skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If most motorway/a-road network have "average speed cameras liberally placed" along them as you and maccard claim, then presumably us driving different roads on different days would make no difference? Of course we might just have very different definitions of liberally!
As long as you don't use Symbol.for() that is - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

(I do think symbols are useful though, replied for correctness.)
I'm not entirely convinced with the function-call syntax for declaring a Symbol.

Why not using something more of the lines with Ruby's
:symbol
syntax?
Yeah. Shitty blogspam posts need to die die die.
> Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure.

"Safety" is also having someone to blame when things go bad. That's the hardware/software vendor or the integrator doing the implementation. Where do you think the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" saying came from?
Fantastic sales that generally happened more than two months after release, to be fair.

I realise, of course, that it was released on other platforms before then. But it seems a little odd to pick on a two month old release. (Actually not quite two months, now that I check)
The very fact that "public pressure" is obviously the most appropriate device for influencing the course of the government / law giver spells out the complete failure of democracy in most western nations.

Public pressure should but it won't.
Thumbs up on the initiative and result -- but why macros?

From the code samples it appears more that the author has created a DSL using C macros than providing a library. Such a bummer.
What's it trying to load?

I was starting to think this was some kind of joke about loading content through JS the way that bar crept across & got stuck just short.

It's not a joke right?
It amuses me that the article states that it's only available in bundles, not on-own - then has a screenshot showing it being available.
I wrote a post in response to Costolo stepping down. Since the trendy thing is to post punditry about Twitter, I couldn't help but chime in.

"On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/

----------

Also, you can make up your own mind about this:

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo...

http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11...

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage...

https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/

http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/

http://john.do/twitter-quit/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo...

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...
Thanks!

I kept it as simple as possible. I was hesitant to even have a header at the top, but heard some feedback from people that thought it should have a name and a way to share it.

Also, the source code is now online here: https://github.com/akumpf/bgaudio
Germany Drops Merkel NSA Phone Tapping Probe
They seem to define "persistence" variously, though I think they're talking about a rootkit in general (as opposed to checkpoint/restore). Emphasis on hypervisors, HDD and SSD firmware and, of course, the SMM.

Given that they talk about "Linux application persistence", I'd assume it's some kernel module rootkit. In which case, it's not that cool. The in-kernel ABI changes a lot and basic techniques like hooking the IDT vary.
> Why not using something more of the lines with Ruby's :symbol syntax?

You mean Common Lisp's syntax, of course.
I agree with you but also believe e-voting undermines the integrity of the democratic system as a whole, black-box or not.

How it currently works where I live is that, at the start of election day, all the volunteers and officials who are working for the day are allowed to inspect the urn, check for hidden compartments, and so on to ensure it's empty (And anyone can sign up to volunteer). Then they receive and place the votes in the urn together, and it remains sealed until the counting commences.

This creates a transparency that is simply not possible with an electronic solution. Even if it was possible to go through all software and hardware being deployed (A project which by itself would take years and cost millions), and the problem of being able to cast anonymous votes without the possibility of anyone finding out what you voted for was solved, you still hand over the democratic control of the election process to a small technological elite who will be doing these checks, while you gain very little from actually doing so.

Denmark tried to put an e-voting system in place a few years back but failed because one of the parties that was intially in favor where swayed by an angry group consisting in large part made up of computer science professionals and students.
You Won’t Be Able to Disable (or Delay) Windows Updates on Windows 10 Home
You are aware that ISDS already exist and have been a part of trade deals for at least 20 years?

TTIP may extend these rights, and it certainly should be negotiated in such a secretive way, but the ISDS provisions are nothing particularly new. ISDS exist because national courts are not always unbiased, and may unduly favour the host nation.
the article is a journalistic shame, it contains typos in the name of Merkel as well as her title. Merkel is Germany's chancellor, not the prime minister. WTF.
Symbols are used all the time in Ruby (and a bunch of other languages), not as duct tape but as a very core feature of the language. Why should it be different in JavaScript?

