skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a smart comment. It sucks to have to keep repeating this comment every time someone trots out this supposedly easy example.

Sure, the units issue was the root cause, but the resulting navigation errors should have been acted upon. They were noticed ("The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed."), but the issue wasn't acted upon. This is a management and budget problem.

Even if the units are given as SI, there are always interface issues -- which coordinate system to use, where the origin is, does z point up or down, degrees or radians. It can be hard to appreciate unless you have had experience with hard-to-find failures due to subtle numerical problems.

As you say, space is hard.
Show HN: Price Bureau – Fair and unbiased price estimations
Or rather, "I may be mistaken in my grand assertion, but I'll place the burden of proof on you".
For those who start reading and wonder when Harry stops being an insufferable little jerk... I'm on chapter 57, now, and he's getting better.
Spaceteam Retrospective
> JVM already exists

Actually there is no single "the JVM," even today. Various JVMs exist, commercial and free, that have their individual strengths.
> Don't want to use your real name? Don't join a site where the goal is to publicly connect with people you know."

ironically, many people joined facebook with the names they used in "real" life, only later to find their accounts suspended because they didn't use their "real name". Additionally, some people joined facebook to connect with certain groups of people they wanted to interact with but coudldn't in their real geographic area (e.g. threatened minority groups or viewpoints that are thinly scatted across the globe), so they may have been allured by facebook's promise to help connect them, only to find later when facebook changes their name policy that their account is suspended.

> Don't want your privacy violated, post only what you feel comfortable with.

Facebook's data collection go beyond the information that you post, but extends to all the metadata and interactions that many users for the most part are unaware that they are giving out and may would prefer not to reveal. Had people listened to Stallman more, these interactions would more likely be handled by people's own private or community servers running free software, allowing people to share only the information that they want to be shared publicly, and keep other information & metadata private.
We run exactly that setup. Apache on the front end proxying and doing SSL for a mish-mash of Java EE, .Net and native apache modules.

There's very little latency added, it allows centralised logging and TBH apache is a ton more reliable than anything else out there. Does about 2-3 million requests a day.
Most likely Saudi Arabia's goal is to drive the new oil-producing techniques (shale), and especially alternatives to oil (solar, nuclear etc), out of business. At least for as long as they can.
I never considered Clojure for design, thanks for sharing!
Julia is definitely worth a look as it has taken on some of these issues (multi-dimensional arrays, slicing, some bounds checking). Now that it has a good garbage collector its remaining achilles heals are multi-threading (there are multiple processes that can send messages though) and long start up times for some modules (no JIT caching yet). It does make a lot of really good decisions at the language level though and is faster than many native languages while being more flexible than many scripting languages.
To perhaps give credit where it's due, the High Line in NYC replicated the success of the Coulee Verte in Paris.
This is a very cool project, I just hope Oracle's lawyers don't descend on this...they have a knack for ruining everything.
What you are writing is exactly why I threw game theory into the mix. Game theory show strategies that given a certain set of rules are beneficial for the player or all players (for interesting example see Nash equilibrium). The example you have given in first paragraph, that forbidding slavery creates a better environment for the whole of it's people is exactly just that - showing one strategy to be more beneficial than the other. It's not showing that slavery is "objectively" wrong. I remember seeing a nature documentary where two species were explained to live in something that could be seen a master/slave symbiosis which benefited them both. (As a sidenote, I'm all against slavery and I do not accept causing harm to others no matter how beneficial it would be to myself).

You say that "people tend to live better lives" and "I would like to live in" etc. This is very subjective. As for quantifying wellbeing of members, we may ask if it's better for 100% of society to feel well, or is it better for 80% of society to feel fantastic and 20% miserable and in fear. It's again a matter of opinion and we can use mathematical concepts like game theory to better explain using formal methods why some moral values would be beneficial for us and other's not. That's why I threw it into the mix.

You also say that some opinions are better than others. This general statement is very dangerous and was used throughout the ages by proponents of slavery, racism etc. They definitely claim that their opinions are better than yours while you do otherwise. The thing is, some opinions are better to achieve certain goal given some set of circumstances, rules and participants. Acknowledging that opinions and moral values are not objectively right or wrong doesn't make us crazy to pursue those that we see as moving the society we live in in the direction we want.
If you were not fooled by the scale of the y axis what makes you think anyone else would be? It belies an underlying arrogance to think that others would be misled where you were not.
The second chart does a much better job to deliver the point.
> Regarding #2, it's conventional wisdom that you can't beat a compiler, but I'm sure DJB is going to show examples where he beats the compiler significantly.

Is the fact that a compiler can beat you sometimes[1] really that controversial?

And he better have a large class of problems in which he can beat the compiler, without using too much time[2]. Or else the title is just needlessly provocative.

