skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then the correct code was something like:

if (f()) {
int x = 1;

if (g()) {
h(x);
}

} else {
g();
}

If g() can be called before f() then it could also
be written as:

int g_flag = g();

if (f()) {
int x = 1;

if (g_flag) {
h(x);
}
|

If you really only had one assignment to x,
and both f() and g() have side effects that
must be run in-order, this can be more
clearly written as:

int f_flag = f(); // force f() to run for ${reasons}
int g_flag = g(); // force g() to run for ${reasons}

if (f_flag && g_flag) {
h(1);
}

This is a lot clearer about what the code is doing, and
the compiler is probably going to optimize away the two
int flag variables anyway.

You should never rely on uinitialized values not just
because of the problems relating to undefined behavior,
but also because you're adding in assumptions about
the runtime state. The code depended on the return
value of f() but did not fully express that dependency
in the code.
Customer attachement is still a largely unproven hypothesis. How many people in San Francisco have both Lyft and Uber? The cost, as a consumer, to use indifferently one or the other is null.

The really hard challenge for Uber is: not becoming a commodity. I have no doubt they can crush incumbent taxi companies. How Uber will avoid being swallowed by the competitive beast they created is another, and harder, challenge.
Learn how to use Smart Lock on Android in 3 simple steps
If you're right, it sounds like Uber is merely more public with their politics, and hence might actually serve to bring this "hidden" moral issues to light?
thanks for the reply, I have already kind of tried option 3 but they just gave me a lame answer that they'll give it to me after the 3 months
> Power plants fund their own decommissioning

They are supposed to. But here in germany the energy company lobbists basically said - in response to a few new proposed fees levied on coal plants - that anything threatening their revenues would cut into future revenue needed for decommissioning fees. And that's despite being required to have funds set aside for decommissioning.

I suspect some creative accounting going on, moving expected future profits into those funds or whatever.

So if their business models fail - e.g. due to renewables - it might turn out that in practice there never was any money set aside for decommissioning.

There are even talks about splitting off coal and fission plants into some sort of "bad bank" companies.

So I would be very wary of any such promises of things being priced in.

Corporations have again and again proven to be very good at privatizing profits while externalizing costs.
My reasons for mentioning Smith:

1. He's almost always grossly misrepresented in modern discourse, and little of that gets beyond the virtually wholly fabricated "invisible hand" metaphor.[1] As this passage shows, and the entire section (from which I've both quoted from at length and greatly condensed in my previous links) makes abundantly clear, Smith isn't the cut-throat capitalist he's made out to be.

2. Yes, the field of economics has in fact "moved on" from Smith. Though I'd argue that in only some cases has it actually improved on him. Failing to understand Smith's own arguments is a principle failing of much of economics.

3. Smith argues his points at (great) length and with ample examples. There remain some errors (I find Graeber's argument for the origins of money as credit more persuasive, for example). But the whole chapter on wages of labour contains much of value even 239 years after its writing.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Gavin Kennedy's scholarship on this topic is excellent http://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-...

It's also a frequent topic at his blog, "Adam Smith's Lost Legacy"
http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2015/06/adam-smiths...

Much of the modern revival can be specifically pinned on Paul Samuelson, in whose landmark textbook it's prominently featured:

http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2010/04/paul-samuel...

http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2012/01/pay-attenti...

And, as a comment at the latter notes, the IH metaphor is explicitly called out as a description of an unknown mechansism:

[I]n The History of Astronomy (written before 1758) Smith speaks of the invisible hand,"to which ignorants refer to explain natural phenomena otherwise unexplainable:

"Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters"

Smith, A., 1980, The Glasgow edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vol., Oxford University Press, vol. III, p. 49

2. For The How Damned Thing: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
> It supports java 7 syntax. Invoke dynamic you mentioned is a jvm feature, which dalvic isn't one.

invokedynamic is a bytecode. Not supporting it means Dalvik / ART can't accept valid bytecode.

> I think the lack of nio is an annoyance that can be fixed tho.

Apparently not. A quick check also suggests that ClassLoader#registerAsParallelCapable is missing.
I wish it was slightly bigger (thinking 6" or 6.5")
Wish You a Happy 4th Birthday Google+
Kudos for having their hearts in the right place.

No kudos for presentation. I've tried to look at two works, typewritten MSS by Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale, and the text display is awkward. The initial presentation is too small to read. Looked long for a zoom control. Finally tried "full browser" link which does display the current page with a zoom control and the ability to drag that page around in a small frame to read it.

While it is nice that UT is doing this, it is sad that each uni has to do its own thing. Can there be no one virtual repository where all such collections -- or at least their catalogs -- could be amalgamated? It's like the bad old days of physical libraries: the scholar has first to find out which collection has the thing she needs, and may never learn that it exists. If they don't want to deal with google books, how about using TIA as a front end?