The most simple way to use them is to replace definitions like this one

var north = 1;
var south = 2;
var east = 3;
var west = 4;
var direction1 = north;
var direction2 = south;
direction1 === direction2 ? "ops" : "ok";

The programmer is doing the work of the interprer/compiler here and make sure to pick unique values for all the constants that are going to be compared together. With symbols that becomes

var north = new Symbol();
var south = new Symbol();
var east = new Symbol();
var west = new Symbol();
var direction1 = north;
var direction2 = south;
direction1 === direction2 ? "ops" : "ok";

which is an improvement even if it is (in a traditional JavaScript way) so much more verbose than Ruby's

direction1 = :north
direction2 = :south
direction1 === direction2 ? "ops" : "ok"

I just wish they'll add some syntactical sugar to do without that "new Symbol()" thing and create symbols as needed like Ruby does.

Unfortunately, from https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Referen...

Symbols and JSON.stringify()

Symbol-keyed properties will be completely ignored when using JSON.stringify():

JSON.stringify({[Symbol("foo")]: "foo"});
// '{}'

We're going to manually serialize them when they leave the RAM.
I think you mean that politicians in smaller countries are
more susceptible to public opinion because

- the politician lives necessarily close the majority of the people and his personal safety (and that of his family) is in danger if he blatantly disrespects the will of the people

- people can more easily "vote with their feet" because they just need to move a few dozen miles away to live in another legislation which enables them to keep most of their social network.
I own a significant amount of tesla stock and stand to benefit from Elon musk-hype. But I have to admit I'm pretty tired of it. There are other people who dream about and do things you know.
> "ISDS exist because national courts are not always unbiased, and may unduly favour the host nation."

As opposed to favouring ... what, exactly?
The very fact, that such a propsal makes it into parliament to be discussed, which is basically a self-castration of power shows how far politics have degenerated. What has a world come to- when you cant even trust the lust of the mighty to be in controll?
I know people there.

Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - throwing dissenters down mine shafts violent.)

The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.
He wasnt CEO at both though
That would be true if at all times meant 100% all times. But I doubt that this rule exists and is assumed to exist to keep the pilot himself from causing harm. But rather to notice medical conditions as soon as possible. So from this psychological stance it is very likely that there will be moments of maybe no more than a minute of someone being alone in the cockpit - realistically.
Docker is great also to hide complexity during implementation. Discourse.org is doing a great work "enveloping" their complex rails app in containers to easy the install process. And is not stateless.
I wonder what this means for Windows Restore feature?
Ask HN: How do you version control your microservices?
When working on a project consisting of a large number of microservices, what solutions do you employ for controlling the composition of specific versions of each microservice.

I currently use git submodules to track the application as a whole, with commit refs for each "green" version of microservice. This "master" repository is then tested with consumer driven contracts for each of the referenced submodules, with subsequent "green" masters for deployment to staging.

This submodule approach requires a lot of discipline for small teams, and on more than one occasion we have encountered the usual submodule concerns. I'm concerned that this will only become more problematic as the team grows.

What are your thoughts for a replacement process?
The government is blocking github, not those tech companies..
It was postponed, because currently it would not pass due to pressure. So they are buying time for lobbying.

Not that it really matters, because the EC doesn't have to respect the result of the EP vote. It is just symbolic.
Show HN: 64Bites – Simplest Way to Learn C64 Programming
I used to program on a BBC Micro and that was low resolution.
> Most people in Zimbabwe have electricity. ... you seem to incorrectly think all people in African countries live in huts

I know people who live in good houses in affluent parts of one of the largest cities in South Africa, and they don't have electricity 24/7 http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/loadshedding/description.
>Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.
Although I have much higher resolution, lately some occular migranes have forced me to up the font size on my monitor. Having really big type seems to stave off the migranes for some reason.

Anyway, I think I've been going for about a month and a half with 80x27 text displays (full screen with tmux). I'm doing web development and my browser is similarly scaled (thank god we're building something with a scalable UI).

I have not missed the screen real estate at all. Of course, I'm old and I used to always work on 80x25, so the extra 2 lines are luxury ;-)
> I realize it adds an additional layer abstraction which one could use to build additional functionalities on top

This is what got my attention about it - it provides a link that makes it more natural to play with SQL from Rust. You get some protection from typos and type errors, and you get the benefit of working with native types. I'd feel more confident working in this environment for those reasons than I would working with string-based SQL directly in my program. As for the incompleteness issues, it's still young and that seems like a solvable problem to me.
While things described in the second paragraph are true, calling Baltic States as being at the forefront of IT tech is a bit of a stretch.

Except for Estonia (Estonia actually doesn't like to be associated that much with Baltics, their mentality is more in line with their northern neighbors.), governments here don't really know how to approach IT. They're just as much out of touch with modern technologies as US gov. It's quite chaotic and unregulated. Plus, silly amounts of corruption.

