skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It doesn't matter what value is returned by a read that overlaps a write. The algorithm is correct even if reading a number while it is changing from 9 to 10 obtains the value 2496.

There are two variables involved in the bakery algorithm[1] -- choosing[k] and number[k]:

- choosing[k] takes only the two values 0 & 1, hence reading/writing to it is atomic.

- number[k] is boundless, hence the question of inconsistency while reading it. Lamport shows (see Assertion 2's Proof in [1]) that given,

1. tL2 < tL3 (on process i), and
2. te < tw < tc (on process k),

(in the non-trivial case) tc can only occur before tL2 (tc < tL2) => tw < tL3, that is process i reads the current value of number[k]. See, no overlap! "The bakery algorithm is correct as long as reading a number returns the correct value if the number is not concurrently being written".

I think it is much easier to understand with the two-arrow formalism presented later in the article.

[1]: http://msr-waypoint.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/bakery....
I thought that was a bit annoying too. And it's also underscore delimited, when there is already a similar function for XML which is ExtractValue()
The ui for about:memory is bad and not very useful in tracking down where the memory is going or leaking. That's something the ui engineers can do to help Firefox with this.
Among people who like Ruby, this is seen as a feature, not a bug. It makes refactorings easier when you change something from a local variable to a method call and don't have to search for all the places you would have to add parentheses in a language like Java. Granted, you could argue that your IDE should take care of that for you with automatic refactorings, but to a Rubyist this is a crutch and also something that forces her to use a particular IDE instead of her favorite editor.
I was wondering the same thing, especially since there is precedent for the JSON_EXTRACT name in SQL:

https://prestodb.io/docs/current/functions/json.html

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/query-reference#jsonfuncti...
This email was an entirely appropriate response to one of the most commonly-seen selfish and rude mailing list posts in software development.

"Hi guys, I know you've been working for years on this! I haven't really bothered to look at your code, or understand the principles of operation, but I have strong opinions about How Things Should Be Done and I'm here to tell you how to run your project."

The reason Theo himself replies to this sort of thing, and in this sort of fashion, is to make it absolutely clear (both to this imbecile and anyone who seeks to emulate him) that the people who want this sort of thing are wrong and will be wasting their effort in asking for it.
I did not know that about the BBG. That is quite interesting.

I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."

But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.
Overstock Will Issue a Private Bond Powered by Bitcoin Tech
In other words, what Larry and Sergei care about is what the shareholders care about.
I think the email that was sent was incredibly rude. This person clearly spent considerable time writing it, and yet it shows from start to finish they didn't bother to read, research, or even understand the current state of OpenBSD.

Why should fools be suffered? OpenBSD developers have an OS to develop.
That book had a large effect on my views of money, not being ostentatious, etc. Some people need to be flashy with their money, but probably not a good idea. I have a friend who usually drives a fairly new model Porsche while I think I have more wealth than he does and I have a 1998 Toyota Corolla. That said, it would be a more boring world if we were all the same!
> Bonds are a volume game. You find an angle to make 0.2% and lever the hell out of it.

This would only work if they are able to borrow money cheaper than the bond markets on which they are buying debt, which would put them in the business of debt arbitrage.

I don’t think this is the case, they are just parking their money in something better than a bank account.
the OpenBSD community gladly alienates those types of users. for "us" (I speak only for myself as a decade+ user and supporter), it's a qualitative game, not quantitative.
On Managing Developers
Exactly, and because it's part of the "normal culture", then no-one bats an eye (I exaggerate a bit there).

If we were to look at football and basketball sports' effect on children, and how pervasive and time-consuming it is to normal teens/young-adults the same way we do when it comes to "e-sports", then we'd be positively disgusted (a bit of extrapolation there).
It is not about "free market" -- but about the ideology behind the current system. It has the name "free market" -- but it is only free for those, that have the money to control politics. That are the persons that control, what is negotiated at TTIP and other treaties.

To answer your question: Go to Bangladesh, go to Mexico (already have a treaty like TTIP in place, and what happened: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer), go to Germany, go to the US. Must I go on?

I don't think, your question was a real question.

You view the world from your position (of a rather rich guy) -- but there are approx. 5 billion people poorer than you and me around.

