skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Verde Technologies was an aerial photograph firm that used the Streamed Image Transformation Editor (SITE) to process digital framegrabs on Sun 3/160 workstations. Each cost about $40,000.00.

We required about 90 seconds for each step of our calibration process. There were several steps per image, we shot many images each day and promised our clients 24-hour turnaround.

So Scott Lydiard, the company president spent $5,000.00 on a Floating Point Accellerator card, as Sun promised that it doubled the speed of numeric code. It was a full-size VME bus card with a 68881 in the middle. I'm not real clear why it needed that much circuitry as Macs just had a single socket where you could pop in a 68881, much like the 8087 socket on DOS PCs.

So one night I install our new card. To my dismay the calibration time was reducing only to 85 seconds.

Not wanting to lose my job I discovered just that night what a profiler was. It turned out that SITE used getc() to read each pixel of an image, and putc() to write it. This because the "streamed" part was meant for building UNIX pipelines. You know simple tools that only do one thing.

I patched the code to read all the pixels in one read() system call.

"Hey Mike. Our new FPA is AWESOME! Only five seconds to calibrate an image."

"You made a wise purchase, Scott."

Then a few minutes later...

"Mike, could you explain why calibration now takes ten seconds on the workstation that doesn't have an FPA?"

"That's because it really does double the speed of numerical code."

SITE was written by a computer science graduate student. It is for this and many similar reasons that I don't regard a CS degree as being of much use to computer programmers. Mine is in Physics; among other things, Physicists figure out the way things work.
> I personally consider that opening borders is a moral imperative

Or close them. The moral imperative is to have a consistent and fair rules. You can't really be the US and let people live for decades in a grey state with all the obligations of a citizen but little of the rights. You take them in or not but that should a quick and permanent decision (i.e. no 3 year limit nonsense)

That's by the way not a US-only problem. That is the same in the UK and most of Europe, even worse, I believe, in Japan.
remember yahoo? XD
Couple perspectives you might find interesting (I say this having to learn the lay of the land over the past year myself):

Most offices are designed with 1 conference room per 10-20 employees. If you have 15 conference rooms you probably have well over 100 employees and many millions in payroll. Those people presumably have many meetings, and the cost of not being able to get their job done is measurable.

Conference rooms can be between 200-300 sq feet, so if you have a 15 of them you're looking at several thousand sq ft on your lease. Depending on where you are in the world, that's probably around $10K/month or so in real estate.

The effective rate is about $17/month/room, which in most cases is tiny compared to the cost of mismanaging office space and productive time above.
As an American, I also strongly suggest you consider going to Canada.

The U.S. immigration system is so far gone that not even American citizens have the power to fix it. It has become a plaything in the hands of professional politicians. Just like many other things in the U.S., you won't get anything remotely like fair treatment unless you have rich or influential sponsors acting on your behalf.

Even if you do ultimately still have your heart set on the U.S., being a Canadian PR will also make that easier, due to Byzantine and Kafkaesque reasons that I don't fully understand myself. And if you don't ever make it, hey, Canada's not too bad a deal either, eh?
Correlation and Causation–Nuts and Chocolate
A human has a natural right to the minimum necessities of life. Owning a small plot of land to provide for oneself should be one option.

Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum necessities is unequal.

The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive. Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from popularity, civilization is a myth.

The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.
Similar to how Project Euler works.

There are naive ways to solve certain problems (finding primes), but there is a general guideline that tasks should finish in under one minute (I believe).
That is part of why I prefer tidal power. It is predictable, and because water is so much thicker than air you can get more energy than from wind turbines. They can even be integrated into hurricane protection measures (I forget The specific term).
And hey, if you round "60% bigger" up to the next multiple, you do get "double"...

What I remember Digg being shocked about when they invited us over for lunch was that they filled two huge floors and we filled... my Toyota Yaris.
Nobody is making money selling phones that don't have apps. Apps are 100% necessary for a smartphone to survive.

Apple simply could not have a successful mobile platform without apps.
No, it's mostly because those commentors on HN can't code worth their salt, and can't find a job, in an industry with thousands of unfilled positions, and need a scapegoat to pile hatred on.

Most of the points stated on those hateful comments are either factually wrong, or overstate something as being the norm, when it probably happens less than 10% of the time.

