skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A function may not reliably cast a pointer-to-const-T to a pointer-to-T because T may actually be immutable, in which case modifying it would be UB. Like all casts, const_cast exists as an escape hatch in the type system for when you know that what you are doing is safe, even if the compiler can't prove it.
But still get worse performance than bare metal (noisy neighbors, inconsistent EBS performance, intra-instance network latency).

Disclaimer: DevOps for AWS and bare metal infrastructure.
You joke about it, but make the experience smooth enough and I bet people would pay a couple of cents per post to participate in an internet argument. It'd be like an auction to see who got the last word in.
I don't care any more. If you're using an answer key then you're prioritizing something else over your core task and you don't have a leg to stand on in political terms. I'm very pro public education, and I would like to be pro teachers, but I am simply not going to lend any support to them as long as they rely on a strategy of whining to get what they want. Relying on answer keys is shameful. The implacable opposition to any sort of standardized testing is bullshit. Academic rigor should be teachers' trump card in political negotiations, and yet they keep acting like it's some sort of unwelcome imposition.

I'm well aware of all the pressure on teachers to act as substitute parents, social workers and so on. But none of their input on these subjects has any value when its divorced from a foundation of academic rigor as their first priority. Without that foundation you cannot have any political leverage. American teachers seem to have forgotten this basic political truth. If the general public does not perceive teachers are intellectually competent and engaged, then it is not going to give any weight to those teachers' opinions on other topics. A degree is education is not a substitute for command of the course material, it's a complement to it. If you can't do a problem like 3 x 7 x 26 in your head then you are innumerate and should not be allowed to teach a math class.
In my opinion, Google is ahead of AWS in most aspects besides access control. GCE instances vs. EC2: faster boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types).

Yes, Amazon offers a bigger variety of products, but the newer ones just scream vendor lock-in without much-added benefit. Why would I use Opsworks if Chef or Ansible work just as well?
Wait, this article isn't about physics? boooooring
I spoke with a Google channel lead who said Google's cloud is 5x the size of Amazon's. The policy is not to talk about it publicly because Google itself uses its own cloud tremendously and the 5x size was not something customers necessarily utilize.
The difference is that a fair effort is (quite rightly) made to counter misogyny and racism while none (quite inappropriately) is made to counter ageism.

And while comments like "men are just smarter" or "whites are just smarter" are quite rightly unthinkable, ageist comments by major tech figures are not unheard of. Which actually amount to judging people by their appearance with some post hoc justification coming out of pop science.

But if I'm wrong, it could be demonstrated here. ycombinator makes wonderful efforts to counter obviously skewed demographics on other fronts. Perhaps ycombinator makes a similar effort to attract founders over 40?

Alas though I fear that this conversation will somehow prove too controversial to remain visible for long enough to discuss.
At the risk of being overly confrontational, the things that make humanities people believe that they are capable of critical thinking (in contrast to STEM types) are comments like yours.

> Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time

Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier..." is obviously written to be tongue-in-cheek.

A close reading (humanities skill!) of this article might highlight the following passage as the central thesis:

Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.

> Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.

Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:

It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they don't?
My house is about to become a no iOS zone... hehe
Would you have done it again if you had no plans to raise funds?
There's also cryptodefense, which generated the keys locally. (See https://archive.is/1AGHG, original source doesn't load for me.)
They already do for video streaming and cloud storage, among others probably. Still a nice position for Amazon to be in.

FWIW, I've been told that their investment per data center is in the billion dollar range. That capital requirement is definitely a barrier to entry.
Makes me happy I learned the trade of barbering in my dad's barbershop as a teenager. There is still a part of me that some day would like to unglue myself from the computer and return to the shop.
It's certainly not bug free. But that's not the point. All I did was rewrite that example with half as much code. The point of that example seems to be "look how much less code RAII takes!" and I'm just trying to show that, although you should use RAII, that's not the reason why.
Ya just replace private with hierarchical. I don't think many techies grew up dreaming of being cogs in an industrial machine but for whatever reason libertarianism/authoritarianism has taken a strong hold on many of their imaginations and we're seeing a lot of these controversies framed in ways that limit possibilities.

College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime.

Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.
"Better" is always relative, it all depends on your workload.

AWS have ~40 instances types and and ~40 services they offer, so this is way ahead of other cloud providers, so it is a much richer ecosystem.
I got Uberio[0]: Uber for ubers. As a site which spits out "Uber for ____" is this somehow self-referential?

[0] http://www.launchnik.com/uberio
Ask HN: Contract dispute, do I shut em' down?
I am in a software development contract that's gone south. The client is refusing to pay my final invoice in full. The client ended the contract prematurely stating that they needed to find a cheaper contractor and to stop billing them for my time. When the client served notice they said they would specify out work for which I would be invited to provide a fixed cost bid for the work.