And the regulations that they do impose end up hurting the countries instead of helping them.

Plus, we are tiny countries (population-wise) that have 2nd world living standards. Not many people can afford to start startups.
It's clear that 'statistical systems' are a hundred years or more away from 'achieving electronic general intelligence'.

'statistical systems', 'deep learning neural networks', ... are totally dumb.

Even commercial systems with massive money invested like Google Translate are only showing how far away from 'intelligent' translations they are.

It does not matter if Lisp is not used in those communities for AI research. The whole approach is limited and does not matter much in 'general intelligence research'.
did this happen last night too (about 15 hours from when this post was made)? I am in India and was not able to reach my servers in Singapore or do a git push. All other sites worked okay. I scratched my head and changed my dns to 8.8.8.8. It still did not work.
Ask HN: Which tools do you use for SaaS customer management?
I trying to spin up a SaaS, so I need to track customer registrations, which plans they have subscribed to and what addons they use.

What is your approach to this?

My first idea was to build something on my own, but this is a problem every SaaS provider has, so there should be something pre-made out there. Like launchrock for gathering email addresses.
I'm the author. I browse independent bookstores whenever I can. I agree that you can find interesting things there that you'll never find in large chains. But I don't recall seeing much by Le Guin in any bookstore, new or used, small or large.

I don't know how many times I've tried to find something slightly off the beaten path in a local bookstore or library only to come home and order it online.

On the other hand, local bookstores were more interesting before Amazon came along. Amazon doesn't just sell bestsellers, far from it, but they've caused local stores to rely more on bestsellers. All my favorite bookstores have shriveled their selection to the point that they're hardly worth visiting anymore.
That wikipedia page suggests that pschological triggers (eg sight of blood, medical details etc) can be treated via exposure therapy. I’d guess that the treatment is similar to that used (very effectively) for phobias: ie progressively increasing the exposure, but under the control of the patient so they have time to accustom themselves to each new level of stimulus & retrain their current stress response.
Telecom Malaysia (AS4788) was leaking a full routing table to a Tier 1 network, Global Crossing (AS3549), who in turn was advertising the prefixes to its peers like Level3 (AS3356). Large portions of the Internet would have been affected.

This is a double fail, both for Telecom Malaysia for leaking a full routing table, and for GBLX who apparently isn't filtering prefixes from their downstream customers or even restricting to a max number of prefixes.
Why did Twitter boss Dick Costolo stand down?
Looks fun! I think you should document how to init / deinit, and what needs to be called for every main-loop iteration (just noctt_prog_iter? or something more?).
Twitter Should Be A Public Utility
> You can argue about the lengths of these strings and the simplicity of your step function all day long, at the end of the day it's still θ(n²) and no better than the simple dynamic programming approach.

It's not O(n^2), but I forgot to mention that. You don't need to calculate the full state, only k entries when your maximum edit distance is k, because the other entries are going to be greater than k anyway. So it's actually O(nk), so it's linear in n (that paper assumes that the max edit distance and the alphabet size are fixed, so by their assumption O(nk) = O(n)). But I think you are missing what a Levenshtein automaton is. The point of a Levenshtein automaton is not to calculate the edit distance. In fact a Levenshtein automaton does not need to calculate the edit distance at all. What a Levenshtein automaton with max distance k to a word "banana" does is this: it determines whether given a prefix like "caba", is there a way to extend that prefix such that the distance to "banana" is less than k. The dynamic programming algorithm does not do this. They are two different (but of course related) problems.

> In fact, even for that it's a relatively bad implementation because it constructs a new list in every step, whereas you could just reuse the same two lists (called score in your implementation) all the time.

Of course, it's a proof of concept not a fast implementation. Plus it's not as simple as keeping two lists when you're searching a text index, because from the same state you will need to calculate multiple successor states. If you destroy the state s when stepping you can't step from that same state s with another letter.

> An L1 cache miss, L2 hit costs around 10 cycles, and the L2 cache is more than sufficiently large

A normal full text index does not even fit in L3. Perhaps it does not even fit in memory.

> You have not shown how you prune the search, so I can't say anything about that. Of course that's the entire point of having an index.

Pruning the search works exactly the same way given any implementation of a Levenshtein automaton. It's just intersecting the automaton with the index.

