skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I don't see how, despite politics, that the lenders bear any blame for that because national governments are presumed to be mature stewards of the state, able to say "No" to enticing but ill-advised offers.

Ever heards of "lackeys" in power? Countries ruled by people whose careers are sponsored by foreign powers? It's quite common in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Southern Europe, namely in all places not big enough to be colonialists themselves.

Greece has been a protectorate and semi-colony (with some parts, like the Dodecanese, Ionian Islands and Cyprus being actual colonies to Italians, British, etc) ever since the country was established. From foreign powers sending a German king to rule the place in early 19th century, down to helping establish a military dictatorship back in the late sixties.
Also, since jmalloc claims it's "inspired by BigMemory from Terracotta", Terracotta open sourced their offheap store under Apache v2: https://github.com/Terracotta-OSS/offheap-store since
"Google"'s novm was pretty clearly labeled as a personal experiment, by a person who worked at Google. Clear Containers uses kvmtool, and iirc is the same group of developers.
"Leading is a skill, and thus valuable"

This is true, but leadership skills are worthless if the people you're leading don't have the skills to do the work in the first place.

And again, you're going to claim that just having money means you deserver more of the reward than someone who actually put the work in to create something?
My original source was wrong. Thanks for the correction you two!
Octopus skin contains a light-sensitive pigment found in eyes
That is some North Korean level of crazy!
Ahh. Yeah that makes plenty of sense lol. I agree for many pop songs.
Interestingly, if sidewalks measure "urbaness", most surburbs have extensive sidewalks and walking trails within a given development.

NYC in the example is very urban, but Staten Island is about 3x as dense as the (very suburban) suburb where I live -- and it gets very rural out here very quick (we're mostly converted farmland at this point). Staten Island seems fairly suburban to me, lots of single-story family homes with yards. It's almost the definition of a suburb except it happens to be administratively within NYC boundaries.

Manhattan is about 30x as dense as where I live and there's nowhere within 15-20 miles of where I live that even looks as urban as Manhattan. Mile after mile you get multi-story highrises or tiny squashed multi-story town homes that are mostly stairs. Even if you ignore the biggest skyscrapers, there's very few other places quite like it.
In that Germany, as a state, could not give a fuck about Germans. As any other state, it's all about the national rich people making a killing.
I'm interested in learning the immigration path to Canada, but unlike the US, I haven't found many people with experience in Canada immigration, especially the path you took (PR via job and stuffs). Do you mind if I have your email for a few questions?

My email is also in my profile, if you don't want to post your email here. Thanks much!
These are not fully settled questions, though the answer is probably no.

Most researchers believe that brains are Turing machine equivalent, therefore can be simulated by any other equivalents. Even Gödel believed this, though he believed the mind had more capabilities than the brain.[1] As a materialist, you would share the commonly-accepted view and reject his latter claim.

There is a small minority of philosophers and physicists who believe that there are meaningful quantum reactions happening in the brain, distinguishing them from classical computers.[2] Some recent computer simulations have shown this to be plausible, but the general impression is that it seems unlikely, and we don't have specific evidence of effects of this sort.

Quantum effects of certain sorts are computationally infeasible to perform with classical computers. And it's theoretically plausible that such effects can not be conducted at scale with in-development quantum computer technology, and is only practical with organic chemistry, but again, this is quite a minority view.

It's also possible that classical brain features, such as its massive concurrence or various clever algorithms, prove difficult to replicate or simulate. If these are easy problems to solve, then strong AI may arrive in decades; if very difficult, centuries. In the latter case, it seems plausible that incorporating wetware would be a useful shortcut. But there's good reason to believe that the practical disadvantages of wetware (e.g. keeping it alive, coordinating with its slow "clock speed") overwhelm the computational conveniences.

--

[1] http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/sieg/onmindTuringsMachines...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
> We need to develop one universal graphic and data visualization library

<xkcd>There are now 38 different libraries</xkcd>
This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_.

I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower... and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the horrors of writing an introduction...

The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings, ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!).

Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares about... That's what being an academic is!

If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be pointless for you.

The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested (again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic" systems...

Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.
Part of it is that we're mixing two things that are a bit arbitrary.

How "urban" a city is and what the limits of a "city" are. Both of these are fungible by the community, as they should be. Urban living where I grew up would probably still include a backyard, in SF it probably includes a garage, in NYC it includes neither. The city of SF is pretty strictly defined, but the city of San Jose certainly has more fungible boundaries as well (santa clara vs milpitas vs san jose).
This is what I've done in the past, not sure why we need to "hack TCP" to get zero downtime.

