skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate Harrahs/Caeser's Entertainment. Where do I even begin.

Some interesting anecdotes:

The CEO Gary Loveman bought ~2.4% stake of NBA basketball team Boston Celtics in 2008. No Harrahs properties can take NBA bets on games involving Celtics or futures bets on who will win championship (Celtics could win) because CEO wants an inconsequential stake in an NBA team. How vain can you be?

Past couple months CEO and friends have been trying to split CET into two separate companies. One with all the valuable properties (Caesar's Vegas, etc.) the other with the stinkers (Atlantic City, etc.) bundled with debt and pension obligations. Trying to screw over all the workers. Judge recently ruled they couldn't do this, but they're still trying.

CET had option to build property on Kotai strip in Macau. CEO said it was too risky, so let it expire. The majority of profits of Las Vegas Sands (Sheldon Adelson) and Wynn Resorts Limited (Steve Wynn) comes from properties they built in Macau.
Let's figure out just how much area we need for solar panels.

The US consumes about 19.05M barrels of oil per day. Each barrel of oil is about 1.6 MWh of power.

So this is 31017210 MWh (3.1 x 10^10 kWh) of power just in oil every day..

The solar constant is 1.36kW/m^2 on average.
Solar panels convert solar energy into power with roughly a 14% efficiency or about 190W/m^2
or about 2.2kWh/m^2 in 12hrs.

Taking 3.1 x 10^10 kWh/(2.2kWh/m^2) I get 13 x 10^9 m^2. Converting this to miles gives us about 5240sq miles of solar panels just to get the same amount of energy we consume in oil.

Hopefully I did everything right above.
Carl Sagan's solar spacecraft finally deploys its sails
I thought Motorola spun out their chip division as Freescale, which just merged with NXP (Philips' chip spin off? Did Motorola retain some portion?
It's a hell of a lot more complicated than that. The "founders" were not from Disney. John Lasseter who worked for the division that would be spun off from Lucasfilm was. But keep in mind for much of Pixar's life it was a hardware/software company producing tools for all kinds of high end imaging uses including animation. John Lasseter did cool demos and other projects to promote the hardware/software. The modern Pixar powerhouse of animation came to be more from accident/desperation than plan...
Interestingly, the sliders in the MVI example seem to react way more slowly...
Our failure with nuclear is more of a policy problem than anything inherent to the technology.

There are at least four startups attempting molten salt reactors. In the U.S. they all struggle with the NRC, which has inflexible regulations mandating things that only apply to solid-fueled reactors. We'll need new regulations before those companies can even operate test reactors.

Bill Gates' company Terrapower, which is attempting a fast reactor, has given up on the NRC and is seeking other countries that will let them work.

The U.S. spent thirty years on the Integral Fast Reactor, and according to the lead scientists on the project, they were a year or two from completion and commercial readiness when the Clinton administration shut them down.

Most of these projects, and others with more conventional technology, want to build small modular reactors that could be licensed once and churned out in factories. The NRC isn't set up for this either.

China is indeed rolling out a lot of renewables, but they're also building a fair number of new nuclear plants and have major research programs on several GenIV designs, including fast reactors and molten salt. This is what we should be doing: pulling out the stops and working on every non-carbon energy source we can, because time is short and technology isn't completely predictable.

Solar and wind certainly do well when backed up by natural gas, but running civilization on them is another matter. To overcome their variability you have to add overproduction, storage, long-distance transmission, and smart grid, all of which gets expensive.
This looks similar to the aspect oriented programming lib aquarium https://github.com/deanwampler/Aquarium
It makes money, but it's not that big of a money-maker.
Ask HN: Why does this app idea not exist already?
I was just Googling a little & found there to be no app which would scan a host computer & automatically generate a kernel config based on what's in the box. I imagine such a tool would be valuable, given how long it takes to trudge through the kernel configuration process.

I would use such an app, but apparently it isn't in demand to the point that someone's built it yet.
I'd say the two biggest differences is with mine (the Go version) you have a little more control over what you are testing. You can test upload and/or download and/or ping response with a few different algorithms.

The main reason for me (why i created this) is that i wanted to have a binary with no dependencies. Granted Python is pretty much installed everywhere, but this will allow me to run the same binary on Linux, Windows, Mac without the prerequisite of having anything else installed.
It is germane to point out that it isn't simply "political" writing or blogging. Moldbug has several essays that are explicitly racist, and though he would no doubt dispute the relationship, the vocabulary and arguments he uses are virtually the same as those of modern Nazis.

