessionHolder) {

function validateRecords(records) {
return records.every(validate);
}

function validateRecord(record) {
if (record.lastRevision !== undefined
&& record.lastRevision.user !== undefined) {
return record.lastRevision.user.getAccounts().every(function(account) {
return sessionHolder.hasAccount(account);
});
}
return record.revisions.map(usesLimits);
}

function usesLimits(revision) {
return sessionHolder.hasUser(revision.user);
}

return {
validateRecords: validateRecords,
validateRecord: validateRecord,
usesLimits: usesLimits,
};
}

The language looks like it has much to like.
Google Maps 2D Driving Simulator
Just wait. They'll learn ya. :)
Or that the biological imperative that we share is common across all animals. The fact that drugs were found by said animal implies trial and error. But then again, what constitutes a drug? In a world where drugs that induce sensation of the level of say cocaine were absent, some other milder drug would apply as a suitable substitute to relieving stress.

But really, I can't fathom how you connect collective consciousness to having no memory of a previous life or the one that follows. Apologies if I'm gravely mistaken.
I doubt anybody would bother programming Chia Pets in a simulation, so I'm going with no.
Open Source Future of Algorithmic Trading
You should have told him "I expected you to say that" and let infinite recursion reign free. :)
Say there are 100 universes. Suppose each universe has 1 in 100 chance of making simulations and if they do they make 100. Your chances then of living in a simulation are ~50%. It's much different than assuming a single universe in which case the advent of simulations almost assures that you're living in one (assuming the author's line of reasoning).

Edit: in summary the pace at which new universes arise could rival or exceed the pace at which simulations could be created.
Don't put words in my mouth. Where did I say corn and apples are healthy? Where did I say corporations are evil? Where did I split us into two groups, my side and your side?

You are arguing a stereotype rather than my actual statements.
They did do a 5 day unpowered retention test http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
Thanks for sharing. Here's a bookmarklet that injects a custom style:

javascript:void%20function(){function%20e(e,t,a){var%20n=%22.%22+e+'{%20padding-left:%2030px;background-image:%20url(%22http://www.fasttrackcalltaxi.co.in/ft_clickyourtaxi/App_Imag...),c.appendChild(d);var%20o=[%22second%22,%22seconds%22,%22minute%22,%22minutes%22,%22hour%22,%22hours%22,%22day%22,%22days%22];o=o.slice(0,o.indexOf(a)+1);for(var%20r=document.querySelectorAll('a[href*=%22item%3Fid%22]'),i=0;i%3Cr.length;i++){var%20s=r.item(i);try{var%20l=parseInt(s.innerHTML.match(/^\d+/)),u=s.innerHTML.match(/^\d+%20(.+%3F)%20ago$/)[1]}catch(m){continue}-1!==o.indexOf(u)%26%26(a===u%26%26l%3Et||(s.parentNode.className+=%22%20%22+e))}}e(%22newpost%22,3,%22hours%22)}();

Screenshot: https://s3.amazonaws.com/tz-www-misc/hn.highlighter.2015-02-...
Also HIDS, such as OSSEC could detect tampering of the operating system. Such as a rootkit installing a module or modifying a bin.
Thank you Manuel (and all the contributors) for creating and working on mOnOwall! It was a great project.
> Venture capitalists and self funded R&D want rosy market projections.

I want people to not die because somebody "moved fast and broke something."
Ask HN: Hacking concerns: does it make a difference which OS I run my SAAS on?
So I'm launching a new SAAS startup.

Does it make any difference from a security perspective if I use Linux or FreeBSD or something else?
Agreed, there's no silver bullet. However, I don't think spending money to feel better is much of an alternative. It feels to me as if internal process design in security-conscious organizations is probably more important than actual systems design... which could be summarized as knowing when not to take shortcuts. Please do get in touch, I'd be happy to chat. Email in profile.
This reminds me of the dial-in server I built in our student home back in '97-'98. It was a 386sx 16Mhz with 2MB of memory and a 40MB hard drive that you had to preheat in the oven or it wouldn't spin up. That was realistically the lowest spec'd hardware you could actually get to run linux on.

It took half an hour to boot, but that was okay since it was always on anyway. It took about 5 minutes to set up a ppp connection using a dial-in modem, and then the whole house had internet access through its network adapter. Unless someone had tripped over the coax cables again of course..
http://www.pbfcomics.com/111/
Mh, this is intriguing, anybody knows what's the stack under that repo?
I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility.

http://qntm.org/responsibility

(that's the title of the incredible short story linked above)
Lets be honest, we all admire those servers running a couple of years without ever rebooting. Maybe our universe is inside one of them? :)
The key point I didn't see mentioned is potential for growth.