As an additional thing I do rolling deploys where I just create an entirely new VM and add it before removing the old one. This just means that I don't have to recycle a node that might potentially have some state on it.
don't use a korean one!
To me, this is a great demonstration of why AWS Lambda is not the future. Amazon gave it a catchy name for the Rube Goldberg cluster that it is.
His blog posts are easier to follow and aren't forced to be in the academic format :)

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/02/...
If dollars are overbought, gold is an option. A couple of my gold mining stocks more than doubled during the dollar's advance in the past few months. Gold price in USD steady, USD rising, foreign currency and mining costs fall, soaring profit margins.
Nice game. Difficult from the start but getting better with each game. Also, great music. Great Job..
When entry-level programming position salaries reached $100k
GT and Paul Johnson still punts and goes for the PAT pretty often. It's very situational, though he does go for it on 4th far more than most BCS-level teams. He's not doing what the aforementioned highschool coach does, though.

Also, I'll take the bait and point out that Florida has been pretty bad for a number of years now. They do get ranked highly every year because of their success the last decade+, but they haven't been a real contender for some time now.
> and the concertina is a popular instrument in South Africa amongst the ancestors of the people who are usually responsible for these waves

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply there, but it seems a bit racist? Or am I just being ignorant?
You're right about the equality aspect of things getting cheaper. We discussed this on Schneier's blog. It's compatible with "make accessible to everyone" definition. I think, playing devil's advocate, my counter was that we often don't get the same thing because we lack the quality, support, or privacy of prior, paid solutions. My Gmail, Dropbox, and so on are selling me out. My MyKolab and secure hosting solution cost a bit more with totally different effect.

I think the "features" are getting democratized by most of these companies but other critical aspects don't. They don't either because they cost too much to implement or too much profit will be lost by opportunities to sell users out. So, as part of it gets democratized, a serious loss happens as either a tradeoff or straight subversion. The original it isn't democratized: only a watered-down, less trustworthy version which may or may not be a good deal. More good ones all the time, at least. :)

Thoughts?
True, but the parent comment was about company culture where vacation taking was not encouraged. The number of vacation days don't appear to matter, what matters is whether there is a week where you work overtime.

The idea being, I think, that working 120 hours deserves additional compensation, whether you have a week to recover or not, and companies can't game overtime by giving you vacation days to recover. They would be better off just having you work regularly.
> he spends much of his time demystifying the field itself, which is a brilliant way to encourage others to explore it :)

yup. this is the first time I understood someone from this field. Honestly, this dude just broken down the wall.

What's more important, passion flows through his writing. And it can be felt. I got so excited while reading it.
Most programs even today don't do many integer divisions (which is why ARM doesn't even support them, for example). Compilers are really good at eliminating them.
"OCR rot"
Irregularities in LaCour: “When contact changes minds" [pdf]
The preferable options in these sorts of situations generally boil down to:

1. Use a SafeHandle or CriticalHandle
2. Let the finalizers for the resources you're holding take care of themselves.

#2 because if your resources already have their own finalizers (e.g., streams, db connections), then implementing your own is like a belt and suspenders. Except that whichever one you added 2nd is probably broken and makes everything strictly worse.
Always good to hear both sides. I reserve judgment until I do. In this case, I'm just going to say "Ok" and be neutral. I like the line you added at the end: quite fair.
Some Interesting Hints About iOS 9
ONLY PLASTIC ONES!

Wood can be conductive depending upon its water content.

Even better, don't poke around in an amp unless you have at least a basic knowledge of electronics. The voltages in there are in the range of 500V, and electricity doesn't respond like you're used to at that level (DC switches, for example, need to be much bigger to resist the arcing at those voltages).

And, while its cool to see someone hack, the amount of damage EVH did to perfectly good guitars (some of them beyond that) is legendary. Learning even a little about what you are hacking goes a long way.
Used AWS for a couple of years but switch to DO and haven't looked back.

Great interface, pricing and service.

Their customer support is also awesome and I've found their support community articles to be thoroughly useful.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/
While this is interesting, what's the point of having a closed-source browser in 2015? Is this really a competitive edge over everyone else?