Edit: ...and then I looked at the URL, hrc.contentdm.oclc.org and thought, huh, that doesn't look like UT or EDU... turns out oclc.org is something like I was just asking for, a front end content distribution platform for multiple libraries. OK then. TIL and all that.
You are overestimating the competitiveness of these markets. In many(perhaps most) parts of India, these operate as unions/ price cartels. The tuk-tuks in particularly ignore meter pricing, in most parts of India, and may resort to violence/harassment to protect themselves from competition. Also most taxis/tuk tuks are independent and do not belong to any company. As such, I imagine they don't enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, efficiencies, and technology that Uber can afford. The quality of service is very poor, which makes Uber something of a Godsend. All these are points on which Uber can and is currently exploiting to gain a foothold, although they face strong challenges.
He could use the savings to close that <p> tag.
Let's assume their strategy works and they win an effective monopoly. What's stopping a "new Uber" coming along, funded by a couple of billion in VC money, to attack Uber's monopoly position by offering the same service cheaper. If winning a market can be done by subsidising your offering with VC cash then someone else will come along and do it as soon as Uber push for higher prices.

While there's huge amounts of private equity money available Uber will never be able to raise prices, especially considering there are plenty of investors around who are unhappy about missing Uber's first few rounds.
In the aviation industry designs really do stand the test of time. A large number of airliners,props and helicopters were designed back in the 60's and 70's with only a few minor upgrades here and there.

I can almost understand why the new jet is having a hard time replacing the previous one. I say almost because at a trillion dollars... Lol
> Resale value would plummet if properties were taxed more, especially if extra onerous taxes were put on foreign investors. This would discourage rich dirty-money investors using central London property as an offshore savings account.

If you're a Russian with enough cash to spare to buy a central London property just as an investment asset, the taxes have to be in triple-digit million ranges to become noteworthy.

> I really don't see why Russians who spend two weeks in London a year need to occupy a huge apartment in South Ken. That space could be used for Londoners who are being pushed into zone 5.

Expensive, multi-million-dollar apartments are not affordable by working-class people.
> Between Macsyma, S-Graphics, and Statice Symbolics could have been a really great software business.

How so? Don't you think they tried and explored that? In reality in early 90s nobody was interested in Lisp anymore. Macsyma was still sold to the market, but didn't have much success. Nichimen's N-World had a small customer base, ran on SGIs (which were still expensive) and then under Windows NT. Statice on non-Lispms never left the beta status.

> I read on Usenet somewhere that there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Macsyma as a separate business.

That's false. See Macsyma, Inc. The company was founded in 1992 and in 1999 acquired by 'Symbolics Technology'.
Thanks Greg, fixed now.
>he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history

The kind of theoritical psychoanalysis Zizek talks about is not really classic psychoanalysis at all. Even Marxism at the lowest level is a theory of psychology.
HN doesn't appreciate when you concretize their epistemology.
So you would agree with me then that free will ultimately leads to chaos? It would constitute freedom to hate openly and freedom to retaliate openly too.
We're losing a dollar on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume!
I've definitely read one where we're an experiment and the speed of light limit is to stop us from escaping all over the lab equipment. I can't remember what it was called now.

I feel as if fiction where we're in a simulation is relatively common, but one where the hacking of reality is actually done well and plausibly rather than handwaved would be pretty new.

The author of Ra also did a short piece you'll probably enjoy: http://qntm.org/responsibility
Author here - I'll implement some of these suggestions and see if the extra space might allow for something a little more interesting. It's a pleasant surprise to see a pull request on this little thing.
Jesus Christ, can't we kill this program already? What's going on, a trillion dollar sunk-cost fallacy?
Agreed. I would like to see deeper questions. I suffered through the "struggle" that Ben Horowitz talks about. I would ask questions like:

Do you wonder why you started the startup in the first place?
Do you regret it?
Do you believe you should be the founder of your own company?

Just some food for thought.
Do you use strictly typed languages or dynamic languages?

I'm using duck typing here.
It's not at all what it's built for. I'd be interested in seeing articles critiquing it's designed mission (or more reporting on the software woes, which would be very relevant here), since I'm no military strategy expert, but reports like this seem rather useless. Do we expect to be doing a lot of WWI/WWII-style close-range air fighting?

EDIT: this, for instance, seems much more interesting: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/22/us-navy-to-...

But it's hard to see how dogfighting prowess would be any help against long-range radar systems that can detect it before being in range.
The problem in Australia is that they don't build up.