A couple weeks after they served notice, their site went offline and the client asked for my assistance to bring it back online. I provided minimal assistance, which is now their reason for refusing to pay my final invoice in full--that I didn't help and they had to figure everything out on their own which took extra effort.

I'm meeting with a lawyer on Monday to discuss how to proceed, so I'm not asking for legal advice. But, I have the keys to their web application, and really want to use this power to shut their site down and force payment in full.

I've heard of developers getting screwed on contracts, but the details rarely come out. So, really what I'm asking for is what members of this community have done in similar circumstances and how that has worked out for them.
Hmm,

The explanation that I get from article for the shift to training more metal workers is that a highly skilled metal worker winds-up being more akin to an engineer - that aspects of metal work are too complex to be understood by just theoretical knowledge of the engineers. Thus the robots in the factories duplicate the processes which both metal workers and engineers create. But if you get rid of the metal workers, you are left not able to change your processes or create new, effective processes.
There has been talk of using superoptimizers in larger compilers however it is usually not worth the effort unless you know a problem case in particular.

Especially since these kinds of transformations could slow down your code if the branch predictor is working well for your code set.
Computer Vision Disrupts Residential Real Estate Economics
Sure, virtualized OS' are always going to have some overhead vs. bare metal.
I see nothing about free coffee on this page...
I have heard Gregg Berman speak, though I hadn't read this speech until skimming it just now. I do think that there is, generally speaking, a heartfelt desire to develop the tools and data needed to gain insights that Berman is talking about.

I think there are two challenges to unpack. One, though I wasn't insinuating it, I could have been. I do believe that regulators are more lawyers than physicists. Berman is the exception rather than the rule.

Two, Berman, in particular, makes a fundamental error that I think is very easy to make. There's a difference between "complex" in the sense that something has a lot of parts, and interactively complex in the sense that parts of a system are fundamentally unknowable and it can experience wild and unexpected dynamics. I think Berman doesn't distinguish between those two types of systems (repeated analogies to cell phones give some indication of his thinking), and more generally, regulators don't understand the aggregate cost of complexity.

In my view, things like Midas are orthogonal to some deeper issues facing the markets. Regulators have created a quasi-competitive market that breeds this sort of interactive complexity. Then, when something goes wrong, they rely on punishment and enforcement actions [1] to target individual firms that have made "mistakes." This not only does not address root causes, it creates a culture of silence around technology risk issues within firms and across the industry. I've written more about this here: http://harvardkennedyschoolreview.com/preventing-crashes-les...

[1] See, e.g., http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-70694.pdf and http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-69655.pdf
What happens to people when they think they're invisible?
Interesting to see the after hour stock price jump.... https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&ei=HXA5VcnWBY...
Not just private prisons but all prisons in the US. There's lots of jobs to be created from sending people to prison. When over 1% of the US adult population is in prison or lockup, this entrenches itself into American society as a "prison-industrial complex".
At least you admit the karma factor. My adversity to losing karma just suppressed the second part of my opinion..
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue #74
I have actually. He's one of my heroes in SL. He works close to where I'll be moving to soon (it's all in one IT park). Guy is very very humble. Very nice to talk to him. Also one of the few all in believers of TDD :D
Actually this code is very stupid and you're half correct. The standard built in Array methods like map or forEach don't work on implicitly defined undefined values but on explicit one they do.

For example:
[1,2,3,undefined].forEach(ele => console.log(ele))
> 1
> 2
> 3
> undefined
On the other hand:
[1,2,3,,].forEach(ele => console.log(ele))
> 1
> 2
> 3

So, take the time you dedicate to hating JavaScript to understand the language instead of bitching here you and that stupid jerk above.
Shouldn't the overproduction of Phds drive down university costs?

Most cost increases appear to come from technology, ancillary services (gyms are popular punching bags in this regard) and administrative staff (everything from diversity deans to grant writers).

I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?

I think this is precisely the issue: the system selects for people who become very, very invested in the system.

Another important change involves the elimination of mandatory retirement: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/silver_lining/2011/04/ple.... Until the early 1990s, tenure care with an expiration date around age 65. Someone who got tenure would be on the books for 25 – 35 years. Today tenure doesn't have an expiration date—someone can be on the books for 50 years or longer. That makes tenure much more onerous.

I'd like to see universities shift from a tenure-based system to a long-term-contract-based system. This has downsides but its downsides seem better than the current tenure-based downsides.
Why I Volunteer as a CEO
Right, but what you are now talking about risk and liquidity. Most market transactions have nothing to do with investment in companies, they have to do with pricing risk. That it makes it easier for companies to find investments in some cases is a beneficial impact of this, not it's main focus.