> Whether or not you built Levenshtein automata is a pointless discussion. You say you built a DFA for Levenshtein distance (true). I'm saying that you didn't implement the paper. Both are correct.

I never claimed to implement the algorithm in the paper. Whether or not it's a Levenshtein automaton is not a pointless discussion. Lucene improved their fuzzy text search times by 100x by pruning the search. You can do that with my method too. That's why the goal here is "implement a Levenshtein automaton" not "implement a Levenshtein automaton with the algorithm described in paper XYZ".

> I'm just pointing out that your implementation, while it was fast to write, is also much much slower than their algorithm, and you shouldn't compare the two as if they were the same.

Even if my algorithm for constructing the DFA is 10x slower than theirs (which I HIGHLY doubt), it still wouldn't matter because you can still use it to get their ~100x speedup because it does exactly the same pruning and the cost of the automaton is just noise.
We do hang around here, but technologies are adopted on "business value" not "geek factor".
There are some surprising places where you can enforce state where it seems impossible. Once you have that, the benefits coalesce.

That's why I built ShutIt, which we've used to encapsulate complex legacy environments to produce stateless builds:

http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/

For example, teams can have a development environment (with _everything_ in it) rebuilt daily. As everyone uses it, everyone curates it, and they're all talking about the same thing - one pet if you like, rather than n, where n is the number of developer/development envs.
The Promise of Lean Experimentation
Are you a super-recogniser? The skill the police are using to hunt criminals
> This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established.

And there's the direct link to complicity in PRISM - is that new?
Why Garbage Collection
You might like Lattice[0], which is extracted from Cloud Foundry.

Basically, everyone is racing back to PaaSes. Heroku pioneered it and are still out there. Red Hat have OpenShift and are making noises about turning it into a Docker+Kubernetes thing in version 3. Cloud Foundry has been around for a few years now. There are other also-rans.

The thing is that apart from Heroku, you've not heard of installable PaaSes because they're being pitched to the Fortune 500s.

I've worked on Cloud Foundry and I work for the company which donates the most effort to the Foundation. It's been surreal to watch other people introduce pieces of a PaaS and see the excitement about the pieces. Meanwhile, we literally have an entire turnkey system already. If you need a full PaaS -- push your app or service and have it running in seconds, with health management, centralised logging, auto-placement, service injection, the works -- we built it already. Free and opensource, owned by an independent Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Anyhow, I'm obviously biased, YMMV etc etc. But I'd play with Lattice, to get the hang of things.

[0] http://lattice.cf/
Ah, the well known "anti-trade lobby". Right up there with alien anal probes and the conspiracy behind 9/11. I bet the commies are behind it.
Many years ago I managed to convince my management that, if they had to use deltaLOC as a performance metric, that they at least use abs(deltaLoC).

I then spent the next year cutting huge chunks of crap out of a C++ application that I had inherited.

Was a most satisfying experience.
Startup Lessons from the Original iPhone Launch
Thank you, that is beautiful. I've been proved decisively wrong and I've gained some greater appreciation for python's libraries.
Ask HN: How is your experience with Oracle, Postgres and MySQL?
This is a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702372.
How was your experience with these databases, PG, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL. If you describe with one sentence how do you describe them in one sentence.
Here is follow up to the discussion, how do you describe your experience with each of RDBMS's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135
I know Google interviews generate a lot of traffic on HN but I thought that I'd add something that I haven't seen covered, that is, the job itself.

I interviewed twice successfully for Google and the interview experience was impeccable (interviewers were great, HR was completely on the ball etc.). The first time there was a hiring freeze so that didn't go anywhere, the second led to offers in several countries in Googles empire. Most of these I could not accept for family reasons but one I could although Google were quite secretive about what the job was.

I accepted thinking that, well they know me well enough by now and what I can do. A mistake. Upon arrival it turned out to be writing an Android app which is completely the wrong end of the spectrum for me - I have never even written Java. I was been benchmarked against people who seem only to have done only that. The other thing that made me realise that I had no long term future in Google is that it was made clear to me that any experience of working for other software companies or other industries was neither interesting or useful. If you have a lot on your C.V. like I have this is problematic.

So I left after a few months.

Sure Google is a fabulous company, does some amazing stuff and has some great people (perhaps not as uniformly great as they'd like you to believe). If you fit the mould tightly enough you will have a lovely time.

TL;DR - They should not have hired someone like me, I should not have accepted.
A venture capital firm says it invests in people “pre-idea, pre-team”