And thirdly: many of just rely on the compiler doing a good enough job. Not a better job than we would do if we were more careful.

[1] Or often times. Depends on who you ask, and in what domains.

[2] Or else you can just say that a programmer can beat a compiler given enough time, where time can be arbitrarily long. But all of us have some kind of time constraint.
This is, indeed, a serious problem.

I concur on the warning: this is graphic.
Live video app taking Twitter by storm
Creating an article automatically puts it on your watch list.
When you take development time into account, GWT doesn't come for free. Yes, it's possible to compile Java to JS via GWT, but the toolchain is prohibitively slow. In contrast, the Haxe compiler is extremely fast.
>But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that.

Apparently you don't, because you aren't really buying anything. You're licensing it. You don't own a thing in your Amazon library. They can, and have, taken books "back" based on user-agreement violations.

Yes, it's convenient for you to have all your books, synced, in one place. But there are negative implications of having all that information controlled.
Right, there's a huge impedance mismatch between COBOL and Java, but couldn't you say the same for any other modern PL? I don't see how migrating COBOL to Python or Clojure or Haskell would be much easier than migrating it to Java.

But yes, no one wants to touch the 30 year-old COBOL codebase with a ten foot pole. It's career kryptonite.

I'd be curious to learn about the solution you're describing for this problem, is it something you can disclose in any detail?
Very bad optics. Surviving revolutions requires a show of strengths, and retreating to a military base is very much a sign of weakness.
This exemplifies a problem with a lot of software these days; the "everything must be dynamic" attitude.

If something really is dynamic, use a dynamic technique.
If something is static, use a static mechanism.

Simple really...
It might not end up with the hoped for performance per watt -- or even with all that good performance, period. It might not even be built in silicon.

But it is a damn interesting architecture.

You don't get to present bits and pieces of it over several EE380 talks unless the grownups think it is interesting, too.

(It is also a lot less like the Itanic than it initially seemed. I think we will know a lot more in about a month, since there will be a new talk in Amsterdam about the new vector model and their µthreading model.)
Sometimes we build things just for the experience, just to learn as we build.
Also on the BBC (and linked at the bottom of the article): Eight countries that have moved their capital cities:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-31877909
Interestingly, "liter" is a customary metric unit, but not an SI unit. SI requires you to use units of length-cubed for volume.

In this respect (partial antiquation in the wake of unit redefinitions) liters have something in common with the quart.
The article said:

> Top African professionals going to work in Europe are not considered expats. They are immigrants. Period. “I work for multinational organisations both in the private and public sectors. And being black or coloured doesn’t gain me the term “expat”. I’m a highly qualified immigrant, as they call me, to be politically correct,” says an African migrant worker.

For your statement to be meaningful, what more education does this highly qualified African need to be considered an expat?

Do people go around asking for someone's educational level before assigning them the label "expat" or "immigrant"? It's much easier to believe that the main distinction is based on the more overt indicators of 'social class, country of origin and economic status', than education level.

For example, the thousands of Iraqi doctors, engineers, and other PhD educated people, who fled Iraq and moved to the US or European countries, are labeled "immigrants" not "expats", on basis of their ethnicity, and not on personal education.

To go back to the point of the Guardian piece, how is the term "expat" useful? Why not "call them immigrants like everyone else"?

I am an American living in Sweden, and I do not work for a multinational company who brought me here on temporary assignment. Do you consider me an expat or an immigrant? Can you tell without knowing my education level? At what point do I switch from one to the other?
Linux: 40 Useful commands for beginners
Well yeah, not having a String type is kind of a deal breaker for web programming.
That was exactly the point this article is trying to make, JS shouldn't be your only rendering method.
Regarding Brazil... but on the other hand, Niemeyer's Brasilia ended up being a place completely pedestrian-unfriendly, full of red dust, and generally speaking, not a desirable place to live. Sure, lots of federal employees live there, and take those jobs because they pay well and offer incredible security, but the wealthy who work in Brasilia typically reside in SP or Rio and just fly in to Brasilia Mon-Thurs or similar... including the politicians. They may have succeeded in designing a city that was strategically defensible, but if everyone who matters is mostly in Rio or SP anyway, ....
The Disturbing Puzzle Game That Nobody Can Solve
Also allows selecting text while reading. Seriously, what were the fanfiction.net guys thinking?
Yeah, I know of Beacon etc. but I've never heard of automatic likes or friendships.
That sounds like library writers being able to bake in optimizations (rewrite rules) into their libraries. Which makes sense; you distribute the optimizations to domain experts (like data structures) instead of just having general optimizations that the compiler writers had time to add.
I've noticed from HN headlines that there's an odd focus on what programming language something is written in. Often they'll take the form of "A <thing that is already common> written in <recently popular language>", rather than a real USP. It's especially odd from a community that places so much emphasis on the importance of a good pitch.
On the other hand, their wiki does have a lot of extremely interesting details about the processor and ISA design, and they have presented several concrete examples of how to get around the problems with Itanium.