It is a particularly HN bias to think of the market as a place to go fund a company, but that is largely a by product for most people. For most people (including everyone with an index fund/etf) its a place for managing risk. That doesn't even take into account, that a big component of this story was about S&P futures. Which are all about risk.

So it is uninteresting (even if it were true, which i doubt) that microsecond time scales make the markets less about investing in companies, they already aren't about that.
The vast majority of the time, this is true. Notice that after the Flash Crash, most prices came back to basically where they started within a few minutes.

At the micro level, the problem is uncertainty. The "true" or "fair" price of a security isn't something you can just calculate: it's uncertain and subject to change when new information is introduced into the system. So theoretically, when the price gets very far from the fair value, market makers should become more and more eager to trade, since they'll make a large profit when the price comes back. But in practice, they never know whether the person on the other side of the trade is just panic-selling and moving the price farther from equilibrium, or if they know something the market maker doesn't and are moving the price closer to a new equilibrium. As the price gets farther from its previous stable value, the probability that the counterparty is informed grows, and eventually no market maker is willing to trade and the market dissolves.

This failure mode is related to the "Market for Lemons" problem: asymmetric information causing a market breakdown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons).
Oh yes. Behaving well with a lot of performance variation and continuing to run in a partial failure state is a reality. Cloud makes it an explicit. Your own bare metal makes it implicit. If your app was born in the cloud, it will run that much better when it gets its own home. Until a local catastrophe, of course.
I think 3 responses here have misinterpreted what you're illustrating. (e.g. "won't that leak?!?!")

KeytarHero could have wrote: "Here's a much shorter more realistic version of new/delete code that will have problems such as leakage after exceptions"

Since he didn't make that explicit, 3 replies seem to have misinterpreted the post as: "Here's a much shorter version that won't leak and doesn't need RAII"

Basically, his example is supposed to be "wrong" but it's a shorter version of "wrong".
Blogspam. Actual article is http://www.realworldtech.com/intel-10nm-qwfet/
If you've never raised anything, then it doesn't shift your company to be on a startup growth-is-life go-big-or-go-home track. Any fundraising does that.

If you're asking whether removing the value of demo day changes things, yes I think it does. It diminishes the value. By how much is tough to say.

I think you should do it, if that is what you're wondering. I think your audience fits really well with their network and experience. From what I understand about what you're doing.

So if you want to have a bigger impact and make it more likely to win, then do it. Related from yesterday: http://blog.yesgraph.com/is-yc-worth-it/ (read to the end)
> It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated.

In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.

Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.

Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.

"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.

It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".

It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.
I'm an early modern historian of science so I'm sympathetic to arguments about Foucault's ahistorical tendencies. My biggest gripe with him is that he tends to conflate "the world" or "the West" with what often seems to be Paris and its environs, when you look at what he's actually citing. But then again, that's a complaint you can lob against many 20th century French historians.

On the other hand, he really is an excellent historian of ideas and of early modern science; maybe a little less empirically grounded than historians from the "Anglo-Saxon" world like me might prefer, but you can't deny the usefulness of his ideas. He's also quite a good prose stylist in many passages, much more lively and original than the other names (like Derrida, who I find opaque and boring) with whom he's often lumped together. His opening description of Las Meninas by Velazquez in The Order of Things is one of the passages that made me want to study what I do.

To get a little pedantic though (because I'm enjoying this discussion), more recent historians of violence and executions basically support the specific claim you call into question (that executions typically didn't frighten early modern audiences). People like Edward Muir at Northwestern have done great original work in Italian archives to show just how different attitudes toward public violence were in the premodern world. [1] An execution was literally something you'd take your kids to and buy refreshments at, like a play. I don't see the conflict between that claim, which is quite robust on an empirical level, and Foucault describing gory details that shock his modern audience - just because we find it frightening doesn't mean our great-great-great-great-grandparents did.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=zlULqJ70bDUC&q=executions#...
Studs was a radio interviewer. The book is taken from thousands of hours of material.

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/938
>- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.

And now, instead, they exclude Asians. Progress!
Until the machines learn to learn...
It doesn't. Just like the example it replaces.

I'm not saying this is the best way to write this code - there are several reasons RAII is better. But in this case, "look how messy non-RAII code is!" isn't the reason.
I hear you. In Canada, "broadband" is 1.5Mbps down and 640Kbps up. Hilarious.
Google is using Chrome to shape the web in their image
U.S. strike inadvertently killed U.S., Italian hostages; Obama apologizes
But it does render its usefulness or utility lower than a simpler construct which offers all of the same benefits, but with lower logical depth.

I'm not saying Foucault's wrong, I'm saying that there are other philosophers who have put forward similar ideas in a much more straightforward fashion without the Brainfuck.