For one, if you are even decently good at software development, and live in any major city in the US, you really have no excuse for not being able to find a job. (Apart from being really bad at interviews.) Demand far outstrips supply.

Secondly, although work visas are used by outsourcing companies a lot, they are also used heavily by companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, a lot of tech startups, etc, and other companies that are looking talented engineers.

Finally, the work visa requires the employee to be paid at least the prevailing wage for the position, and most of them get paid well above the prevailing wage, so the "driving down wages" point isn't valid either.

Most of these commentors also fail to realize that there is really no other way to immigrate, besides a work visa, unless you want to go the family-based or refugeee route (not an option for most). They also show a total ignorance of the lump of labor fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

When someone heaps abuse and hatred on highly-skilled immigrants (like those on HN), and call for an end to skilled immigration, they are really calling for an end to all immigration. It's noxious xenophobia and perhaps racially-motivated hatred, plain and simple.
You know, I am a Canadian PR too and while nowhere near as bad as the US temporary worker situation, the transition from PR to citizen is not easy if you have the audacity to travel. And, thanks to this wonderful new bill, you can be stripped of your citizenship basically any time the government wants to without judicial oversight.
Show HN: NPM package workerproxy (proxy calls to Web Workers made easy)
I assume that you can prove that your ancestors migrated here legally.
> And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow,

If we could agree on global-scale engineering projects to manipulate the climate, we'd probably be able to agree on reducing dependence on fossil fuels...
Your free plan is killing your SaaS
For thousands of years, work was something the peasants and the poor people did. An excellent trick pulled recently was to convince many of them that there was such a thing as a "work ethic" and that it was good and right and honourable.
Possibly more important, "becoming an American" (which seems to mean Usano as I am an American because I live in one of and have citizenship in one of the countries of America) means you get to pay US incometaxes on your income anywhere in the world for the rest of your life.
I was one of them. I was a lurker on r/php (actually commenting using a bugmenot.com account) that I found using Google but somehow didn't understand the rest of the website / frontpage.

Digg v4 forced me to take a deeper look at reddit and since then my life has gone downhill :)
If life feels awful, what makes you continue on the same path?

I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
As always, with the EU, it’s complicated, but often the "free to work, live and retire everywhere in the EU" is considered part of Schengen.
"Unfortunately something not so different sometimes does. E.g., you're at a startup, you have a critical demo for your best-hope customer, it was scheduled very aggressively because the CEO wanted to fit the customer's availability, it's happening in one hour, and nothing is working.

Not exactly confrontational (though it could easily get that way if you aren't careful) but just as stressful.

Of course it's far better to avoid such situations, but they do happen.
Or Hawking.. oh wait :-)
Why do you think I'm advocating this?
Example of the package being used to proxy calls to a Web Worker running Lua: http://blixt.nyc/js-luaworker/
It's never enforced even though countless immigrants apply for mean-tested benefits. One more piece of dysfunctional immigration system.
The only time I've found talking about a project to be a good predictor is when it's a type of project or tech stack that I'm familiar with. In that case, I can ask very specific probing questions about problems I'd encountered with that problem or tech. In answering these questions whether and how often they talk about specific solutions they came up with versus saying something along the lines of "well I dunno, I wasn't responsible for that piece" or "I'm not sure about the details, I was more involved with the higher level decision making" can be very telling.
On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).
Surgeons are not number 10 heating oil commodities. The difference in quality between one surgeon and the next matters when it comes to an operation's outcome. Likewise - and this is the gist of my comment - licensing software engineers might raise the minimum bar, but it won't make hiring any easier because licensing doesn't establish relevant expertise or pertinent experience. Obstetricians not thoracic surgeons are what you want for Cesareans just as you don't want a J programmer writing your CMS.
Could this example have been accomplished with awk and xargs just as fast, with same or less memory usage, in fewer lines of code?

Seems so to me after skimming the article, but maybe I missed an important advantage of using Akka Streams for this task?
This work was not done by NVIDIA, it was done by MapD, a startup. NVIDIA is promoting the work of a partner; it's a guest post on the NVIDIA developer blog.
Game of chances: inheritance is a question of probability, not destiny
I'll be very interested in hearing what your measures are, and how you'll account for things like employees being in a bad environment/having bad bosses. It's a complicated thing to measure.