Sure Twitter and others have a significantly higher valuation, but they also have expectations (and I'm not sure I agree) for significantly higher growth potential and future earnings.
OK, but it sounds like the main problem there is local disk access, which is the great satan anyway. You an generate a machine-hosing writeout workload using only one thread on Linux, because Linux loves to starve readers if it can write instead.

I think the unstated second dimension of your comment is that most operating system distributions come out of the installer with absolutely the wrong parameters for running many threads. I think the default thread stack size is 2MB still, and the socket buffers are all huge, and there are limits on how many processes you can have that make people think those limits are meaningful, when they're really not.
You can probably charge like $60/hr for the architect time.
Just because I was curious: Chia Pet mod for The Sims 1 with over 15k downloads http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/7806
Not much. Use an LTS version of a distribution which you understand well. You're more likely to have appsec problems caused by yourself rather than being compromised by problems in the OS.

Make sure you're able to do firedrills like e.g. upgrading the version of Nginx or OpenSSL which you use in response to a vulnerability in them getting discovered. We've been doing a lot of that these last two years, and it probably won't get any less common.
This looks like Ruby. Why not just use Ruby?
Pale Blue Dot + 25 Years
The traditional response if you firmly believe a stock is undervalued by a factor of > 8.6 is to buy as much of it as your finances will bear, then sit on it. It would be interesting to see whether the author does so.

There's also the possibility that BuzzFeed et al. are proportionally overvalued, which seems like it's probably the case in some instances, but the argument you're making if "valuation >> revenue - costs" is that the right hand side of the equation is accelerating in a way that justifies the left hand side.
For apt repositories, you might be interested in http://www.aptly.info/, especially if you want to host it on S3 as it integrates very well. As others have mentioned reprepo isn't that tough to use either, but moving it to S3 instead of somewhere else basically amounted to using an S3 URI. It also has some other features that might be handy, e.g. versioning/snapshots and serving your repos locally for testing.

In any case, I find the process of actually creating the packages far more arduous than setting up the repo...
You should talk to more Americans. It's a country of three hundred million people and there is a continuum of political opinion ranging from extreme to extreme. It sounds like you're heavily invested in your perception though.
HeartForth: An Emoji-Based Stack Language
Project Euler in Nim
protip: if you substitute "in a computer simulation" with "inside some dude's dream," you discover a vast amount of prior research on this topic was conducted by everybody who ever smoked their first joint.
Why? Why do systems like this get hacked?
I pretty much reached this same conclusion :S
I'm constantly tormented how I'm not conscious about 7 billion people's mind but I am of mine. Why it happened till now? Can it be happening infinitely? Like if you play a video, then you pause it for billions of years, then play it again. If we were able to watch the video cutting the part where it was paused, it would look like it was never paused in the first place.

Maybe life is like that. I'll die, in a couple of billions of years, or other universes what I perceive as my consciousness will wake up (independently of the body form).

If I was told to close my eyes, and I'll get some drugs to fall asleep, then during that time someone is going to make a 100% exact copy of myself, where would my current consciousness wake up? In which bed, if me and my copy are in the same room?

How someone could convince my copy, he is not the original one? (if, for example, there is no video of the procedure). Would that prove there is no real consciousness as we perceive it and we are merely a byproduct of the laws of the universe?

Why did I become conscious in the first place? What if my homosapien body had never born?

Can it be that there is just one single consciousness but every creature experiences it on their own way? (like an OS being installed in different hardware. After some time they would look different, just like we all have different personalities and experiences, etc).

There is an hypothesis that says there is just one single electron in the universe, but all the matter is a kind of representation of it in time. That would explain why a positron and electron would annihilate each other.

I'm not an expert whatsoever on physics. I'm just curious of my own existence :)
>The paper you referenced from early 2014 isn't really considered very relevant anymore

It is relevant and discusses fundamental problems with PoS, it is a very strongly reasoned paper and there hasn't been anything reasonable countering it so far.

It isn't considered relevant to scamcoiners, of course, since their goal isn't making a secure cryptocurrency, rather transferring money from a fools hand to theirs.

