skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> However, Google controls a popular web server (Google search) and client (Google Chrome), so for web-things, they can create "widespread adoption" for whatever they standardize.

Google's innovation is to make http faster over a slow unreliable network (e.g. a wireless device). They solved a real world problem, proved it using their own users and now are going to standardize. Their innovation is driving their standardization efforts.

If google didn't solve a real world problem then even with their platform they couldn't impact widespread adoption. Their innovations (SPDY and now QUIC) solve real world problems, so adoption will become widespread.

MSFT with Office XML was solving a political problem, not a real world problem. Ie. Office was taking a hit because DOC/XLS were proprietary formats, and governments were concerned about archiving documents in a proprietary format and were therefore threatening to move to open standards (ie. OSS office suites). MSFT fought back by pushing through a standard document format to offer their sales staff with a rebuttal to customers threatening to move to an open standard. Ie. The 'standard' only has traction due to MSFTs monopoly on office and serves no real benefit to anyway except for MSFTs salesforce.
Ten years ago some friends and I did some preliminary design on an MMO game. Size and scope was basically the continental US, with thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of NPCs.

The data involved, we estimated, would fit comfortably into less than 10 TB.

It's not a technical problem, even at that time. It's strictly a design problem--once you've built such a thing, how do you populate it? What do you do to make it interesting?

And as I've gotten older, sadly, the appeal of creating virtual worlds has gotten less and less. I don't want people spending time frantically toggling state in a row in a database, even one I operate and get revenue from. :(
Room for optimizing compilers = distance between programming languages and CPU instructions/microarchitecture
I've started to wonder why we've never seen a more IDE-like autocomplete in consoles. I mean, why do I have to use man pages and all sorts of reference guides to remember the parameters for find or grep or whatever, or the order of commands for whatever?

There really needs to be better communication between software and the environment it's running in.
I'm an engineer, and I've gotten so much benefit out of that book. I read it cover to cover several times a year. It's very corny, but it reminds me of several things I often don't conciously think about when interacting with people. Sometimes reading that book is the only way I can get through the day and interact pleasantly with people.

One reason engineers can be unintentionally critical is that their job is often "find what's wrong with this thing and make it better". It's rarely "find what's right with this thing and congratulate someone". It takes me quite a bit of mental effort to switch from nitpick mode to encouragement mode. I've tried to consciously balance my criticisms by leaving a few honest encouraging comments in code reviews like: "thanks for improving test coverage here", or "glad you handled timeouts and retrys, this api has given us grief before".
Chances are they are using a SHA-1 certificate.

* checks *

Yep.
Cost isn't necessarily tied to uptime expectations. It's tied to the value people get from it. Bloomberg is so far ahead of it's competitors that this minor event probably won't lose them any business.
I will not let my coworkers see me typing expletives into terminal; much less if it is a woman.

It is a nice idea, though. Will use it if it's called auto-correct or something.
There a common form of such posts by developers: "I've found database X and I LOVE it, we're migrating all our systems." Then a year later "Things didn't work out, here's how we migrated from database X to database Y."

Someone should make an index of such blog posts.
I love C and Lisp.
Google+ Photos Are Now Available in Google Drive
> Back in the day I learned about using VHDL to design circuits, is that the kind of compilation also used for FPGAs?

FPGAs can implement any digital circuit which fits, with some caveats. So yes, VHDL is commonly used to describe designs for FPGAs. I'm not sure what you mean by '[that] kind of compilation', though, as you never specify what kind of compilation you mean.

Implementing a circuit on an FPGA involves many of the same, or similar, steps and processes as implementing it on an ASIC (and obviously, does not involve all the physical design stuff). If that's what you're asking.

> That language paradigm is close to modern dataflow oriented programming languages. It should be theoretically possible to compile an application program written in that style and have the logical circuits in the FPGA be a direct mapping of the business logic in the application.

Sure, of course it's theoretically possible; there's nothing you can do in digital logic you cannot do on a UTM (space/memory constraints aside), and vice-versa. This field is known as "High-Level Synthesis", and it's been around for decades. It's only now becoming sort-of widely used for real-world stuff.

But it's nothing like "directly translating" to logic for the FPGA ;). It's probably easier for most programmers to design in such a language vs. an HDL, but AFAIK that's not even close to the biggest challenge with doing HLS. I think timing and resource allocation are much bigger problems (but I'm not very informed about HLS!).

Look through the HLS literature if you're interested in what's involved--I'm not an expert by any means. Also, if you're interested in alternative programming languages for hardware design, check out BlueSpec and Chisel.
Another worth read: https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb

Although to be fair, it's not just MongoDB that is performing poorly.
Oh fun.
>I think the issue with Stirling Engines is the fact that they have moving parts that could wear and break down.