Edit: One final thought about it: Even when you are on the profitable side of today's system (what might even change), you even might be effected by its back-sides, when for example environmental regulations are lowered. Many regulations today are lowered or not strengthened, because they could potentially harm big corporations. Also in the rich countries, even rich people are dying of environmental induced deceases. That politics is turning more and more a blind eye to those problems, is showing, that we are indeed enslaved!
The following code would do the right thing; see if you can spot the difference, and think about whether you would catch that in code review (g++/clang++/visualc++ won't warn about it).

{
mutex_guard guard(some_mutex);
foo();
}
You missed the point. Doctors in the US take 4 years of generally medically-unrelated undergraduate schooling before they're allowed into medical school. Why not just allow them into medical school?
Is it just me or is there a conspiracy not to determinedly and aggressively seek alternatives to closed firmware in the so called open source world? Theo de Raadt's response makes me feel that some people who claim to be committed to open source are happy to violate the principles by giving hardware providers who are not committed to the principles an easy ride.

I mean how many leading Linux/Open Source developers are ready to say 'we don't really like it, but if you want to use their hardware you will have to use their blobs'

How hard is it for open source designers to design their own hardware and open the firmware for it? How difficult is it for hardware developers to release the specs for dated hardware to allow software improvements, and keep the firmware for new more performant hardware closed.

The complainer has a point. It is disingenious for Linux to claim commitment to open source and neglect be virtually silent on the threat closed firmware blobs pose in this era of security issues.
The new Macbook
I've noticed in the past on Hacker News comment threads about Amazon AWS, or other cloud services, that a common theme is that "EC2 is expensive, just buy a dedicated server from OVH/Hetzner!"

This is why some use EC2: it is trivial to snapshot and backup block storage, it is cheap to store snapshots, and recovery from a catastrophic hardware crash will take minutes.
Cutting Corners or Why Rails May Kill Ruby
Some of his math notation is not so
good.

His 22 slides on game theory go on and
on but are not clear on just the really
simple solution: It's just a really
simple linear programming problem.
Could knock it off on one slide, two
or three if wanted to be verbose.
I did that when I taught linear programming
in college and an MBA program.

More generally, a large fraction of these
topics and a larger fraction of the
more basic tools are what was
long called the mathematical sciences,
where generally the work was done
more carefully, and, in particular, the
mathematics of operations research
along with, sure,
and pure and applied statistics.

He ends up with genetic algorithms and
simulated annealing. Gee,
I encountered such a problem only once:
Some guys had a resource allocation
problem and formulated it as a
0-1 integer linear program with
40,000 constraints and 600,000
variables. They had tried simulated
annealing, ran for days, and
stopped with results
with objective function value
of unknown distance from the
optimal value.

I saw an approach via Lagrangian
relaxation, which really needs
most of a nice course in optimization,
wrote some software, and got
a feasible solution with objective
function value guaranteed to be
within 0.025% of optimality.
My software ran for 905 seconds
on an old 90 MHz PC.

For the bound of 0.025%,
Lagrangian relaxation has,
on the optimal value of the objective
function,
both a lower bound and an upper bound
and, during the relaxation,
lowers the upper bound and raises
the lower bound. When the
two bounds are close enough for
the context, then take the
best feasible solution so far
and call the work done.

I'd type in the basics here except
I'd really need TeX.

The resource allocation problem
was optimization, just optimization,
and needed just some of what had
long been known in optimization.
Simulated annealing didn't look
very good, and it wasn't.

Optimization, going back to
mathematical programming,
unconstrained, constrained,
the Kuhn-Tucker conditions,
linear programming, network linear
programming,
integer programming,
dynamic programming, etc. were
well developed fields starting
in the late 1940s with
a lot of work rock solid by
1980.

Good work has come from Princeton,
Johns Hopkins, Cornell,
Waterloo, Georgia Tech, University
of Washington, etc.
Jobbik[1] are now the third biggest party in Hungary. Their candidates are openly anti-semitic[2]. They want to return Hungary's borders to those of the pre-WWI Kingdom of Hungary. They put up statues to military commanders who were allies of Hitler. It would be a big mistake to call Jobbik just an anti-immigration movement.

I agree that there are very few far left parties in Europe with any number of elected politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobbik

[2] >In a newsletter published by a group calling itself "The trade union of Hungarian police officers prepared for action", the following was allegedly printed: "Given our current situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it is the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare for armed battle against the Jews." The editor of the union, Judit Szima, was a Jobbik candidate in the upcoming election for the European Union parliament. Haaretz alleged Szima "didn't see anything wrong with the content of the article."
From the story sound like some on the naval brass are more concerned about high dust, gear adrift, and fresh paint jobs

Read more: http://www.duffelblog.com/2014/04/admiral-cleanliness-check/...
I'm a go user right now, but I really want to ditch it because I'm in total disarray with the way the go language is managed and the deafness of the go team. Been looking at D,Nim and Crystal.

