skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A hardware engineer told me in discussions on chip subversion that BS like this is common in SOC's, too. He said they're so expensive to develop that vendors often include the functionality of all their chips in one design. Then, they flip a switch on the chip to enable or disable specific functionality. This means they all cost the same to make but they can give you specific features at specific prices. Hard disk makers do it too where you bought a "120GB" drive that uses same eg 1TB platter as the rest but firmware restricts user to 120GB.

You can't be sure whats in it unless a company such as Chipworks tears it down piece by piece and wire by wire. Sneaky is the norm in hardware.
I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a huge problem because it's generally easy enough to read all the comments in a thread, but in busier threads (for examples see popular forums on reddit), minority viewpoints are quickly and efficiently hidden from view. The system is very effective at promoting the most popular viewpoint (at the expensive of every other quality), which makes comment threads boring and predictable.
It's funny, because while I remember I was forced to implement one back in my CS days, I questioned the point and practicality of it (as I did with other things like in the OS class). But I am thankful now for having been put through the exercise (as well as competitive grading, based on the average runtime with random hashtables constructed). Knowing how a hash table is implemented allows you to understand why it's an efficient structure.
Agreed on all counts.

For those who don't know what we're talking about: this map of the recent UK election results should illustrate the huge divide between Scotland and England:

https://flipchartfairytales.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/scre...

They are two very different cultures.
Sometimes the established norm is pretty far from the HN norm, too. It's an interesting way to learn about the (more active) users here. Not a rigorous or a scientific way, of course.
> dynamic vs static typing

And some lisps, such as Racket, allow you to switch from untyped to typed with nominal changes.
I deliberately chose to use vrbo.com over airbnb.com for my last rental. Interestingly the condo was available on both and the rental terms were more favorable on vrbo.com for security deposit and the like.

I do not know how big a competitor vrbo.com is, but they exist.
Err.

Schools without academia would see better sporting results.

I know that I performed worse in school due to computing. Longer term that seemed to work out better for me. (horrendous secondary school results, decent college and university, because I was lucky enough for the gatekeepers to see past marks on a sheet.)

We need to stop this idea of grading people. Really. It is not reasonable to bin people at an early age and assign them to a class based on this.
An excellent benevolent dictator can be so much better than any system where there's a big pressure to converging to the crowd average, or even the lowest common denominator of the crowd.

Most of us joined HN for exactly this reason. It was run in dictator fashion by a guy whose writings and actions showed that he was clearly above what ever be achieved by a general crowd average, at least in a particular area of expertise.

Unfortunately, his other work prevented him from spending much time here, and it's now been years since he left all active involvement in the community entirely.

The departure of the benevolent dictator is almost always catastrophic, as far as I sense. Imagine if Linus had left Linux after just a couple years, or if Guido had left Python after just a couple years. You can start to see evidence of the problems that a disappearing excellent dictator causes in the decision paralysis facing the Bitcoin community now.

What's good, is that the HN successor should appear within the next few years.
I still remember the salt scare. Ridiculous on the face of it..
It is quite common in India to have rocks/pebbles hurled at the trains by kids, basically as a source of amusement. Mostly happens in rural areas but I've seen it happen in more urban places as well. I've personally experienced a pebble bouncing off the window grill and miss my forhead by an inch. I remember reading about a man dying due to this few years ago but can't find the source.
Pentagon Uses MEMEX to Hunt for ISIS on the Dark Web
I want stallman.org to remain simple: not a "user experience" but rather a place where I present certain information, views and action opportunities to you.

...and as a result, I think it gives a very good "user experience" - I wish more webpages were like this, plain and informative without distractions.
Which of these hypothetical situations is more realistic?

CEO: "I see that we had 99.994% uptime for the last six months, and we came in very close to the forecasted budget. Well done, engineers!"

CEO: "I see that we had 99.9% efficient usage for the last six months, and we reduced our budget. Well done, engineers!"

Neither scenario is realistic, of course. Uptime is nice and efficiency is nice and budgets are nice, but what the CEO is actually interested in is:

VP Customer Support: "Our satisfaction rate is up, call quality metrics are great. I looked over the call stats and it looks like we're no longer getting complaints about performance or unreachability."
Swarms of Mini-Drones Prepping for Remote Battle
Every time I checked, semi-skimmed was at least a few cents cheaper. I only ever checked in Europe though.
The exact same concept applies to premature optimization, except that in case, it would be obvious that the person is a poor programmer.

