skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This line: I would have sent out an email to the mailing lists earlier; but since at each point I thought I was "one change away" from fixing the problems, I kept on delaying said email until it was clear that the problems were finally fixed" is such a common situation for most people, but I tend to see it with engineers especially. I find I struggle with it an incredible amount. In some ways, I guess it seems healthy or reassuring that incredibly smart people like Colin Percival suffer from similar challenges around fully understanding the scope of the problem and the solution.

All that being said, I really respect the detailed response from a technical perspective as well as owning up to (and the decisions that went into) a spell of downgraded performance.

Later edit because I don't want to spam the comments: I'd love some context (maybe from cperciva himself?) around the performance enhancement of integrating new Intel AESNI instructions. This is well beyond my depth and while Colin mentions that it didn't necessarily increase performance, I'm wondering if the hope is it would longterm? Or were there other benefits to such an integration?
> The reality is that most of us get in to our car and just drive.

I don't mean that the internals appear complicated (I wouldn't know anyway), I mean just learning it as a user appears that way.

> That's part of the issue with Perl 6: its proponents get very excited about it and write about all the really cool stuff you can do with it, but for those who don't know the language, it sounds intimidating.

Yes. But it's not just that; trying to read the Synopses is daunting. It's very easy to get stuck there, try for a while on IRC, then give up.

> Here's a talk I gave at FOSDEM ...

Thanks for the link, and for the talk.
The article isn't really covering the modern pinball scene. While Stern is definitely the major manufacturer in play, Jersey Jack is growing and there are several more boutique manufacturers including:

Multimorphic - Offers the P3 pinball system integrating a full LCD panel with motion tracking into the playfield (as opposed to the backbox like JJ.) They also offer the P-ROC which allows replacing the CPU (a 6809/ASIC combo!) with a Spartan3 system allowing you to reprogram the rules on most 90's+ games.

Spooky Pinball - Ben Heck designed the America's Most Haunted machine, an "unlicensed" theme that is quite fun to play. I believe the first run was for 150 machines, with the next title to be announced in the near future.

Heighway Pinball - Manufacturer out of England with one title in production (Full Throttle, a motorbike theme) and are working on a licensed Alien themed pin.

There are a couple others including current and former game designers working on their own or with one of the manufacturers. This also says nothing of the pinball modding community, custom one-off games, etc.

EDIT: Completely forgot Planetary Pinball who is remaking late 90's pinball machines with modern electronics. First machine is Medieval Madness and is shipping now.
I'm really not seeing what you gain out of running fine-grained control all-the-time here. Even if it were vital for a customer that you hit a budget target exactly you could dynamically change the granularity of control as you got closer. If anything predictive modeling would give you better budget use when you do have the flexibility than granular adjustment would (I don't know much about the area though and just going with your description of the problem here.)
How the royals learned to act normal
Much of what keeps programmer salaries from going up as fast as they should is that managers know that, even if you're a genuine "10x" or even 100x engineer, you don't stay a 10x-er unless you get interesting projects, which tend to be rare in most companies. Since they control the allocation of interesting work, there's often an implied either/or: you can get interesting work and a cost-of-living bump or you can get a 20% raise.

For some examples: (1) frequent job hops can improve your salary, but they reduce your ability to stick with a long project and become good at anything; (2) if you're looking to make the case for a move into management, you do better to take on an ugly-but-necessary project where you'll delegate most of the work, than to stick with the technically interesting stuff and get a reputation of someone who only wants to work on the "fun" stuff; (3) Haskell engineers make about 40% less than Java engineers at the same level of engineering ability. (The difference in medians is only a few percent, but the median Haskell engineer is equivalent to ~95th percentile in Java.) That's because Java engineers can set up multilateral bidding wars every 2 years and get huge pay bumps; in Haskell, that's nearly impossible because it's a small community.

Personally, I tend to go for interesting work. That's because I think, in the long term, it'll play out better for me to have spent my 30s well than to have ratcheted up my salary but not really know anything.

If we want to see engineers paid what they're worth, though, we've got to get political enough that we can actually run companies (let's be honest; 98+ percent of VC-funded startups are run by Guys With Connections Who Therefore Call Shots, not engineers) and take control of the work allocation processes as well.
Is this distinct from a money transmitter? I know transmitters must be registered in each state that a user might originate from, and each registration costs around $50,000.
Come back when you can write a database in sql, or a browser in html. Hell, try writing a browser in javascript.

How much of what the average programmer does looks like implementing a programming language and how much is just throwing some UI over a CRUD database? Why insist that a tool is only worthwhile if it can do both? There is plenty of room for tools that just solve the kinds of problems that most people have and do it without requiring years of training.

The vast majority of knowledge workers still rely on tools like Excel and Labview even when they are grossly unsuited for the task at hand, because the alternatives we offer require far too much training.