It would be nice to hear from some more people in the industry about it, or see some more results, but I remain cautiously optimistic.
And are reporters switching into PR? What jobs are the news people leaving to?
what are you talking about? - i have a lot of friends and do not use facebook - i have an account but dont really log in - a lot of my friends dont use it. the less you use facebook, the more you realize how useless it really is - you want to keep in touch with people, use email - it has worked for a long time, and will continue to work for a long time.

photos - use google photos or dropbox

messages - who care about facebook posts anyways - they are useless

facebook groups - their are competitors in this space now

THERE IS A WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK, DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT AND LIFE CONTINUES WITHOUT IT
Surely if there was a revolution, the other parts of the territory could simply ignore Brasília?
How do you know, and thus conciously choose, if a site has a facebook widget without visiting it ?

You could use adblock or something similar on the desktop or android, but then you need to know about it first, and it opens another can of worm regarding site revenues etc.

Also if you're an iOS user you'll just have to live with it or abandon Safari for more limited browsers, and avoid opening any webview from any app ever.

Avoiding sites that use facebook widget is just not realistic. You're fine with it, and that's ok, but that's not really the point.
Serious question that the article doesn't appear to cover, but where did the transplanted penis come from? Was it a recently deceased donor?
Actually, it basically does mean you have to put people in prison. What else are you going to due if its illegal? Fine them? Great, they'll never pay the fine, do more drugs. Now what? Fine them some more? Okay...it only goes on so long until they go to jail.

Any punishment oriented consequences are simply going to either be too harsh, or too lenient.
It's one that I feel comfortable commenting on, nothing more.
Of course you have to learn the language the compiler is implemented in when you're hacking the compiler. That's not an inconvenience, it's a tautology.
Take a look at the comp.arch newsgroup.

Names to look for, apart from Ivan Godard, are Andy Glew, Mitch Alsup, and Terje Mathisen.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyglew

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/mitch-alsup/7/153/869

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/terje-mathisen/1/18/b74

They don't necessarily believe that it will succeed or that the whole architecture is good -- but the consensus seems to be that it at least is interesting.
Indeed. How about an analogous tool to the OP that uses binary search to deduce which updated gem(s) break the build, and then uses binary search on the intermediate versions of those gems to tell you exactly which version is the first bad one? Then spits out the changelog for that version ;)
simple - they do it for the clicks

increase CLR --> more revenue
To be fair, I think that the given block could be written better both in terms of clarity and in terms of knocking out unneeded functions.

s = fd == -1 ? socket(ss->ss_family, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP) : fd;
if (s == -1)
goto bad;

Is the equivalent of

if (fd == -1)
{
s = -1;
goto bad;
}
else
{
s = socket(ss->ss_family, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
}

but with one less comparison, assignment of a constant to s in the error condition instead of a variable, which is usually faster, and a more clear, explicit, layout. Now, the compiler may make these optimizations for you, but it still leaves an uglier bit of code. Tristate operators can be useful, but in some cases, like this, they can make the code less efficient.
Build your own Siri: An open-source digital assistant
> The reality, unfortunately, is very much the opposite:
> general-purpose "optimizing" compilers are falling farther
> and farther behind the actual capabilities of modern
> processors.

This is just flat out wrong.

Saying this is wrong implies that the gap between ideal processor-specific assembly and generated code is closing, and that compilers today can achieve a higher percentage of potential performance than they could in the past. Do you have evidence that suggests this is true? Are you possibly conflating "optimizing the code as written including all unintentially specified corner cases" with "optimizing the production of the desired answer"?

In my personal experience (which is mostly compression and scientific computing), I find that I can get significantly higher x64 performance from Haswell than from earlier Intel generations --- frequently more than twice as fast as I can do for Sandy Bridge, due to a combination of better memory interactions, fewer scheduling gotcha's, and wider integer vectors. Very rarely do I find that compiler generated code (Clang, GCC, icc) achieves this level of speedup, and even more rarely do I find that the same code gets optimal performance on both of these generations. Even more rarely does the generated assembly surprise me by exceeding my expectations of maximal performance.