Strangeloop, in the past, has explicitly tried to foster a minority-friendly environment. Many of the other speakers are from minority groups. It's easy to see that having a speaker with Moldbug's history would do irreparable damage to what Alex has been trying to do.

You can still disagree with the decision, but that at least is the context in which it was made. It isn't just that he's politically conservative or holds to some unusual opinion - he has literally written that several of his co-speakers are genetically more fit to be slaves while he, a white male, is genetically designed to be a master.

I don't blame Alex for wanting to avoid that dynamic at his conference.

Call it "culture fit", if you must. Can't he have the culture he wants at his conference?
Hacky Finally Support for C++ Exceptions
I think that's true but scrap and pivot is generally what the startup experience is like, so if you aren't accustomed to failure and throwing away work and uncertainty as to whether you'll ship, you might not like the startup experience.
The central core of Pixar, when it originated at Lucasfilm, were people from NYIT led by Ed Catmull. John Lasseter didn't join until later, and he's the only prominent ex-Disney person I'm aware of.
I would love this as a screen saver.
What I've usually heard is AdWords and AdSense.
Short answer, yes that's a good way to think about it. The Hilbert Hotel paradox is closely related to the B-T paradox, it only adds a few more complications to make a stronger statement.

The key step in the B-T paradox is setting up a two-dimenional free group in just three-dimensional rotations. This is an infinite discrete set, a sort of analogue of the integers (which is the one-dimensional free group). In the integers it is no surprise (or maybe it is) that you can take the positive integers and shift them all to the right by one unit and then suddenly you have made a "hole" from apparently nothing (the Hilbert's hotel paradox). One worrisome part of this is that the "rooms" must get infinitely far away, but B-T exploits the fact that by using irrational rotations you an wrap the whole construction into the space taken up by a single sphere.

Add just a little more mathematical mumbo jumbo and you have a two-dimensional free group, which is a hotel such that every room is as big as all the rest of the rooms and you can set up the hotel so that each room is as big as all the rest of the rooms, and then you can do magic such that a move to the left actually leaves as much space as the whole hotel. And since it's all wrapped up in a ball it doesn't even run off to infinity to do this.

You do need the rooms to be points with zero volume, though; otherwise even with one-atom rooms you still need to shove the entire infinite hotel into a finite space and you will run out of room.
How does the speedtest website respond to this same test? If you think this is a bug in the code itself (and not just speedtest in general) i'm happy to dig into this. Just open an issue on github.

Thanks!
My first thought was to respond with https://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm, but we all know that hobarrera isn't actually interested in facts (or why post a video of a non-scientist confronting other non-scientists about all the things none of them know anything about)?

Scott dealt with him correctly. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2316#comment-639452
Compare emachineshop.com. They have been doing that for years, and have a site with actual information instead of just pretty pictures.
Please note that this test also only captures a single profile of Graph Engine. The cell entry lookup table and the MM module are designed to operate in a more complex environment and not optimized towards the direction of this micro benchmark(concurrency, logging, a strong type system, to name a few). Of course, it would be very interesting to test against other options, especially those concurrent dictionaries combined with custom allocators.
I disagree with your idea that other states don't have some sort of pet peeve they will 'dock you points' for.

Go to Austin and look for a job while spouting off right-to-life and anti-gay marriage nonsense.

Go to Houston/Dallas and espouse the opposite opinion.

Go to Washington DC or Virginia and look for a job while being vocally against government involvement in your personal life and the spy state of affairs, or the military industrial complex.

Hell, let's take it further than job acquiring or state scope; ask anyone with lightly browned skin how they were treated nationwide after September 11th.

'personal is the political' is a nationally accepted doctrine, sadly. In my travels I haven't witnessed much different from state to state.
Compare emachineshop.com. They have been doing that for years, and have a site with useful information instead of just pretty pictures.
> Microsoft didn't need servers when they were a startup

Wrong. Gates and Allen used Harvard's University mainframe to do their first gig, then paid for other mainframe time:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC
> Does Ada have anything like Haskell typeclasses or am I going to have to write a different sort function for every single data type which can be sorted?

Generics and interfaces.

> Does Ada have a numeric tower, or will I have to accept truncation and re-write basic numeric functions?

Subtypes and ranges.

> Haskell has strong static typing without forcing me to specify irrelevant details up front. How about Ada?

If you mean type inference. No in Ada everything has to explicit.

Now you are comparing Apples and Oranges here, as Ada is a systems programming language.