Any of these interesting achievements are made somewhat ho-hum by the fact that there's no way to see what happened.
I appreciate the detailed reply. It seems like it's not a fit for my zero-overhead strategy but an interesting alternative to C++ for app development.
Once upon a time, mv was "a stupid system call interface to rename(2)". However, some users didn't like having to think about whether the source and destination were on the same mountpoint, so someone decided to make mv more complex[1]. The Unix designers lamented the growing complexity, but the great many naive users celebrated the change, and demanded that all mv implementations do that.

[1]: I believe GNU mv was the first to do that, but I could be mistaken.

Edit: As userbinator points out, this isn't totally true. I still believe it is true for moving directories, but for files, mv has copied them since at least Research UNIX V4 (1973), this being implemented by either Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie themselves.
> A lot of processing jobs can't use indexes (except for lookup tables) so a PostgreSQL 4TB db with a schema for OLTP workloads doesn't solve the issue.

What are the cases where an RDBMS can't use indexes on fact tables?
Can't sing the praises of Show Stopper high enough either! Finished it about a month ago and absolutely loved it -- it was great when paired with this: https://github.com/tpn/pdfs/blob/master/Windows%20Research%2...

I sent a tweet to the author saying I was really enjoying the book when I was about half way through it and he actually e-mailed me to say thanks. How nice is that!
Actually they're not "free to do anything they want", as the sanest options (those which most foreign economists advised from the start), such as defaulting and/or cutting part of the debt were taken off the table by threats and diplomatic and political pressure.
> Everyone who gets in touch with me requesting help to evaluate their own situation can be certain not to get his identity revealed by me. I acted this way across the entire xerox saga and I won't stop this way of acting now. My contact data can be found in the imprint.

Can the author actually legally make this guarantee?
Thanks. I think Erlang is the grandfather of languages using the actor pattern and at the same time Joe realized that POSIX threads does not belong to business logic code and it can be done without leaking the number of actual OS threads to the user's codebase. On the top of that Joe also implemented the message passing to avoid the shared memory that is a serious problem from the safety point of view for applications with threads. One thread can take down the entire process execution. Addressing these in Erlang made it possible to write the first commercial system with extra high availability and fault tolerance.

JVM is obviously great a VM, and Scala brings most of the Erlang (and many other languages) features to the table. I am not sure about the fault tolerance. I need to look into how Akka implements the actors.

> Concurrency means synchronizing and sending messages between
> processes.

I think in Erlang you can do only async sending and when the receiving process wakes up it gets it through one of the means you mentioned.

http://bartoszmilewski.com/2009/02/10/message-passing-sync-o...

> Erlang can't cope with this load btw.

This is what I am curious about. I have seen only one big system written in Erlang that was massive big. WhatsApp was also running in Erlang and they achieved something like 1M connection/server. That was impressive. I am wondering how could you do that with Akka?

> https://github.com/puniverse/quasar

I am following the development of these, starting to use it in Clojure soon, I am curious how it works out. Personally I prefer Aleph on the JVM for Clojure projects but wanna see what is happening in Quasar & co.

https://github.com/ztellman/aleph
This is the typical unbalance of code + configuration. The code can be very clear but you need to read a lot of documents to be able to configure it in a particular system.
Prostate cancer breakthrough
Show HN: Kitty Launcher – a Mac OS X web development workflow launcher
Thanks for this comment, as I'm learning to touch type, and for me every time I had to type the bottom row with my right hand it feels awkward.
This will definitely change the way I learn :-)
Going from what people on different projects and forums said when I was Googling it. I could assess its current state better with a few questions. Can it run in kernel mode on bare metal? Can it run without a sizeable runtime? Are its core abstractions for common uses (arrays, strings, etc) at C++ performance at least? Are basic, demo algorithms small enough as object code to fit into a L1 cache?

These would be a nice start on assessing it as a true C++ alternative for varieties of systems programming. Come to think of it, I might also look to see if any C++ developers in high-end gaming have tried it. They're so tight on efficiency (and skilled at getting it) that might tell me plenty.
There are monthly threads for this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287
not understanding that the (non-existing) target will be a subdirectory of the source.

mv first tries to rename("/mnt", "/mnt/foo") and only after that fails with EXDEV it decides to mkdir("/mnt/foo")

To me this looks like a bug: the order of the checks has been reversed. mv should never attempt to put a directory into itself, since there is no situation in which that ever makes sense. Only after that check passes should it decide if rename() is enough, or if it has to do a copy/delete.