No-one is going to take your emacs away, we're just trying to figure out what the other 99% of the population is going to use.
"and the way all those productivity gains have all benefited a very, very tiny amount of people?
"

The quality of life has been rapidly increasing for the entire planet. Visit ourworldindata.org and view all 16 of the data entries.
We went with Zenhub :)
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation.
I'm not sure I follow the author's argument. However this is a definite fallacy:

"Cause goodness knows that the easiest way to raise one's compensation in the knowledge economy is to simply space out more while getting paid the same."

There's an opportunity cost to being stuck in a chair "pretending" to work. And my compensation does not go up if I'm "pretending" to work.

Instead, I choose to work at places that don't value my time by my presence but instead value my results.
Mirage supports Ocaml
the video shows people making Python Unikernels.

This slide deck supports Elixir and Erlang languages.

(just adding details for people)
The Microsoft astroturfing on HN is at an all time high.
Yes, well i know this name is pseudonymous and someone who actually tried could probably figure out who I was.

Yik Yak seems very different from hacker news.
See also the MEI project at http://music-encoding.org. Not quite the same thing, but still noteworthy. It's an attempt to provide a parallel to TEI (http://www.tei-c.org) for music notation. MEI is still under development, and they're supposedly working on some way to output notation (maybe through Lilypond; it's been a few months since I've kept up with the project).
I am so glad people are starting to realize that what gives currency its values is that it, and only it, can be used to pay taxes, which are incurred in many transactions that don't even have to involve money.
Just keep the background black and prevent from choosing too dark colors.
". And it's really hard to find good hired workers to help out, because nowadays no one wants to do strenuous physical labor for relatively low pay"
I wonder why :)
The game just launched. I know quite a bit about it (having won $1500), so feel free to ask me anything.
its a dangerous position, if people start to find courage from Uber...You don't go to jail for decades for exercising regulatory arbitrage when taking paid rides in your car.
$6M seems like a lot to take out of a $25M round, but if the investors were ok with it, and the founders were ok with it, how is it not fair?

Earlier investors don't seem happy about it, but I'm not sure how much weight that has; early investors often have to accept new terms during a fund raising round; for better or worse.
They told the company at least a day beforehand: https://t.co/dnvq8F3Ad0
What's the tech behind this? Meteor?
> I had a friend interview with Google to work in their uptime group or something like that. He had to solve some brainteaser about generating an in-order list of numbers that meet a certain criteria in O(n) time and constant space. I get that someone somewhere thought it was a good idea. But if you're tasked with keeping failures from happening being able to solve that brainteaser doesn't say anything about your suitability for the job. Being able to imagine disaster scenarios and how they'll play out seems a lot more important to me.

I think Google's approach to hiring has generally been "let's hire really smart and overqualified people and then they'll be suitable for any job".
Thanks.

MyDef is not really a programming language, but a meta layer. Sounds like a new concept but it is more like cpp or m4 in the toolchain point of view. As such, it can work with any programming languages. e.g. In the Nim example, every thing written is Nim, except the macro; and MyDef itself is actually in 100% Perl (the bootstrap folder is actually a pure Perl package). However, specific extension/plugin also can be written for specific language to customize and gain special power; I did that for Perl and C.
To me the issue with the deck is that it doesn't simplify the idea - it expands it over and over again until you get overwhelmed by the details of the business. That feeling of complexity, in my opinion, would leave investors feeling that the whole solution was so complex that there were too many ways to fail. Manufacturing? Marketplace? Hardware? It's too much for me - I can't imagine how an investor takes it all in and feels that the team could successfully execute on all the parts.

The best decks I've seen, in addition to everything you've brought up, also simplify the idea down.
Apple has anounced they are returning 200B to there shareholders over the next few years. The somewhat shocking reality is that's only 5 years woth of proffits which is arguably a perfectly reasonable cash hoard.

However, the real issue is the depreciation on components makes shipping cutting edge electronics by sea untenable. Put another way Apple does not want to wait another 25 days before releasing their new phone or be forced to ramp up production on an even less proven technology.

PS: Another option is to ship the phones by air but the packaging by sea. However, phones are small enough that it would not be woth maintaining a U.S. factory for final assembly.
IOActive's findings enable a very difficult but devastating man-in-the-middle attack against anyone buying or storing these locks. It's really hard to clone a key to these locks, but once that's done the lock can be reassembled, and the attacker can use the copy to open it.