When you put in context saving, say, 150 calories (500 ml whole vs. skim milk) in the diet of an obese person who stuffs 4000+ calories in his belly, and practices no sports ("walking a lot" is not included, sorry), then we're talking about mental masturbation, not meaningful, rational, strategies.
Darpa Developing a Search Engine (MEMEX) for the Dark Web
Agreed. And that more than anything else about HN bothers me. I like intelligent humor. (Stupid humor however deserves to be down voted).
A Simple API  for GeoJson US Boundaries(city,state,zip)
There's too much to unpack in what you wrote. Again, define "efficiency", and while you're at it, define "utility" too and what it means that it's "non-linear" for capital.
If you're looking for zero cost c containers, I'd recommend an approach which uses intrusive data structures. http://www.agottem.com/libcontainer has one such implementation of common container types.
Was your second session your last because the prayer suggestion made you not want to go again?
It seems, according to [1] that the impact of the changes has been obfuscated. I cant find a specific article with citations though yet.

[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/584
Food habits during the growing years also contribute to the perception of taste. I had whole milk while growing up and I still prefer that. One of my friends grew up on the low-fat variety and likes it that way; he even tried whole on my recommendation and went back to low-fat because, "it didn't taste good".
Change of User Name
Hello, does anyone know how to change username on Hackernews? I want to change to my real name ... Thanks a lot ..
It looks like MEMEX is now a reality. See my other submission about it's development here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9560182
I haven't clear why this is being downvoted.

When put into the perspective of the entire volume of nutritional research, the concepts which are established as certain are a tiny fraction of the total (for the great majority, one finds every possible opinion/research, and the opposite of it), so being skeptical is perfectly reasonable.

Quoting the article:

-----

> suggests that high-fat dairy consumption within typical dietary patterns is inversely associated with obesity risk.

Obesity risk.

> While not conclusive, the results "may provide a rationale for future research"

Not conclusive.

----

Sadly, under these conditions, it's perfectly reasonable not to exclude that in 10 years, the opposite of such conclusions will be reached.
>Hard disk makers do it too where you bought a "120GB" drive that uses same eg 1TB platter as the rest but firmware restricts user to 120GB.

Why isn't some smart hacker buying these in bulk, reverse engineering the firmware to enable the full 1TB, and reselling at a 1tb price point? Would that be a good business?
I parsed that as agreeing with you (albeit worded a bit awkwardly), that the "bad thing" was not thinking about it, not disagreeing with Stallman.
I have actually done a lot of development on a very similar device, based on the Spreadtrum 6821 (the famed $25 firefox phone). Its a pretty neat device - 128MB RAM, 256 MB Flash, support for upto32GB microsd card, dual SIM (EDGE only), Bluetooth, FM radio, replaceable battery, 320x480 lcd touch screen, a seperate touch "strip" which you can configure as capacitive buttons, three hardware buttons (V+,V-, power).

I did a full kernel build, wrote the device driver for the LCD screen, am currently writing the driver for the SIM. I have a debian rootfs running on it - its a nifty little linux gadget. I am currently using a bunch of these as part of a linux kernel hacking tutorial for college kids.

I believe there is a lot of potential for these as alternatives to RPi and its brethren for certain applications. If you try to add all the above peripherals to RPi we quickly cross $500 (of course, you would probably not do so in reality).

If any one is interested in more info, message me.

Shameless Plug: I am also looking for consulting ops on such and similar (I have a LOT of embedded and electronic design experience - from vague user spec to full design).
Or even dead hacker if kept up long enough.

I also like me some moderate energy reserves; it improves almost keeling over from low blood sugar when forgetting to eat or no food is available for a few hours tremendously.
You can't. All you can do is abandon your existing handle and create a new one. You can leave a note in your profile pointing at your new handle if you want to, but with no submissions and no comments, it seems a little pointless.
There's no contest between physical vs. virtual isolation. Theo de Raadt and @thegrugq are right when they're saying you shouldn't put much trust in virtualisation-as-isolation model. Just look at the recent VENOM bug.
This may not be a direct comment rms's computing habits, but it's related and as good a place as any bring it up. I've been trying to reconcile two views on free software. I like to think about it in terms of car ownership because its more tangible to me:

As a car owner, I should have the freedom to open my car, inspect its inner workings, change/fix things as desired, and share my knowledge others. The ability to openly inspect the inner workings also allows me to assure that the car is only performing operations I purchased it to perform.

However, as a car developer, I cannot possibly hope to make money by giving the car away for free. There have been significant hours invested into the design of the car. Sure, there's money to made in maintenance, but realistically most people don't care about routine maintenance. They'd rather buy the car and ride it 'til the wheels fall off - maybe an oil change here and there.

Are these two views fundamentally incompatible? Does anyone pay an upfront cost for free software in recognition of the time spent building/designing the product as they might with proprietary?
Somewhat, but our brains haven't had millions of years to develop the ability to "see" sound, like bats cat.

A human generated "click" is much different than a computer generated series of sounds which represent an accurate scan of the objects in front of the user.