Restrictions on who can invest only bar the people who can't hire a clever lawyer to get around the restrictions.
There was a comment thread earlier today about whether Uber is solving rich-people problems or common-people problems. I wonder the extent to which Uber's pricing is sustainable -- are they subsidizing uberX and uberPOOL pricing out of money they're raising, or are the debts just in the pursuit of growth to new cities? Or put another way, if they ceased all growth, froze prices, and laid off all engineering and marketing staff except for one person to keep up with mobile OS updates (but kept the staff to recruit drivers, deal with legal issues, etc.), would the company be profitable, or would it go bankrupt?

I certainly don't complain when I get subsidized lunches delivered to me on VC money, but when existing Uber cities are debating regularizing Uber's legal status or just fixing the inefficiencies / problems with the taxi industry that Uber capitalized on, I want to know if Uber's going to be around for the people of that city, at the same effective prices, in 20 years.
The Phantom F4 had no main gun because everyone thought there were no dogfighst but only missle fights. Reality was different and they added a vulcan gun.

The F35 is not designed for dogfights but long range missle fights and stealth.
Rethinkdbdash bug #103
I would say the opposite. I suspect they could clamp way down on spending and "only" grow 200% per year instead of 300%.
Por que no los dos?

Yes, abundant energy is behind virtually all past development. What seems to be holding back the next 5 billion, however, is access to what that energy has made available.

Though the question of just how many billions can be provided for ought also be raised.
It would be interesting to implement the emulator using the PyPy toolchain.
People are probably awful... They hear a new word, don't know what it means, and then copy it all over the place until it doesn't mean anything anymore.
Thanks FiatLuxDave, I think you are exactly right. Prototype/design cycle time is a huge issue with fusion, fission, and many other energy technologies. No matter how good your idea may be, you have to be able to build, test, iterate, prove, and commercialize it quickly (and ideally, cheaply, but I would argue quickly is even more important). In energy, the physics make everything work better at large scale so it is easy to fall into the "build it bigger" trap.
Having worked for financial traders I won't call them the very worst company in the world. But if my choices were working for them or quitting the industry, I wouldn't blink.

For me it's more the accumulation of awfulness. They started out as a scheme to time-share limos among young entitled dudebros. They entered the market with the black cars, exploiting a status-good dynamic. They've shifted all of the capital cost and risk of the taxi business to drivers, surely screwing many of them in the process. Their "we're too important to comply with mere laws" routine strikes me as arrogant horseshit. They've had assorted scandals, including inviting a bunch of journalists to an off-the-record dinner and then "joking" about plans to spend lots of money to destroy the career of a prominent journalist they didn't like. I've lost count of how many places have arrested or issued arrest warrants for their people.

Throughout all of this, they sing a song of "entrepreneurship" and "worker independence" while providing low-quality, low-stability jobs and making long-term plans to put every one of their drivers out of work. They couldn't give a shit about their workers, and are even willing to threaten their jobs (which aren't jobs, of course, but independent contractor positions) if they are politically active.

On top of all of that, I believe they're a great example of the shift back to a new gilded age, where the main function of the poor is to directly serve the wealthy. But instead of a Victorian model where employees are part of the household, in the Uber model we'll get paid only during the instants we are directly useful to somebody with money.

That's just some highlights off the top of my head; the list goes on. They may not be the very worst, but they have an awful lot of people rooting for their fall. I expect they won't go totally bust. But I am looking forward to a Groupon-style outcome once their investor-fueled growth becomes untenable.
Uber has come along and made every single thing about cab journeys better. People complaining about it look like idiots.

The only evil here is whatever it was that made it take so long for this change to come about.
I'm not embracing the full extent of Oracle's argument in the case, I'm giving my own take on the issue.
If you think taxis are bad in the US, they are 10x worse outside of it.
The thing is, this isn't even a challenge to any assumptions physicists have, or even a surprising result. Every prediction of quantum theory for these kinds of atomic systems has been borne out.

All this "weirdness" is the same old story of "Is it a particle or a wave?!," when in reality, we know its neither. Quantum objects are represented by wavefunctions, or vectors in a Hilbert space, to which "particle" and "wave" are intuitive approximations in certain regimes, that makes it easier for humans to talk about in natural, non-mathematical language.

All this experiment has shown is that a object that we expect to be described by quantum mechanics turns out to, indeed, be described by quantum mechanics.
OK I will take your challenge. You can read a detailed description of why I hate Uber above (tl;dr: shady practices pushing towards indentured servitude and weaking the very rule of law). What's manufactured of it and how am I being manipulated?
Just keeping the military-industrial complex well-fed, basically. It doesn't matter if the thing can even get off the ground.
Do you guys think that they will eventually scrap the program and open source this future failed startup?
Sure, because that schoolboy flipping off the officer was obviously a punk gangster Al-Qaeda sleeper agent suicide bomber.
But unlike F4, F35 has a main gun, and I think that demonstrates the dogfight doctrine still has its way. Unfortunately that gun has its own problem [1].