- D is neat but I'm not interested at all in unsafe stuffs and don't want to have to debug programs or 3rd party libs that relies on that, I want a safe language.

- Nim looks really good, although some features like (foo_bar = FooBar ) are just disgusting

- While Crystal is new and libs is non existent, it feels like a good candidate for the long run. I hope it will have the same concurrency capabilities as go. Good luck with the language.
This concept has been used in new zealand for decades. The communications channel is probably moving to radio and possibly integrated in to smart meters. It used to/still does work on a "ripple" signal where the utility injects a higher frequency signal, such as 300 Hz, on to the power lines and then relays at the customer's houses pick up the signals and operate on and off.

They cycle through groups of customers so nobody's hot water is off for very long.

here is an excellent resource with pictures of the ripple plant and the evolution of the equipment
http://www.oriongroup.co.nz/downloads/ripplesignalguide.pdf
Heh, thanks!
His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant.

His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?
> To have any chance of actually winning, you had to be very good.

This is a relatively solved problem. With SC2, unless you're in the top or bottom 1% of players, your win rate over a sufficiently large number of games will be 50%. You'll have losing streaks (and they can be pretty stressful), but you don't get thrown into game after game where you have no hope of winning.
Europe’s Last Act?
The fad of repurposing evolutionary biology to explain some current situation needs to go away. It's appealing because it's a convenient way for people to wrap their opinions in science, using such phrases as, "it makes sense..."

In this particular claim (females have a biological motivation to conserve sex), you should research findings regarding female bonobos. EG, from [1]: "bonobo females mate throughout their ovulatory cycles with most or all group males." In other words, females may actually be incentivized towards promiscuity because it confuses paternity, bonding the offspring with multiple group males, increasing its chances for survival.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_scD6LxIuMUC&pg=PA1938&lpg...
Weird 90's PSA
Its funny how JSON emerged as subset of JavaScript - easy to parse with eval(). But now if you do that its terrible code. So the subset aspect is totally irrelevant now.
The OpenBSD developers are concerned with working on OpenBSD, not leading some crusade against closed-source firmware. If it bothers you that much, then do as Theo says and don't use hardware that requires the blobs. If there are no open alternatives, why is that OpenBSD's problem?
linchpin should be on everyones reading list
Lucrelab is one of the top networks of 2015?
Very Zen. The failure to recognize the limitations of one's received cognitive instrumentation. And this instrumentation is empirically oriented so without empirical validation what have you got? And with emphasis placed on theories which are 'sufficiently elegant and explanatory' while setting aside the need for experimental confirmation merely sets the theorist up for 'The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact' (Thomas Huxley)
I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons.

Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling everybody through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end.

Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.
Parent poster means free as in speech. Theo chooses to take it as free as in beer. Love OpenBSD but Theo should have thought before getting angry.
Wow I'm being down voted did you actually read the article? Faking a disaster is like mega-trolling.
It'll make you better at that particular job than a CS degree would, but it won't make you better at CS.

Or as the saying goes: "Education is for those who give orders; training is for those who take them."
I would say that OWA is an interesting feature, but still far from being perfect. In the real world cases, we need sometimes to perform some sort of validation, where we need true/false answer rather than Unknown. This is where OWA falls short. For instance in the case of cardinality problem. (For those who doesn't know: In OWL you can say that a person can have only 1 father, but then you might add 2 fathers for one person, and the reasoner would be perfectly fine with that. It assumes that both persons might be actually the same instance)
Ah, yes. :)
Repeat after me:

Money is not wealth.

Money is not wealth.

What you spend your money on is wealth.

Sitting on a number in a computer file does not cause inequality.
Video+Conference Goes to Central Asia: Turkey and Kazakhstan 2015
> How hard is it for open source designers to design their own hardware and open the firmware for it?

If you have to ask, you are not qualified to comment on the issue.

Modern devices are complex, and the firmware often comprises the majority of the functionality of the devices and implements the interfaces exposed to OS drivers. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest companies spend just as much or more on development of firmware, than on the hardware.

Who are you to make such demands of them, and the people working on creating open drivers for such devices?
And what if a nonnrich person needs access to capital in order to pay workers?