In NASA's ASRG design there is a stirling generator with only has one moving part: a free piston moving inside a coil, cushioned by the working gas. Wear and tear should be minimal, even for a multi-decade mission.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/rps/docs/ASRGfacts2_10rev3_21.p... (page 2)
You can read more here:

https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2014/09/09/s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368418
React is pretty good, the most promising in a while, but Appcelerator still has far more API coverage on both major platforms than React, Telerik, or anyone else. Pay special attention to what kind of native integrations the app will require before choosing a framework.
> Guice may not show up on any profiler as problem

The it isn't a problem.

> but if you slow down object creation by a factor of 40x, something you may do thousands of times per second for the life of your program

Then it'll show up in the profiler. You aren't going to do something that slows down the program across the board yet doesn't create new hot spots that show up in the profiler.
A couple of years back I was working as a programmer, working on an application written in C. The application was always built with all optimizations disabled, because a bug in the compiler's optimizer (is that the correct term?) had bitten the programmers, so they had become really careful.

One day, as an experiment, I built the applications with pretty much all safe optimizations enabled and did a simple benchmark that showed a performance improvement of ... (drum-roll) two percent.
This left me scratching my head, wondering if that meant the compiler really sucked at optimizing the code or if the code was so badly written the optimizer could not really do anything about it (or maybe it was so well-written it already was close to optimal without "optimizing" it? Probably not.).

How nice would it be, I thought, if the compiler could give me some kind of feedback on which parts of my source code it did or did optimize, and why.

I am relieved to hear (well, read, technically speaking) that I am not the only person to have had that idea.

Many programmers have all kinds of ideads in their heads about how writing their code in a certain way will make it easier for the compiler to optimize the heck out of it, but I guess few actually go and check if their assumption have any basis in reality.

It would be so incredibly nice to have a compiler that told you about such things, so you could know if your assumptions were true or bogus.

Sigh
Efficient Doesn't Equal Performant
I'm getting really sick of people calling this kind of thing an Operating System. If your first step is "Install Linux", it's not an operating system. It might be a meta-operating system or something like that, but we've had a pretty standard definition of what constitutes an OS for decades now.
Honestly wonder what took them so long to think to do this. It always seemed like it would be a natural integration.

Not docking on them for dragging their feet - more of a legitimate curiosity than a mock.
MongoDB is advertised as general purpose database though and majority of people use it that way.
Most of your third paragraph would argue for my #1 or #2 cases: there's an opportunity for more arrangements that would allow productive programmers who are not happy in firms with the dominant culture/management practice to have sustainable programming careers, there just need to be more such arrangements or better ways of such programmers finding out about such arrangements.

But my #1 or and especially #2 could mean that there's a much bigger opportunity to make typical working conditions better. From this one might see an opportunity for the industry to improve itself, or an opportunity for outside regulation to stimulate such improvement.

My #3 predominating means that non-typical arrangements are irrelevant except for extreme outliers willing to make great material sacrifices and that toxic workplaces are somehow (presumably through causing people to work very long hours and work hard due to fear) more productive than bearable workplaces, and presumably there's little difference between workplaces at non- and for-profits whether producing nonfree or free software, because they're all caught up in a race to the bottom. In this case a productive programmer who finds toxic workplaces unbearable and does not want to make extreme material sacrifices would have nowhere to go other than a different full time career, and there's no opportunity to improve the industry to change this outcome from within the industry. From this one could accept that the current state of industry is optimal, or demand outside regulation, or demand the overthrow of capitalism.

To the limited extent that I know about them, I admire Tim, Joey, and RMS and assume they've all made the right choices for themselves.
YC Startup Is Helping the Cops Track Sex Workers Online
I'm not sure what difference you think gender makes, unless you think women are delicate flowers that must be sheltered from bad language, but I do agree that it would be better named something more office friendly. I'd suggest 'argh', 'grr' or 'gah'.
It seems like currently everything is sacrificed to content owners to protect their system of earning money. There has to be another way otherwise we are loosing more and more freedom on the internet.
"WTF" is less vulgar than "fuck" for roughly the same reason that "the f-word" is less vulgar than "fuck".
I think the key is to give an honest compliment on not a bullshit one. So instead of "great job on the thing! but ..." maybe "great job finding and diagnosing the root cause of that problem, that was pretty hairy, but I think there's a better way to fix the root cause".
Because humans already exist, perhaps.
The article closes with a couple example uses. Basically any place where a fast/efficient conversion between light and electricity is useful could potentially be made better.