I'm not sure where Daniel is going with his presentation, but what I often find myself wanting is a non-brain-dead non-optimizing compiler. It makes me sad to know how to make code run fast, but be unable to keep the compiler from slowing it down. Obviously, this is a rare case, since only a tiny percentage of code will ever be allowed to be this highly optimized. But I sure wish that there was a way to return to "glorified assembly", and that I had a way to tell the compiler to keep its grubby little fingers off certain small sections of my consciously crafted code.
The other problem is that the predictor for HIV is risky sexual behavior. Circumcision is not correlated with reduced risky behavior.
The mobile app turns on the damn mic

I checked my iphone privacy settings because this sounded preposterous, and the Facebook app is not listed as having requested microphone permissions. Is it able to turn on the microphone without requesting permission?
The rise of early-morning dance parties
All C implementations of languages that exist on the JVM start fast. All JVM implementations are slow. How is this not a JVM problem?
A pipeline of Java hello worlds then might take half a second just to spawn the multiple JVMs. It is also important to note that the work a JVM does scales in the number of classes you load: running "saxonb-xslt" with no arguments (so as to get the usage block) takes 215ms "hot" (1485ms "cold") on my relatively beefy server. In comparison, running "xsltproc" with no arguments takes 7ms "hot" (113ms "cold", though my cold numbers for this may be artificially low as maybe the JVM warmed up some C library xsltproc also happens to be using; the number doesn't feel wrong, though, given the hot times, which are perfectly reproducible, btw, as nothing else is happening on this computer). If I actually tried to use Saxon (so it had to load and link even more classes related to the transformations) the slowness would just become more and more painful.
The problem is, here in Italy, we are over-defensive towards the "artistic soul" of a city, often refusing to modernize some areas just because a lot of people think it could "ruin" the artistic soul of the whole place.

Another example is in Turin where there was a battle to try to stop the build of the first skyscraper because it could be higher than the Mole Antonelliana, the main monument of the city. In the end the skyscraper was built but they forced the architects to make it high just some meters below the height of the Mole. And still today there are protesters who say it ruined all the city.

Trying to modernize even some peripheral areas of Rome will be really hard.
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I speculate that this is why possession of anabolic steroids in Canada is not illegal, just the trafficking of them.

While for most other "drugs", both possession and trafficking is illegal.
Dying young reduces the risk of getting cancer, but surely it is not the recommended method for cancer prevention.
Not to take away from the author's effort, a basic JVM is not hard to implement. It's easier than writing a JavaScript or a Ruby interpreter, as the Java bytecode was designed for simple execution.

What is a lot of work is writing a high-performance JVM (with a good optimizing JIT and a good GC), getting the details right (especially the Java memory model), and supporting "advanced" features such as JNI and JVMTI.
It's implemented for copy-protection purposes.

Yes, seriously.

http://blog.fictionpress.com/2013/10/11/languages-for-naviga...

You can get around it by disabling Javascript, but then all the text becomes annoyingly center-aligned.
Isn't that the point? People will have risky sexual behavior whether circumcised or not, so if circumcision reduces the likelihood of AIDS transmission in people with risky sexual behavior, it's a net win.

EDIT: the downthread comment clarified the parent comment for me.

As I said even further downstream, if the study was done naively, where we simply took circumcised vs. uncircumcised people and compared their HIV rates, I would agree 100%.

But the original study was taking a population of adult uncircumcised males in africa and circumcising 50% of them randomly, and then tracking their HIV infection rates. That should control for upbringing. From the studies:

"In these studies, men who had been randomly assigned to the circumcision group had a 60% (South Africa), 53% (Kenya), and 51% (Uganda) lower incidence of HIV infection compared with men assigned to the wait-list group to be circumcised at the end of the study. In all three studies, a small number of men who had been assigned to be circumcised did not undergo the procedure; likewise, a small number of men assigned to the control groups did undergo circumcision. When the data were reanalyzed to account for these occurrences, men who had been circumcised had a 76% (South Africa), 60% (Kenya), and 55% (Uganda) reduction in risk for HIV infection compared with those who were not circumcised."
> In the lab, Bortolozzo and his coworkers have been able to detect speeds as slow as 20 millionths of a billionth of a meter per second (20 femtometers per second) with a measurement lasting only one second.

I wonder how difficult it is to perform this on a glacier from a moving plane? Measuring relative velocities is impressive, but then how do you know how fast the plane is moving?
That really doesn't seem easier at all...
There has been another narrative that "citizen journalists" would either disrupt the industry, or replace the roles of journalists whose industry had been disrupted. This has come with mixed results for everyday journalism. In the case of investigative journalism, it just doesn't seem to be happening.

This level of depth in journalism requires time and skill. The choice seems to either work a full time job to supplement this hobby and having zero time for other things in life, or living without financial security. There is the other risk that this type of journalism tends to create enemies which can hurt job security. It can also hurt your career if you are seen as someone who isn't able to keep a secret. Individuals also expose themselves to the risks of libel and slander lawsuits.

Most people who can pull off journalism like this are usually going to be capable of pursuing a dozen other more lucrative and less stressful careers.