It's NOT like you can walk up to one with a thumb drive and pwn it.
In case any other customer is wondering "Wait, I didn't hear anything from my monitoring about that and I'm retroactively worried. How worried should I be?" like I was: I just pulled our logs and reconstructed them, and it shows over the last ~30 days that the worse-case performance of our daily backup (~150 MB per day delta, ~45 GB total post deduplication) was about 40% longer than our typical case. This didn't trip our monitoring at the time because they all completed successfully.

n.b. Our backups run outside of the hotspot times for Tarsnap, so we may have had less performance impact than many customers. I have an old habit of "Schedule all cron jobs to start predictably but at a random offset from the hour to avoid stampeding any previously undiscovered SPOFs." That's one of the Old Wizened Graybeard habits that I picked up from one of the senior engineers at my last real job, which I impart onto y'all for the same reason he imparted it onto me: it costs you nothing and will save you grief some day far in the future.
"An error has occurred"
They shouldn't return a single dime. The investors who allowed them to take $3 million off the table should be punished for their stupidity.
Yeah, I said the same thing before I started this. But that's when I'm waste deep in code and I hit the inevitable stumbling block of a weird library bug, missing config option, strange behavior, etc.

That addictive, power-through flow state is hard to maintain without instant SO/Google access, and for many years that was the only way I coded. But I've begun to relish the other mode of programming: the deep thought and careful mental construction of the optimal program, piece by piece, module by module. Sure, I can't bang out as many lines at night, but when I go into the city in the morning I have a mental view of underlying structure – laid out in clear, bold strokes – that makes my SO-enabled coding so much more effective, and directed.*

(*I've noticed that letting SO answer a question prevents any pause which would make you step back from your work and ask "Am I even taking the right approach here?" Low latency, REPLs, and quick access answers make it very easy to go down a rabbit hole – the dark side of exploratory coding.)

And yes, as others have mentioned, I do cache and wget all the docs for whatever tools I'm currently using. With all that, it's hard to get truly stuck, even without the internet.
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495606
I wish he had gone into more detail about his research and how he is pushing AI development. He just said it's akin to a building a rocket ship but gives no real indication of what he is really working on.

Is he trying to push the boundaries of neural networks or trying to create a new pattern recognition algorithm or machine learning algorithm like a Naive Bayes classifier?

I just wish he had went into more technical detail about his work.
Chapters bother you that much huh?
Russell Pavlicek had a pretty good high level talk on Unikernels at Linuxfest Northwest this year -http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/2015/sessions/next-generation-...
I hated Reveal.js until I realized that I could press Space to advance, and Shift-Space to move backwards, and it will just Do The Right Thing.

Can you go down? Space will go down. Otherwise, Space will go to the right. It re-linearizes the presentation, while still preserving the 2D layout for quick navigation between major topics.
Toxic cynicism or reasonable skepticism? In anything involving health or food, it pays to keep an elevated level of skepticism. Too many people make too much money off of scams that have no scientific basis, but lots of marketing.

Btw, I visited boulder last week and ate at The Kitchen Next Door. The food was delicious, but nothing struck me as especially healthy. Most of it was fried.
That's just the AI effect. People assume that intelligence is magic. Once they learn that simple algorithms can generate intelligent behavior they refuse to believe it's intelligent. There is no law of nature that hard problems require complicated solutions.

>As far as fear of AGI/Strong A.I. Listen, you can't stop something whose time has come.

Huh? All of the people advocating AI safety are saying to invest in making AI safe, not to ban AI research.

However that's not even correct. The development of general purpose computers was delayed for nearly a century because it didn't get enough funding. Human cloning and many other areas of technology/research have successfully been banned. I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but you can't argue that it's impossible to prevent technologies.

>The fear that arises from this group is in knowing that AGI will trump Weak A.I (their cash cow). Thus, the fear propaganda.

Are you seriously suggesting some kind of conspiracy by "weak AI" people to prevent the development of AGI by manipulating the media?
I can see that you have gotten lots of responses about cake and eating cake and candies and sorts. In case you were looking for the direct answer> Selling is ok, Being in the business of exchanging (buying/selling) requires legal frameworks.
I'm amazed anyone is asking for the founders' money to be returned. Can someone who believes this explain the rationale?
Hear hear on said Old Wizened Graybeard habit. The amount of pain inflicted from twenty jobs all starting up at :00 (or even :30, :45, etc.) when they could easily run at :04 or :17 can be huge. Anecdotally I once "lost" a sandbox server to a ton of developer sandbox jobs starting at :00 and not completing before the next batch started.
I've been collecting pinball machines for nearly 20 years now and the recent resurgence in popularity has really breathed new life into the industry.

It was a dark time for pinball after WMS closed their pinball division in 1999, leaving second place Stern alone in the market, at a time when their quality was nowhere near what WMS was doing at the time.

Now there's a new breed of collectors who exclusively buy brand new Sterns and add all kinds of modifications to "bling" them out, and the cost of the nearly-20-year-old WMS games has skyrocketed.