Change in pitch representing changes in depth is much more able to be processed by the human brain verses trying to hear how the sound waves bounce off of objects.

Plus, this will work in public while I'd guess that the human clicking noises require a quiet environment and have significant limitations.

Imagine a blind person walking freely down the sidewalk and the device would not be making any sounds until there is a sign or building within 20 feet, with a scanning (or single point) tone that gets progressively louder. Effortless echolocation.

The device also has several GPS, WiFi, gyroscope, and cellular geolocation abilities so it would know when the user has reached the end of the sidewalk, if outside.

I remember this story from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4
I thought it was related to tesla motors.
From Vegas to the App Store  –  an Indie Apple Watch Game Developer’s Journey
Do ordinary people want to fight in a war, when the best possible outcome for them is getting back alive?

If not, how would democracy make them any less willing to wage wars?
Because syntax isn't that big of a deal to most people, I guess. They are more concerned with actually useful things, like safety features and other buzzwords. ;)

But like mentioned, there is Nim. Which at least have the indentation-thing going for it.
Note that this post is from October 2010, and it appears that the magpie repo[0] hasn't been committed to in over two years. In addition, the static type system was ripped out of the language about six months after this blog post was written[1].

This is understandable, given that the approach to typing seemed pretty ad-hoc, really unsafe, and somewhat incoherent. The whole point of a type system is to say something about the runtime behavior of a program before you actually run it. To actually execute fragments of your program as part of the type checking step, then, sortof defeats the purpose. Not only that, but typing can fail while producing side effects in your system, some of which may be harmful (launching the nukes, etc.) There are some systems that do _abstract_ interpretation at this point, but that is a model of an execution, not an actual execution, and is therefore sound in the sense that it will not perform random mutations in this strange running/not running superposition.

[0]: https://github.com/munificent/magpie
[1]: https://github.com/munificent/magpie/commit/58742b0e7f3431c1...
Well, yes, then I am intolerant of aggressive behaviour and take action to suppress it and its spread.

The simple logic is that hostility obscures the writer's meaning, invites reactive hostility, and pollutes the conversation. I can see no reason to promote it.

Slow down, try again without invective, be civil. It works better.

We are not the powerless disenfranchised citizens of a dictatorial state with no other means of expression. Some of us might be, actually, but not in this setting.
it does. in fact, that is the default recommendation, ie PTVS installed into Community Edition:

https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS/wiki/PTVS-Installation
!!Con – The joy, excitement, and surprise of programming – Day 2
Not much, I did it myself! But the idea behind the site is "find that single unique person who is right for you" (one in 8^8 people). So it exemplifies the idea I was talking about.
Is Firefox really better than Chrome here, or is it worse because it is enabling bad user behavior?
(upvoted because is a logical answer to the question provided. The title don't say nothing about alive or not).

But I wonder why we want a marine animal to travel by air or in a closed container when you can easily provide it with a "migration experience" just putting a submerged cage in a jib and use water instead fuel to fully support their body weight.

Some problemas with this idea that I can see is how avoid the motorship noise (Helicopters and planes do a lot of noise also) and speed of the cruise vs speed of the animals. and the relationship between the cage and the ship

If we could solve those points the most human way to move a beluga should be by sea in a mix of a submerged sea cage next the prow (if wheater permits) and pool.

Yes, remember, we have huge ships with huge swimming pools!. People even could pay an extra price by a "extra-luxe-best-and-first-cruise-in-the-world-with-whale-shark-experience" (if you need to put the animal safely in a harbour or if a puntual danger appears you use the jib and put the whale or the shark in the pool).

You can put all fish and material that you want for the whale in the hold of the cruise (you could even save some costs of their feeding if you just fish for the whale in the meanwhile).

If properly done, this will be also a really great publicity for both the aquarium and the cruise company. No troubles with faeces, the best place to swim effortless, and the best water quality than a beluga can dream with. Put some fake whales in front of the cage and the beluga probably will try to follow them. Less stress, richer life and a healthy exercise for the whale. Both animals, whale and shark are designed to migrate huge distances and love it...

Yes, definitely we should explore the idea of creating mobile dolphinariums.
It was a little more than that - he was talking about the HAARP conspiracy theory as well. It just became clear he didn't approach the world rationally. I'm sure for some people he would be a great therapist, but not a good match for me.
I'm currently re-reading Ready Player One and all I can think about is the Oasis and Haptic Suits... Looks pretty interesting but I think that delivery window looks a little too optimistic...
But is average utilisation the right metric? The work day is only like 8-10 hours, I would expect many corporate infrastructures to be only active during that period. Plus you don't size your infrastructure to a typical workload, you size it to be able to accommodate higher than usual peak workload otherwise you will be down at the busiest period.
How much do they consume? What else do they consume?