>t's kind of hard to have an argument of this subject with you, given that you seem to be complaining about PoS when ethereum 1.0 will be a 100% PoW system

So because I complain about PoS, I cannot argue that software is broken for any other reason? I don't have a specific complaint, they have such a complicated system that I have a myriad of complaints including Ethereums multiple consensus implementations, ASIC resistance, incredibly small block times, using insecure crypto in their illegal IPO, their system being basically useless, etc.

>The PoW guys will keep complaining that the PoS systems "aren't secure enough" and the PoS guys will happily use them anyway.

Since "PoS guys" appear to be fine with centralization and the obvious harmed security from that, they probably will be happy with other forms of broken security.

>Clearly I'm a PoS fan and don't think that'll happen.

There is basically no debate among cryptocurrency researchers that PoS doesn't work, it is mostly promoted among noobies and scammers. You can be a "fan" of it all you want, but it isn't like being a fan of Republicans or a fan of C++, it's like being a fan of md4 for cryptography.
I personally don't know much but from reading replies I think this reply [0] by Philip Sturgeon might give the most insight:

> I do not accept this.

> You are one of the most active, motivated and appreciated contributors
of PHP over the last few years. Not to shit on anyone specifically,
but there are only 4 or 5 people doing 80% of the work of PHP
recently, and you are one of them.

> Scalar Type Hints are a massive burden, and you're stuck in the middle
of everyone who has a strong opinion about either strict or weak and
getting screamed at by both camps at the same time as getting crap
from the people who dont want either.

> I constantly see people giving you shit in here, on Reddit,
StackOverflow Chat and wherever else and it sickens me. They're
condescending, patronising or at the very least missing some P's and
Q's which are fairly important when giving feedback as harsh as they
often give.

> The lack of respect between contributors here in general sickens me,
and I'm not known as somebody who is wildly polite at all times.

> Scalar Type Hinting was the closest it's ever been. If the workload is
too much then stick to one RFC at a time, but to remove yourself from
the equation is a massive loss for PHP as a whole. I'm not trying to
place a burden on you, but your input will be sorely missed by a
massive number of people.

> Please, don't let the assholes win. PHP needs you.

[0] http://news.php.net/php.internals/82754
I think I am the only one who think humans will never manage to build something that complex.

Come on: (1) We still have to use humans for motion capture in order to make 3d realistic. (2) We still haven't come up with an IA to chat with. (3) We still haven't figure out what's the smallest unit in the matter, if matter is a thing.
> Well, that battery might cost more than the entire house. And for what purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, and then reconnect again when the battery has run out? Or to power it with expensive solar panels?

I can't figure out if he's being willfully obtuse here.

It's to allow you to get off the grid entirely. If you generate enough solar to cover 100% of your usage, right now you're still slapped with a grid connection fee. The battery covers you overnight and makes grid connection totally unnecessary.

Oh but what about charging your car? Battery swap stations.
> are you an idiot? Do you even understand

This comment breaks the HN guidelines. We'd appreciate it if you'd read the site rules and follow them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Well you don't own the airspace over your property. Based on existing regulations that's class G and is open and uncontrolled (generally from the ground to 1200' AGL)[0]

And if any of the regs in part 91 end up applying-

FAR 91.13 (a) just says aircraft have to be operated safely. "No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another." So unless they were buzzing your house that might be hard to prove.

The regs are loose around dropping items, too- FAR 91.15 [1]. They don't talk about needing property owner permission or anything. Maybe you could twist that in your defense since it is so loose- if something did fall from a UAV.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_%28United_States...

[1] http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgFAR.nsf...
EasyPost (YC S13) hiring back-end devs
As a Texan who moved to New York City for the summer I really missed Southern hospitality (and Tex-Mex). When I came back to Texas the Southern hospitality did feel fake until I got used to it again. Although some of it probably is fake, I think most of it is genuine. Just like when I moved to NY it seemed like everybody was a depressed workaholic, when in reality that they are probably as you say trying "to minimize their impact on other people". Likewise I'm sure Southerners come off as fake until you get used to the culture. The pace of life is much slower and people love to make small talk. Also we don't ask people how their day is going so that we can figure out details about their life and judge them. Its just a nice thing to do.
Ask HN: What are the main reasons why so many systems get hacked?
Multiple processes in Python at scale mean really clunky interprocess communication, lots of copies of everything the interpreter loaded, and lots of cache misses.
> For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything.

That's a religious argument unconnected to the question of whether our universe is simulated or not.

> When we are born we have no memory of our previous life.