Who would buy an IPO if they knew everyone else took your advice and would never let the IPO buyer exit? Trading stock is dealing in liquidity. Liquidity is where all the wealth in the market is made available to humans.
Then please explain Linux's extreme level of notoriety despite Linus Torvalds' equally combative attitude.
You're confusing the results of work with the results of spending the money that you make by work. Most people don't give a shit about their work and would stop working there the first chance they got. And of course people like the shit they can buy with the money.
I've written fairly extensively on that, and the essays aren't hard to find, but I'd prefer not colouring the discussion myself.
No, there is no conspiracy. It's just a battle few are willing and able to fight. All major systems will gladly support open hardware, there are distros that avoid shipping blobs, but right now most people simply aren't willing to accept the compromises necessary to run blob-free or purely open hardware.

If they didn't care, there wouldn't be open-source drivers for GPUs, projects like coreboot, ...
Perhaps this excellent looking free resource, which I haven't closely looked at: Modern C.

It was discussed here [1], and also more recently submitted [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018247

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9647257
In Haskell types are used a lot as documentation and to make static guarantees about the program logic, not just runtime safety. If you're only worrying about illegal operations you practically don't need signatures.
The second sentence is something being debated as a result of the Citizen's United ruling, so his essay seems oddly prescient.

> the world is changing and sometimes contradictory

If you think ontologies don't change and will not require constant maintenance I have a bridge to sell you.
No, I didn't, sorry!

I don't see that option documented anywhere except the changelog, and one passing reference in the docs that says it sets the release flag, but neither say it has any effect on optimisation.
GPL + Linus rants are funnier to read.
Ask HN: Is a 100% free (as in freedom) modern desktop possible?
I understand that for the time being, there cannot be 100% free phones (the graphics chip, the baseband modem, and the GPS chip) or laptops (the video BIOS, the webcam, and AFAIK, the SSD firmware), but given that desktops are composed of somewhat interchangeable parts, is it possible to build one that is completely free, all the way from the OS to all firmware to the BIOS?

Some preferences: AMD--not Intel, discrete graphics are better than on-the-motherboard, SSD is better than a spinning hard drive, and an optical drive is unnecessary.

Edited for typos and clarity.
I read Dewie3's comment as agreeing with you, albeit via sarcasm and cynicism (and some negativity).
Not to mention the implication that the BSD and Linux communities don't care about software freedom is patently false. The two communities have very much been willing to fork or reimplement things from scratch because of licensing reasons all the time, even when the result ends up worse (e.g. Debian's cdrkit forked from cdrtools).
I don't know why the title was changed. The talk is by Adam Lichtl and Stephen Jones.

It features computer fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of combustion in an accessible manner, though naturally the details are quite complex under the cover.

Keywords, for people wanting to dip their toes: discrete wavelet transform, space partition schemes (BSP, quadrees, octrees), space-filling curves.

The point lookup technique was a little fuzzy and I'd like some more details if possible.
Another NYTimes article by a millenial amazed by the completely ordinary lives led by their parents' friends.
Unfortunately iOS 9's new 'rootless' feature is going to break a lot of stuff in this.
You misunderstood what I wrote.

The statement that the US has a spotty record with the legality of its covert operations does not logically imply that the US has "sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience".

I was pointing out that just because something is illegal in the US won't stop the government if it's so inclined. They'll either find some dubious legal justification (see how the Authorization to Use Military Force has been interpreted), or just do it anyway (I find the legal reasoning supporting PRISM beyond specious; it's risible).

I thought my posts were pretty clear? I think you're mixing me up with the arguments of other posters.
For what it's worth, Stallman thinks that firmware is an integral part of hardware, and doesn't seem to think of it in the same way as other software.
Cory Doctorow on metadata (2001)
That's a problem with Cabal, not GHC. They're working on it.
Really liked your article =)

Long term thinking is really hard to do these days.

I'm 36 and my generation seems to take for granted that everything evolves at the same pace as most 20th century technologies have done so far.

This seems to be compounded by the prevalent market driven logic that prioritizes short term profit above all.

Putting these things in their correct historic timescale is very insight-full.

thank you =)
Ask HN: Is it likely a Berlin startup would hire an international student?
Anyone familiar enough with the Berlin or Munich startup scene to comment on whether or not a German startup would hire an international student studying in Germany?

Asking for a friend - a Perl/Python engineer with 7+ years of software experience.
Every one of those quotes is portraying selfishness. Why should anyone discuss those points? They don't have long-term value to anyone else.