The problem here is that the error conditions are not mutually exclusive - it is possible to have a rename cross devices and attempt to move a directory into one of its descendants - but there's no specification in the standard[1] of which error should be returned in such a case. The priority of non-mutually-exclusive errors is seldom considered, yet this is a good example of why it's important.

In other words the "rename("/mnt", "/mnt/foo")" should have failed with EINVAL, not EXDEV. A look through the Linux source shows that at least there, cross-device has higher priority than parent-descendant: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/namei.c#L4240

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/re...
Spoiler Free Sports
www.SpoilerFreeScores.com
Not all. Some cryptocurrencies are Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work. This means that in order to try and do a 51% attack, the attacker must have 51% of the staking coins. PoS uses magnitudes less electricity than PoW and game theory suggests it's just as, if not more, secure.
>BayCon has been around for 30 years.

Star Trek conventions and other stuff too. But all of those were a very fringe thing to what Comic-Con is today, and were not attended by late-20 or 30-somethings...

>Before that, the niche interests just change -- my dad and his friends have been dressing up in 20s garb and driving 20s cars to period events since the 60s. There are Civil War re-enactments and sex clubs and costume parties and all sorts of things.

A costume ball or a civil war re-enanactment (much less a "sex club") is not the same kind of thing as a comics/star wars/etc based pop culture that's mainstream with adults.

>This page has a picture of the nonexistent 20-40 year olds turning out to see Stan Laurel in 1947

Not sure what the relevance is. Stan Laurel was a comedian and a famous actor. Nobody said comedy and movies weren't popular with adults.

We're talking about stuff like Batman and similar superhero stuff -- which was something few 20-40 year olds cared for even in the early 80s.
> Storing zeroes and ones deterministically

Turing-complete platforms are universal simulators. There's nothing they can't represent.

> like how information is flowing from short-term memory to long-term

Sure, we know that. The little seahorse helps out.

> re-purposing brain structures

rudimentary artificial neural nets do the same thing. they also self-specialize automatically with no innate programming (line detectors, edge detectors, eye detectors, cat detectors, all the way up—automatically).

> we may still be hundreds of years away

lol. nope. gotta think exponentially.

> lesser solutions if we stop seeing financial benefits, like with space exploration

can't do space exploration without the approval of a nation-state. can do AI tomfoolery in your own basement with nobody else finding out until it's too late.
Standard knowledge for robots
This is awesome idea. Do you have users?
> bun.name = "Sky";

> // Yep, it's saved. Seriously.

How?
The similar blocks technique used in JBIG2 is what's called the prediction step in many image codecs, or intra prediction in video. That specific technique is a perfectly fine idea so I've always wondered why more codecs don't use it - usually they don't let motion vectors point into the current frame.

But usually there's a step after it called residual coding, where you subtract the predicted image from the original and send the difference to make up for errors. Just leaving that out is, um, interesting.
> bun.name = "Sky";
> // Yep, it's saved. Seriously.

How?
Why do say it's a relatively small field? Outside of mobile, the desktop web is the front end target in all of computing these days, and JS is the only reasonable way to write for it.
It appears to be equivalent to a feature/dumbphone, in which context even a 2G network is usually overkill.
You're making a number of judgements about the danger of the situation. The train analogy is also misleading.

We're now essentially arguing about which situation puts the passenger's lives at stake the most. Which is the most dangerous situation?

If we absolutely have to use an analogy we should make the train and the plane situations equal. In the case of the plane no one was hurt. Nobody even knew what had happened - not even the pilots. This might be analogous to a train "hacker" placing a washing machine on the tracks...and then removing the washing machine while the train is still at a safe distance.

There we go - the train "hacker" has shown that a washing machine can be placed on the tracks successfully and now the train companies can start to think of a solution. Maybe breaks. Or horns. Or those big cute scoops ;)

I think if you wanted to send the hacker to rot in jail (and keep your conscience) you'd have to prove that the hacker was very reckless and had no experience with avionics systems. Something tells me he knew how to run these systems though - at least enough to hack into them.
This infuriates me:

"But Leigh argues that unlucky students with no results “shouldn’t be getting a PhD anyway”, since the degree is awarded “for a contribution to knowledge, not for a good try”."

Translation: never do work on anything that has even the possibility of failure.

Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge.

This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".
desalination is very hard

and even harder to get rid of the waste brine