So it allows for memory safe systems programming, with all the direct hardware access and memory allocation control that such use cases require.

Whereas Haskell, currently, still requires language extensions like on HalVM and House OS implementations.
human life values
i started this book as a child thinking I was an adult. i finished it and i really was.
You're getting unfairly downvoted, but you're right: whether you agree with their ideas or not, the main tactic of the left is to police what topics are "appropriate" and marginalize those who are "inappropriate" with a label. I'm mostly apolitical so I'm not particularly outraged by this, but I wish they'd just own what they do. If they really think their ideas stand up, they should be welcoming opposition rather than trying to silence it.
Oh thank you, thank you, thank you! [Bookmarks comment]
Protections for Late Investors Can Inflate Startup Valuations
I'm curious which years you were at Google? The bottom-up culture has been dead for the past 2 years, and a deluge of projects were canned in the past 12-18 months. There's really zero chance now of starting your own project at G and building a team around it.
Personally I'm cool with conferences banning out-of-the-closet racists from speaking. I guess that makes me the minority on HN. /shrug. So be it.
> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."?

I'll defend his right to say it, and I'll also defend a conference organiser's right to deny politically-outspoken developers a chance to talk about their (nevertheless interesting) projects.
Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're drawing. However, it seems to be the consensus. [edit: I see that there are secondary sources — but I'm curious about a primary source. Shouldn't that be the most important?]
Funny, I was just looking at this yesterday night to get some ideas on building design.
> This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend.

There is plainly nothing lamentable about a private enterprise opting out of suffering a fool a platform. This is literally the market of free ideas at work: if you hold detestable opinions, you may find yourself unwelcome in many places.
Using a GPL-licensed compiler doesn't mean you have to release the source code that you compile with it.

(I am not a lawyer; do not rely on my advice without thoroughly verifying it.)
Oh but they do. When taking measurements in a scientific setting, it usually gives the most accurate and simple model to assume that your measurement is an approximation of a certain real number, and understand more accurate measurements as better estimates of this real number. Using rational numbers or other countable sets in this position usually leads to undesirable biases and or circuity in the model. When you need a "continuum", the real numbers have the best properties for the job.
It really depends on what her views on women in technology are. If she's pro, then I imagine a conference explicitly trying to ban that category would have little traction, so it hardly matters. If she's con, then yea, sure, ban her from speaking.
Ask HN: If you've had a kid, what do you wish you'd done differently?
I'm a 37 year old nerd and having my first kid in a few months. I'd love to hear from other fellow nerds what, in retrospect, they wish they had done differently.
Indeed, I counted AdWords and AdSense separately.
Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/
This could be the first country to go cashless
Oh, I remember using the Braid variant even it's a little more difficult to make with one hand.
He rejected it because he was a sculptor and not a painter. Eventually he gave in and had to teach himself how to paint.

A lot of artists were mentally ill, and took up painting as a form of therapy.

In the USA they used to put the stupid with the smart in special schools and asylums for people with a mental illness. Once they changed that there are more disabled people now in society with a mental illness.

http://petroleusesletter.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/why-are-th...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carl...

Relevant obnoxious quote, in a sea of drivel:

In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject, serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner (the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted.

Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
Yes, the first few chapters were mind-bogglingly good. Loses its punch towards the end, but the first two thirds floored me.
Here's one I've been researching for the last year or so (of on-and-mostly-off research) - superimposed coding.

Remember about 5-10 years when Bloom filters popped up often on HN and other tech sites? They are one type of superimposed coding. The basic idea is that a given word or descriptor gets $k$ bits, out of $N$ in a bitset. In a Bloom filter, $k$ is constant, but in the general case it can vary.

In the 1940s, Calvin Mooers worked out one system of choosing $k$ based on the information content of the descriptors. He called it Zatocoding. He applied this to selecting punched cards, including punched cards with chemical data; that being the field I work in. Knuth has a bit about the approach in The Art of Computer Programming, v 3, with "false drop cookies."

This technique was never mainstream, in part I think because one has to trust in random numbers, but also in practice it was applied to manual punched card searches, and it's difficult to memorize random punch codes.

As computers became machines instead of people, this approach disappeared. There's a chemistry paper in about 1975 which considers it, with the phrases "old technique" and "this may appear to be a throwback", then a paper in 1976 which gives a much needed improvement for how to apply Zatocoding to hierarchical data.