That saying has been around for ages, but strikes me as one of those superficially smart sounding but actually kind of fundamentally misguided phrases that sometimes become popular. Unless someone is suggesting an all cows milk diet, I suppose.
Correct.

The accepting socket is shared between multiple workers which each have its own fd for epoll or kqueue. Because of this a form of serialising the accepts between said workers is needed to avoid unnecessary wakeups.
Being told to pray is pretty much the antithesis of good therapy.
We agree. Except for the subjective part.

I'm not talking about hostility to my beliefs. I'm talking about straightforward aggressive angry spouting that happens occasionally, even here, and destroys any attempt at civility.

Up voted. :)
3 awesome Scenes made in the best game engines
Proxy2: HTTP/HTTPS proxy in a single python script
Well here is my context. The UK gov't, and other governments around the world have clearly demonstrated incompetence WRT their ability to tell dangerous individuals from harmless ones[1], to act appropriately in dealing with suspects, and to acknowledge mistakes when they happen. Those are the kinds of problems that need sorting out before even considering whether to give the gov't more and broader powers with which they will most certainly do more harm, and then fail to acknowledge their inevitable mistakes, and then fail to correct the mistakes when forced to acknowledge them.

>He is not advocating for an overbearing state as a social model in and of itself.

What makes you so sure?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/27/twitter-joke-tria...
yes and no

for online growth you should build a system, not a website.

but a system does not necessarily mean multiple webproperties. running, promoting, maintaining a successful, growing webproperty is a full time job. if you start out with multiple webproperties you will do to much, to soon and you will fail. i see this again and again with publishing startups (here in europe) that target multiple markets or multipel languages. running two interconnected webproperties (i.e. language versions) is not double as hard as running one, but hard². a webproperty must definitely be seen as something that must scale and something that you can "branch out" from (diversify) but start with just one (1) thing (market, language, webproperty). if you found what works, then do more, do them differently and make sure that the parts make sense when seen as a whole.

ad risk distribution: yes, if you have just one strategy - i.e.: one webproperty and have an aggressive risk startegy you are betting on just one horse, and you are running it hard and at one point, it will fail. so yes, hedging is necessary.

in the past hedging (in regards of traffic growth) was meant having multiple webproperties, multiple domains. because search was basically the only way you could drive massive and growing traffic to it. this is no longer true: native apps, push notifications, social push, social shares, mail push (i.e. newsletters, email alerts) can now deliver enough (traffic/user) growth that your company can thrive and succeed. this is already hedging - and thank to zuckerberg and jobs and mailchimp (and other) we now can hedge our traffic/user (growth) strategies instead of needing to hedge our SEO strategie (from the start)

tumbs up for the Donella H. Meadows reference, she was the ultimate growth hacker decades before the term existed.
"A post-hypervisor world "

lol. I've been predicting a backlash against this virtualization hype since 2005, and this is the first time I've heard anyone else mention anything like it.

Of course, if you had told me in 2005 that we would be switching from hypervisors back to containers, I would have broke down crying.

Is our industry run by masochists? or just the inexperienced, who don't know any better?
I always took him for a liberal (in the American meaning) libertarian. I don't think he's an anarchist or a Marxist at all, though I expect some of his opinions on private property (especially intellectual property) might be somewhat agreeable to a Marxist.
Once you get used to the tab groups they can be very powerful. I use them for contexts myself; one for casual browsing, one for development for client x, one for client y etc, one for research, and the list goes on.

Obviously you can easily achieve the same thing in separate windows as well, so ultimately I suppose it doesn't make a huge difference, but it's the way I find makes for the biggest difference in separating workspaces.
I personally wouldn't consider a 168MHz Cortex-M4 as "microcontroller" level performance - it's in the same range as a 100MHz Pentium, and the desktops machines of the time could certainly run Python code without much difficulty.

Getting Python on something like an AVR or PIC18, that would be far more interesting...
> What Western person in their right mind would proudly proclaim his support for actual terrorists?

One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter.

The IRA, for example, was well funded through donations to give one of the most recent examples. The ANC is another one that springs to mind:

"'The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land" - Margaret Thatcher, 1987

Going back a bit further, many European countries actively tried stopping recruitment to the International Brigades fighting against Franco in the Spanish civil war, up to and including imprisoning people.

Irgun is another example: A zionist military organization with several massacres to its name that was considered a terrorist organization by Britain at the time, as well as by some important contemporary Jewish organizations. Irgun is one of the direct predecessors to the Israeli Likud party, that has been part of most Israeli governments since th late 70's.

There's a long range of causes that various subsets of Western civil society have given support to that have been considered terrorist by contemporary authorities.

Some of them are still seen as terrorists in retrospect, some of them are seen as heroes and freedom fighters. Some are seen as either/both depending on who you ask.