Faster cameras are certainly possible, but most cameras are slowed down by processor and storage, not the sensor. As an example of this, Vision Research sells a 4k model of the Phantom high-speed camera, which does 940 fps at 4096x2304. And they've got 4 different models that will do 640x480 video at 34,700 - 69,900fps. That's 10-20 billion pixels every second, or 45-90 gigabytes/second raw color video data, which is significantly faster than you can write to RAM in most computers.

But at 1,000,000,000,000+fps as the article talks about? Awesome innovation, communications look to be a winner here.
You could have inconsistencies in your data[1] and not even realize it.

[1] https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb
> The defaults should be safe.

That's one opinion fitting one set of use cases. There are plenty of use cases where speed is more important than durability.

Hell, Redis default configs don't enable the append-only log, but you don't see the HN hate train jumping all over Redis. This is because Redis use cases typically don't require that level of durability.

edit for source: cmd+f for "appendonly" https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antirez/redis/2.8/redis.co...
/sigh @hackernews turning into your typical reddit thread.
I'm still a big fan of the feedback offered by the XMT's compiler. I think it's a lot more important/useful when the difference between success and failure is a few orders of magnitude (as when trying to parallelize for a target with plenty of processors).
Done! Better late than never ;)
I feel like fish gets part of the way there by grabbing stuff from the man pages and displaying descriptions in tab-complete options. But we're still a ways from the anti-Mac user interface[1]. Unless maybe you count Google's search bar.

[1]http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
It's not quite that simple, because both in startups and relationships you can lose all hope for a future for a time, recover it at some point and be successful. I would say you've failed when that situation persists for too long - something completely subjective and dependent on your pain threshold.
The Ghost Parcels of El Paso
If you agree with the author's conclusion that we need better languages that allow us to give the compiler more information about the optimization needs of our program, then I think you have to look in the direction of languages like Haskell, Idris, etc. Fortran can be faster than C because C has aliasing that limits the optimizations that the compiler can perform. Similarly, strongly typed and pure languages like Haskell give you even more. You can do a lot with types, but on top of that Haskell allows you to define rewrite rules that tell the compiler how things can be optimized. This allows the compiler to automatically convert things like this:

map f (map g items)

...into this:

map (f . g) items
This is very important and can increase security on the internet a lot. As far as I know Google is already doing this in Chrome with it's own servers.
Saying GCC can outperform experts is incorrect. Saying that every project can afford an expert that can outperform GCC is incorrect.

You can optimize for minimum CO2 emission and then brain power will be spent on problems that waste most CPU cycles.

I don't think even DJB is arguing that optimizing compilers don't bring a benefit. I think DJB says that if you want a secure hypervisor/OS/browser, you should hand code the performance critical parts (e.g. bulk encryption and authentication for TLS, handshake for TLS, video decode, screen composition) and compile the rest with CompCert. If you can add more optimizations to CompCert without affecting its correctness, that's nice. But DJB does not want to run the output of GCC -O3 instead of the output of CompCert for the cold code, and he doesn't want to run the output of GCC -O3 instead of assembly by DJB, Adam Langely, Mike Pall, Jason Garrett-Glaser, etc. for the hot code.
>>but code changes do not update objects retroactively<<

Can you explain what you mean by that?

iirc You can step back through the execution stack in the debugger, change code or variable values; and when you resume the new code is used and the new values are used.
> ... almost no one does it.

I've heard an anecdote that Altera kept getting pestered by customers asking why they don't have it--"but why not? Xilinx has it!".

So they implemented it just so they could say, "We have it too!".

It shut them up, and since no non-academics actually use PR (that I'm aware of; I'd love to hear counterexamples), they've promptly ignored it again :).
Just pointing out the two of the arguments against Word: iPad\iPhone support and price, are not really valid since MS has official Office for iPad\iPhone for free.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/6/7163789/microsoft-office-f...
It might not be as feature rich as the full desktop version but it sure is more feature rich that plain text.
Just remove the frets, problem solved.
Halide is a domain specific language.
I think Halide is wonderful, and i think if you have a domain, it's entirely possible to make great things for that domain.

But if your domain is "general purpose", i haven't seen anything that has come out well.

IE i think it is exactly the restriction to given domains or choices that enable you to do the kinds of things halide does.
Ya I'm waiting for someone to show me some kind of explosive corruption from this data dump, perhaps I just need to wait. I suppose that is the argument for releasing everything; all the reporters and people around the world might find something that a reporter in NY or DC or London will not understand or fail to connect the dots. I just don't see why they can't send these to the top news organizations and wait for them to review them, and maybe point out a few big news items they found?

If that doesn't happen, this seems silly to me. It's basically entertainment gossip and of no real news value.