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/31/new-u-s-ste...
I think you mean "net revenue" (rider receipts less payments to drivers).

And if the $417m is from Q4 2014 (or even Q1 2015), 200% growth this year would surpass $3b (i.e., 30% of $10b).
DarcMatter: from secret spreadsheets to an online marketplace in alternatives
I'm not familiar with this particular experiment, but all my pondering on the subject - as a layman - leads me to a simple conclusion.

The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak.

The particle has some other properties, but what's being "measured" is not one of those properties.

How can I explain?

Imagine someone who has never tried any Korean food, and you try to ask him/her: what's your favorite Korean food? There's no answer. So you try to "measure" it by feeding him some Korean items and recording his facial expressions. He will like some items more than others, but it has nothing to do with "his favorite Korean food", and has more to do with how the items were prepared and his mood at the time.

A "point" location for a photon is never defined; it's not a property of a photon that it exists in a point in space. When you fire a photon at a "wall" and see a "blip", you're not seeing the position of the photon at some point in time. You're seeing the rough position of the atom that had an electron that absorbed the photon's energy, and I'm not even sure the atom has a well defined point position either. The whole thing is an artifact (a side effect) of some interaction between several systems and doesn't really tell you anything fundamental about the photon (or the quantum object).

At least that's how I understand it.
I didn't say punishing police for such things would solve all our other problems, or even that it was a good idea. I said it would lead to less of said things.

In principle, any limitation placed on police could wind up helping criminals; nonetheless there must be some limitations. Things like citizen review boards would probably be a good idea here.
Get your Google calendar into tmux
Well, your question asks on a few different levels. There is the personal level, the societal/community level, and the over-encompassing reality.

On the personal level, we're restricted somewhat by our current situation, so you have free will like a stream has the ability to curve paths down a mountain. It could go left or right, but every decision branches, and if the stream is going quickly, there is less choice involved, whereas if it is running slowly or smoothly, there is a lot of directability.

On the societal level, our basic premise here in the United States is that we are all entitled to life liberty and property, and conventionally we extend this to happiness. Actions that don't impinge on another citizen's path to these are considered alright, and I think that is a fine way to be: don't harm others. Why? Well you wouldn't want it to happen to you, and in the world of generalities (and overall reality) you could just as easily have been born on the other end of that string/strand.

Then what would absolute free will be? Well, the ability to change your body shape, change your environment by thinking.. perhaps even with less effort than is involved in "thinking" with words and images. It's an interesting question, but in general free will is the ability to direct your flow, it doesn't necessarily entail being able to change the pre-existing flow, unless you mean gradually. I find the river and stream metaphor extremely valuable in this context, and have heard karma spoken of in a similar fashion.

Everything dissolves, you can make skillful actions and direct your stream to goodness. Ideally, intelligent and sensitive people are directing their flows to unbound potential, because as you can see, it is easy to continue into a spiral that minimizes, whereas it is actually possible with effort to "flow back up" the mountain, coming to a place of total potential, where you might be able to experience or talk about an "absolute free will"

Thus, in my simpleton opinion, free will is not an absolute unless you are directing your own capacities toward the experience of an absolute freedom.

The Supreme Court thing... could you provide an example?
Nah, they will just sweep it under the rug in the name of national security. Not even a post-mortem because that would put some highly ranked people whom about to become the advisors of the defense industry on the grilling fire.
The thing is - I suspect there are three or so orders of magnitude more of this style of quadcopter:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybtq960nzf8dxl3/Clarkson%20CX10X.j...

Than the sort that'd have any real risk of knocking you out of they fell on you.

I fly this over the heads of my friends/family/colleagues all the time. I probably wouldn't fly one around a newborn, but I've had it batted out of the air by a 2 year old in full view of his laughing mother.

I've got some bigger-but-still-small "250" size quads too - all up ready-to-fly weights of around 300g. I'm more careful with those - but I've intentionally flown them into myself with no more protection than a tshirt - and it kinda hurts, but doesn't "injure" me (again, I suspect the mother of the aforementioned 2 year old would think differently if I unexpectedly hit them with one of these in the local park, but it's still in the frisbee or football kind of injury risk - not a "this'll definitely need an ambulance" category. And I at least tell myself I'm _much_ more in control of this than a football or frisbee in flight, and I _really_ don't want to hit anybody).
It would be crazy profitable.

But it is subsidizing a lot of rides right now, for example "Pool" rides where riders get the discount even if they are the only passenger.