Are you guys planning on publishing any of this material in a journal or research venue, or will you keep the results to blog posts?
Are comments usually heavily downvoted after you caution the commenter? Maybe you could set a lower limit on those comments. Getting downvoted to -50 seems excessive.
The problem is that you generally don't realize "the system is fucked" until you've spent several years in the system and you suddenly drop into a kafka-esque black hole because someone put one wrong date on a 50 pages filing.

Also due to the duration of time involved changes in the law can both screw you up or make it possible. Can you predict what the legal system will be like 6 years down the road ?
The Swiss proposal is a very generous proposal that still comes at a time when saying "people can just get jobs" is not entirely laughable. You could say they're ahead of their time.

And yet, current government spending is 21% of GDP, and that amounts to $12,000 per man, woman and child. Remember, not everyone will hold on to their $12,000. Many will pay back a portion in taxes, and some will pay all of it back. And children will probably not receive the full amount, their parents instead getting a growing percentage until the child is 18. That's about 25% of the population. People in prison would not receive their basic income while serving their sentence, I'd assume. That's about 1% of the population, although I'd hope a basic income would decrease that.

The Swiss proposal would be $32,400 per person, for 74% of the US population, which would come to 7.7 trillion, or around 46% of the GDP.

Sounds outrageous, yes, but consider the fact that we are continually increasing the amount of wealth we create, while drastically reducing the labor necessary to create it.

GDP will continue to increase and wages will continue to stagnate and fall. And at some point, certain disruptive technologies (such as self-driving cars) will decimate whole industries almost overnight.

What that means is that the basic income amount won't be increasing nearly as quickly as the GDP, which means that balking at a current-day percentage of GDP will make less and less sense.

Especially when you're facing massive discontent and the prospect of a near freeze on consumer spending.
Show HN: Hexagonator generates abstract wallpapers made of hexagons from images
https://www.youtube.com/user/Lush

doesn't go to Lush Cosmetics. What am i missing?
Here's an interesting counterpoint, arguing from economic evidence that at least in the last decade or two, downward pressure on wages doesn't appear to be primarily the result of automation: http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that...
I imagine they will run at a loss until they can monetize effectively like reddit. I know everyone tells us that reddit is not profitable but they are selling their front page to advertisers quietly.

I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be found out quickly, but it was up voted enough to get it into the hot\rising queue and by virtue of appearing there it made it to the front page.

We know that in the early days the admins/founders used fake accounts to simulate activity on the site and I not imagine that has changed. So they use these accounts to boost up votes and almost guarantee a front page position.

They are also happy to remove front page posts that advertisers don't like e.g sears
Context for this argument: The US is still the largest manufacturer of goods in the world. But the number of people in the US involved in manufacturing has declined.
The value of the denomination of the "minimum income" will fall immediately, lowering that supposed minimum

The word for that is inflation, and so far economists have not seen evidence that a basic income would effect inflation.

developing your happiness for and from what you have.

That's a good goal for microeconomics. But this is about macroeconomics.
> Except for the tech corporations who are suppressing wages--which is all of them

This is not true. I'm on an H1B, and I can change jobs freely. Employers can't prevent you from changing jobs. Employers have zero power to suppress wages if you have an H1B -- because you can get a better paying job. (This is unlike the L-1, which locks you to your employer.) The only thing preventing someone from getting a better paying job is how good they are at what they do.

What's funny is that a lot of the engineers that outsourcing companies (like TCS, Infosys) bring over, end up leaving their poorly-paying sponsor soon after getting to the US (usually in 6 months), for a higher-paying job elsewhere. The only people left behind are those who can't find a better job...
I spent 14 years in France on the same fool's errand. Same situation.
He has a law degree and found it difficult to immigrate.. Jesus!

I am not saying they have better prospects, than us, tech workers, just that they should know the system better than us.
Anyone on CB, 10m, or 6m bands? Was there crazy radio band behavior?
Post-quantum crypto has never been a laughing matter of academic cryptographic research. That said, PQ Solutions' software is. Their main site isn't quite clear, but their app home page at https://pq-chat.com/ spells out the problems clearly (starting with being an app home page):

1. It's available on the App Store, for iOS devices, which is secured by classical crypto. Anyone in their threat model (i.e., any attacker that would only be defeated by post-quantum encryption) can just break the classical signatures on App Store updates or iOS system updates and push out a compromised version.