And if anything, I feel like this detracts from the story because there are so many superfluous emails in there. I'm not going to go through them and most people won't, so why don't Wikileaks review them and release the ones that are actually newsworthy?
Interacting with a compiler sounds horrible. Think of the questions it might need to ask: "Hey! I could use AVX2 instructions here, after I inline a bunch of stuff and eliminate some dead code, but it requires doing a bunch of memory copying. Is that a good idea?". How would you answer a question like that?

And then, since optimizations are target dependent, you would need to go through this exercise for each target. Sounds fun.
A Few Tips on Getting Press for Your Project from the Team at Kickstarter
I acknowledge the potential health concerns of STD's (not really a legitimate concern... see below) - but it's 2015 and we're still telling two consenting adults what they can and can't do with their bodies?

If health issue and reducing STD's was the primary concern, making prostitution illegal could have adverse affects. People like sex. Those sorts of people will sleep around at bars and clubs. For sex. Being promiscuous and sleeping around is more likely to spread STD's than a regulated sex market (EG: requiring licenses and STD checks of the workers). Without hard statistics and data backing up either side of the argument though... it's a tough call.

Also the gray-area loopholes like escorts - many of whom are hired for their sexual favours.

We waste a lot of time and resources on something that should be inconsequential - barring forced prostitution (which would be illegal under other terms).

I just don't get it.
No. Looks good here.
Which part of the guidelines? I reread the entire thing and didn't find where it would apply.
>The Internet is made of people. Do these people (you and I and everyone ITT) not exist in the real world?

The internet is mostly made of a strict subset of people who exist in the real world, and the people who make up The Internet, in the sense of internet-centered subcultures, are a very small subset of all real people.

The fact that an idea or ideology is loud, or even possibly dominant, within our subculture is not even evidence of its being dominant within society as a whole. Most of society are nothing like us net-folk.

>Do you honestly believe a Golden Age actor invented Conservatism? Crazy town banana pants

What I said is that he brought it to mainstream electoral dominance, particularly after the social-democratic Postwar Consensus.

> Isn't mainstream more of a reflection of Common Knowledge then ubiquity throughout subgroups?

Right, hence why we need to check to make sure that what we think is common to think among our friends and cliques is actually common among the population as a whole -- because our friends and cliques are not representative samples.

>Regardless, the idea that leftishness is somehow an underground thing is CTBP.

Don't be silly. It's not underground, it's just a comparatively small minority of the total population. In the United States, for instance, if I recall the numbers correctly, I believe that roughly 40% of the population self-report as conservative or conservative-leaning, 10% as independent/undecided, 20% as liberal or leftist, and 30% as moderate/centrist. So in total, there are fewer devoted leftists than devoted rightists, and fewer devoted anything-ists than self-declared non-ideologues.

And of the people who self-declare as leftists, only a minority will be Tumblr leftists.

So yeah: a tempest in the internet's teacup doesn't mean that a bunch of authoritarian identity-politicking liberals are taking over the world.
It's a cool word. Are there any natural languages that have different words for spatial and non-spatial/conceptual locations?

I know there are lots of distinctions that other languages make and English lacks (like medial/distal demonstratives) but I don't know what linguists would call this one, so it's hard to search for.
Maybe. But is it no less entitled to say "Screw regulations/laws, we're gonna do our thing, anyway", make a bunch of money and then say "y'know, we can afford to follow regulations/laws, let's beef them up so others can't 'bootstrap' themselves"? (where 'bootstrap' in this case is 'ignore regulations and laws to maximize profit').
The Graduate School of Business Library at Stanford used to have a couple of terminals, in case you are in the bay area.
Can somebody point good(and up to date) resources to learn more about neural networks?
Trianglify Generator
I don't buy it.

"The f-word" is used exclusively by people being descriptive. Nobody says "So I was f-wording my spouse..." or stubs their toe and exclaims "oh f-word!". It is used when people are reporting what other people said. That is why it is considered less offensive; it is never properly used.

It signals to the easily offended, "I want to convey this information to you, but I am deliberately mangling words so that you know I too disapprove of the terrible word that was unfortunately used by somebody else."

"WTF" isn't used that way. When people say it, they are using it, not describing somebody's usage. There is zero implication of an apology or empathy with the audience's word-phobia.
I don't think that this is specific only to Einstein. Probably European Jews have similar brains. We all know their success in science.
What sources are you talking about? I just did a quick once-over and I couldn't find any links to the leadership institute
Hackers

Fight Club

The Matrix trilogy
"And forgive us our sins; for we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us."
SELECT * FROM ($S) AS FOO WHERE FOO.age > 20