I think that 1976 paper is amazing. It helped me understand the problem. But it was never part of mainstream understanding. That is to say, very few modern practitioners know of the concept, it's not in any of the text books (they have a very shallow coverage of the topic), and the few papers that have referenced the 1976 article don't seem to have understood the paper, but are citing it for completeness sake.

That said, it doesn't solve the problem. An alternate approach was developed in the late 1980s that's more directly related to the Bloom filter sense of using $k$ hash functions. As a result, it's detuned for the specific information in the data set, but it's able to reject new descriptors that weren't part of the training set.

Based on the documentation for the method (it was never published in the scientific literature; everyone references the manual page), it comes across like a Bloom filter. However, in talking with people in the know, a specific detail was not clarified, which is that $k$ is a function of the size of the chemical feature used as the descriptor. This makes it a proper superimposed coding system.

No one has looked at this information-theoretical approach in 25 years. Almost no one knows that this can even be a useful approach.
> actions like this encourage . . . controversial writers
> to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest
> the vigilante mobs find them.

Racist writers can stay well in the shadows; their human persons can suffer the consequences of their detestable opinions. Both of these are moral and just outcomes. Societies need not, indeed must not sacrifice forward progress on the altar of freedom of expression for the sake of it alone.

> If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their
> opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable,
> we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture.

Exactly the opposite is true. If we can not make moral decisions as a society, to say "the opinion that minority races are inferior is not one we are willing to tolerate," we stand no chance to have any meaningful cultural progression.
What is it more specifically that you disagree with in Diamond’s theories?
A few things. I was not planning on getting involved in this conversation, but since dang decided to un-flag it, I'm going to leave one or two comments, but don't plan on sticking around very much. As tptacek said elsewhere in this thread, politics + HN == nightmare.

First of all, many more people complained than me. You didn't look very hard.

Second, I'm not _strictly_ a communist: I'm certainly very left-wing, and I often role-play a communist, because I think Americans need a connection to an actual left. My allegiance is ultimately to Deleuze, not Marx. To put it in terms of a meme image I saw the other day, around non-leftists, I usually use 'communist' as a shorthand, but amongst leftists, a more nuanced discussions can be had, for sure. EDIT: ahh, here we go: http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS

Finally, since you're dragging personal views into this, I'll just leave this here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...
You missed the biggest criticism of Warren Buffet regarding taxes.

Warren Buffet argues for high estate taxes. Bershire Hawthaway makes a lot of money buying family-owned businesses worth ~$100M, who are forced to sell due to the estate tax bill.
You're comparing a barrel of oil directly to electricity, a fallacy. Electric vehicles are extremely efficient photon to road compared to combustion vehicles.

"Tank-to-wheel efficiency of conventional Otto cycle car is only 16% as illustrated fellow. Here, Otto cycle engine loss is 72%, standby /idle loss is 10% and drive line loss is 2%. Accessories loss, such as air conditioning unit consumes 2% but for comparison purposes, it was assumed 0%."

That's right. You're losing almost 90% of your available energy to heat. In all practicalities, you use less than 1% of energy available in a barrel of oil to move a car forward.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pu4i-aok/cooldata2/hybridcar/hyb...

"That’s right, an electric car is over four times as efficient at turning energy into motion."

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-whee...

Please see /u/Brackenshire's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676675) regarding land required.
If one uses classical logic there are even many countable, even finite sets which are beyond computable distinction. The set of computable functions on say natural numbers is a countable set, but even distinguishing when two such are equal cannot be effectively done.

The solution is either to distinguish between countable and enumerable and decidable, or to use intuitionistic logic.
marxism has very little to do with racism, sexism or homophobia
This sounds like the function of the free marketplace of ideas. One is allowed to espouse any ideology that you wish. However, other people are allowed to respond with their own speech. They can call the idea racist if they want. They can take away speaking platforms if they want.

Ideally, it operates like the free market of ideas.

In practice, it tends to offer a disproportionate amount of power to those who are most easily offended, and provides them with a de facto "hecklers' veto" over people with views outside the mainstream.

In the Moldbug case, some people wre "so genuinely offended" by the prospect of him speaking (or even being present at the conference) that they were willing to request that his talk offer be revoked. This was the case even when the subject of his talk is completely unrelated to his controversial politics. (Most people would probably agree that a technical conference is the wrong venue for him to speak about his controversial politics.)

Would most people attending the conference have known about his politics if there weren't this outcry to bring publicity? Unlikely. This was a deliberate message to alienate and exclude those with conservative politics from the tech industry.