This presumes there is such a thing as previous lives to begin with, something for which no scientific evidence exists. Barring that, the problem becomes the same as the question "why does a computer program I just wrote have no memory of its previous existence?".

> So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies

Step back a moment from this logical jump and try to imagine how someone without your spiritual background might parse this conclusion. It comes from out of nowhere, some might even say it's the opposite of what one would expect to follow an observation like "When we die we have no memory of our current one.".

> That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated.

These observations about animals are not new, in fact most pet owners are likely to see this as a trivial truism.

> so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time

Another non sequitur. This observation doesn't follow from your chain of arguments, it follows from a premise you started out with.

> then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being

Everything is transient, our existence is as ephemeral as the configuration of our environment - this fact does not in itself mean anything. It sounds like you're reserving a special place for humans or intelligent life in general, but in actual fact the universe doesn't care about the existence of life one way or the other. The presumption that consciousness is a basic physical force constitutes a fundamental category error, it runs counter to everything we know about physics.

In any case, this has no bearing on whether the universe is simulated or not: the basic building blocks of reality do not make special exceptions for brains. There is absolutely no expected difference between a mind running within a computer-like system and a mind running on the "real" universe, whatever that may be.
This also solves the peak load problem, since you can pay for power at night and run off of your giant Tesla battery in the garage during the day.
Don't have a citation for this, but I recall hearing that Square runs JRuby in production.

Separately, the start time makes JRuby awful for TDD/Dev, but once it has time to warm up in production it is vastly faster. Scan back through some Ruby Rogues episodes, they discuss it a few times in more detail.
Be my biological Valentine: Do microbes define physical attraction?
I think the legal consequences would by far surpass any of the more practical aspects mentioned here ? Something of value NOT owned (ultimately) by a person of a government ?

What if there is a flaw in the decision software and something goes horribly wrong ? Would not be the first time... The software is written by someone, the decision to use the software was done by someone, etc. Still if really no one else is to blame, then the government is responsible ? So if nobody else then they 'own' it ?

It also means abandoning the risk taking and therefore profit potential / earning power for people.

Challenging.

And once solved why not use the same concept for rental apartments, clothes ?
Planetary gearing has been used in bicycles for over a century. A planetary mechanism built inside the rear freehub provides clean and reliable gearing, albeit at a slight efficiency loss versus derailleur gearing. These gearhubs are extremely popular in many parts of Europe, where utility cycling is the norm.

The greatest example of hub gearing is the Rohloff Speedhub, which features fourteen ratios with an overall range of 526%. It is a true mechanical marvel, and several examples have done over 100,000km without major servicing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohloff_Speedhub
I can point to people who used eigenvalues to make billions and change the world. So... maybe they're not useless.
"The great thing about the human imagination is that it has no problem imagining contradictions."

ah yes, and science is always free of such contradiction. the author invests so much energy laughing at the simulation theory, only to conclude that he cannot disprove it? considering how much the author apparently hates philosophy, he managed to write a rather philosophical article.

"Or if we are, the universe simulating us has completely different physics from the one we live in"

i kind of feel like, with all due respect, no shit? why explore such profound philosophy within the constraints of science as we know it today?
Except if you emulate them in JavaScript. I get 5.10 BogoMIPS: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=custom&cdrom.url=http://k%C3%A6n...
Personal laser cutters, milling machines, next wave in computer-aided creativity
He actually makes two assumptions both of which hurt his point, the first is that cost of the battery is that of a house (given that an 85kW Tesla costs $90K and you don't need the car with it, we'll guess the battery is less than $90K) so lets call it $75K. And the second is that stabilizing energy costs doesn't change anything else.

If your house is nominally electric (using gas for things which gas is really good at, making heat) and your gasoline bill is non-existent because your vehicle is electric. It means you can cost out power with a depreciation/replacement cost model which gives you much better forecasting ability. One of the reasons given for taking 'energy costs' out of the whole inflation/cpi metric was due to its volatility.

I tend to agree with his thesis that Apple will not buy Tesla but I don't think he makes a good argument against the battery claim.
That's one reason I dropped out of a PhD program in Math. I realized that, if I was lucky and did well, I would get a tenure-track job at the #250 ranked school. If I was unlucky, I would be perma-adjunct with no other marketable skills at age 40.

On the other hand, in software, I'm also feeling washed up at age 40, but at least I earned a decent salary in the meantime, and probably will always be able to find some sort of software-related job.
Ugh. I sincerely hope investors do not force the NYT to shutter its newsroom operations and become buzzfeed.