2. From the FAQ (https://pq-chat.com/faq):

> Does it mean access security is reliant on only a 5-digit PIN?
>
> Yes. We do offer additional security of access by using QR code, NFC or voice authentication. However, our research and user feedback indicate most users may not want a complicated way to get into the app. A 5-digit PIN seems to be an acceptable compromise between security and convenience.

You don't need a quantum computer to brute-force this. For the entire lifetime of this app, quantum computers will be slower at brute-forcing 100,000 PINs than classical ones.

3. From the FAQ:

> How can we tell if your app is safe?
>
> We appreciate a user may not want to trust a third party app. We have therefore incorporated a feature that, by pressing and holding a buddy’s name, all the text in the chat screen will be shown in Never-The-Same ciphertext in order to show you the encryption is working.

I hope it's obvious that this is both completely untrustworthy and cryptographically useless. I'd dismiss this at marketing copy, but it's clearly an implemented feature (hover over the "Never-The-Same" picture at https://post-quantum.com/pqchat), which makes me worry about the technical background of the team in this discipline.

The TechCrunch article seems to be implying that PQ Solutions is going after the enterprise / government market, which is a good market to go after, but you don't need fancy crypto for that. You just need a solid app that works and uses the state of the art in public crypto, and also isn't a general-audience chat app like WhatsApp so that IT doesn't block it. Any effort spent on research for the long-term is effort not spent on making the company sustainable. Go fight the government procurement and FIPS fights, get rich on classical crypto, sell and quit, and spend your time working with the public crypto community on research and on software development. Then you'll be solving the hard problems of how to move the entire world, including the iOS and App Store stack, HTTPS, etc., over to post-quantum encryption. Only in that world will your app be able to defend against an actual threat.

Until then, talking about quantum computers is FUD -- FUD that might get you money now, but constrain you to spending time on research that's going nowhere.
Not sure, but I think it's unique to JS b/c it's built into web browsers. Therefore, all major browsers vendors need to ok major changes to the language so that there isn't a severe fragmentation in version support. I think this is achieved via the standards committee.
Evernote is not exactly the best example I'm afraid. I paid for it once, and it was because I needed shared folders and that was a paid-only feature. Otherwise I wouldn't have paid. Heck, I'd have used any other service if my then-teammates weren't that attached to Evernote. The new web interface is slow and sloppy, the Windows desktop client has ALWAYS been behind the Mac client, the proprietary language for the source of the notes is retarded, there's no way of editing the raw content of the notes, etc.

Every year that passes, I'm honestly baffled by them not going bankrupt.
It would not be the first time something got a lot of attention on HN and then "suddenly" landed in a more mainstream news site. It still unnerves me a bit when comments I make here end up in a story in the press.
Here is a good page comparing bootstrap to other alike frameworks: http://responsive.vermilion.com/compare.php.

Personally I would again choose bootstrap, if you have previous good experiences with it.
Culture can not be respected in fact. Even if people wish to do so.

The problem is that the thing is a moving target. When a lot of still alive people where born 'culture' was: 'a black woman was not supossed to sit in the best places of a bus', 'the children roam free with their friends and dogs and can go everywhere' and 'Is acceptable if I slap my wife in the face sometimes because I feel frustrated for the work'. Yes, this was a small part of the tradition not so long time ago.

Each generation have been educated in a different point of view about what was acceptable or not. What 'culture' should be honored for newcomers?. West coast 1966? Sometimes 'culture' is just plain wrong and should not be respected.
I love emacs but for mixing languages you are better off
with a UI made for exactly that: the Beaker Notebook
http://BeakerNotebook.com

note: we are hiring!
Could you explain this a little more? What new build tooling has been developed for Haskell recently (other than the parent link)?

One of the things that keeps me from revisiting Haskell was the aforementioned subpar build tooling. That's one of the reasons I'm enjoying Golang so much.
https://www.youtube.com/Lush is the URL in question.
Researchers develop stretchable plasma screens and batteries
I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do.

I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.

That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.

Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here.

Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!
I believe it's https://youtube.com/Lush that is in dispute.