Pinball has never been stronger.
You have responsability for your actions even if you're legaly forced to them. This sane principle was officialized in the Nuremberg trials [1].

Edit0: In fact, the principles were more specific to international law vs national law and orders. However, the idea behind is still sane even if you don't violate international law.

Edit1: It's about recognizing personal responsibility.

Edit2: Those who disagree, why?

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_principles
One way to think about your fear is, shouldn't that just be a tarsnap feature?

Add some metadata for a machine that tarsnap should expect a once a day/week/month backup from this machine, and if it doesn't get one, to send you an email?
U.S. Treasury slaps virtual currency startup Ripple with $700K fine
Hi Craigslist and Vine We hacked you guys
[Disclaimer: I'm the PM and lead dev of this project]
Basically the rationale is that it is a beta website and we didn't had the time to do all the optimizations we want. More updates and sections should be coming in the next few weeks.
LHC sees first low-energy collisions
That makes it even worse. It'll drive up property prices and make the locals, relative to cost of living, a lot poorer.

There's so much filthy global money in Manhattan and California real estate right now that it's mind-boggling. And as Malta is a tiny island nation, and real estate exhibits extreme price inelasticity, this sort of thing can happen quickly.

Real estate hyperinflation is a plague that must be fought with any means necessary.
> The first reason is that you want he founders to be focused on the company, and not struggling to make ends meet. That way they can make long term decisions.

If a company makes it beyond the seed stage, it should be capitalized well enough to allow the founders to take a reasonable salary. If there are any founders employed at venture-backed startups struggling to make ends meet, I think it's safe to say the vast majority of them are not struggling because they're not being paid well enough.

> Secondly, every round the founders lose more and more control. They should be compensated for this.

Why? If you want to maximize control, build a business that doesn't need to sell equity to raise capital. Or build such a great business that you can raise large sums of capital without having to sell much equity.

Incidentally, when founders cash out their shares, they're only hastening the loss of control, especially if this is done early when the company's valuation is lower.

> One of the big problems with venture capital these days (and the reason I won't take it anymore) is that it disrespects the founders by demanding liquidation preferences for the VCs. As if the VCs who merely put up other people's money should have rights superior to the people who literally put part of their life into the company. That's not right. All shares should be equal, and if not, the founders should at least be respected.

This is silly. You're not going to raise millions of dollars from professional investors who have fiduciary duties to their limited partners without said investors demanding reasonable protections. Period.

If a founder is worried about a 1x preference, which is fairly standard, it suggests the founder is not confident about the company's prospects, at least as far as investor expectations are concerned. For example, if a founder raises $5 million round at $15 million pre and is worried about a 1x preference, one would have to question whether the founder really believes the company is actually going to be able to deliver the type of growth his or her investors expect.

If an investor demands a 2x or greater preference in this market, it probably means the company is not in a good position because nobody competing for a deal is likely to demand more than a 1x preference today.

> Thirdly, too often I've seen VCs force founders to revest shares. But the value of those shares was already earned. The founder incentive to do well comes from increasing the value of the shares... and revesting the shares denies the founders crucial voting rights that they have earned already. (And makes it that much easier for the VCs to force a founder out, which is usually a bad idea in my experience.)

Revesting is negotiable and if you set up a reasonable vesting schedule when you form your company, chances are you'll be able to avoid this issue entirely. A lot of founder revesting issues arise because the founders purchased their shares for virtually nothing with no restrictions attached when they formed the company.
Today's XKCD Finally Takes Physics to Task
Secret wasn't hurting for money. How would 6m (which was a secondary sale and was not taken out of the business, btw) have helped?
Maximizing Superconducting Critical Temperature
Usually I'm asking myself questions (what do I need here? Do I need to add something else if X happens?), and putting together a solution to a puzzle - this is stuff I've already mostly worked out, mainly just replaying my thoughts.

Also I think of what will the computer do with what I'm coding, how things will calculate, or how the user will see it or respond, part of it is on the fly debugging, part optimization, often during this, I also think of additional code for optimization elsewhere, fixes or new features.

One thing I know is when I'm in the zone my human interaction skills goes down, not much for platitudes or chit chat, unless it's about the stuff I'm working on.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about and should not be taken seriously.

Eliding the virtualized network and disk interfaces is not what they are talking about though. They are sticking with those. So, given virtualized CPU, RAM, network and disk interfaces; a runtime that talks directly to those interfaces; and the intent to exclusively run a single process per VM; what do they really need Linux for?
whistles

Until the day when Colin considers it in-scope for Tarsnap, I recommend Deadman's Snitch for this purpose. I literally spend more on DMS to monitor Tarsnap than I spend on Tarsnap. No, I don't think that is just, either.
For anyone reluctant to click on a shortened URL, the full URL is https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-BwS8oOqrxSQ/VUgoAVekqjI/A...