skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My work intends to change the aspect of having to be a computer scientist in order to leverage the power of an FPGA by using Haskell/CLaSH as a HDL which is close to mathematics.

Furthermore, the verification of the designs is simplified a lot by checking directly in Haskell over generating VHDL testbenches and then running an additional simulator tool.

Lastly, I hope that with the recent acquisition of Altera by Intel, some of the other issues you mentioned (mainly floating point performance) additionally with some tooling issues will be addressed as well.
The Value of Basic Research
If we are always expected to write new, different, useful, quality code that solves real problems, then no one would ever start programming in the first place.

Everyone needs to start somewhere and maybe for a veteran coder the expectation is to solve new real problems, but for those just starting out, writing and re-writing basic conditionals and loops are more important than solving real problems.

Each project should end in learning something new. For me this config parser (whether anyone actually finds it useful or not) was learning how to write a scanner/parser from scratch. To try and fill a void in my knowledge, rather than solving real problems.
Technology and the Evolution of Storytelling
Google's hidden easter eggs and tricks
It is interesting indeed but the best Sci Fi fiction work in my view is Hyperion.
I am not sure I understand why that's desirable. Why is reading plain text out of /dev/mouse and writing plain text to /dev/draw an improvement over how Linux or OS X or Windows does it?

EDIT: I get that Plan 9 is "more UNIX than UNIX" and that this is an extension of how UNIX behaved. I view that as a philosophical, rather than practical, point though.
The sequels aren't that well written.

The prequels shouldn't have been written.
Thank you. This does a great job of summing up the article. It was exactly what I hoped people would take away from it.
Why You Business Can't Live Without Information Management Consulting
Lack of APIs, maybe?
Tourist arrested on terrorism charge for taking a selfie video
>> Black people don't commit more murders because they're black

>That's a hypothesis. You're free to go about proving or evidencing your position.

Here in Switzerland black Swiss do not commit more murders than other "races". Surely you won't argue the alpine winds changed their genome with respect to black Americans now would you?
Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont
Maybe they have?

Perch http://grabaperch.com/products/perch

Craft https://buildwithcraft.com
Do you care to elaborate on your disagreement?
And UTF-16 random-access strings (like in Java and many other things designed in the 90s) make the problem even worse, because with UTF-8 you will notice the bugs as soon as the first non-English-speaker uses your system, but with UTF-16 the affected languages are a lot more obscure.
He sounds like Arthur C Clarke!
The good think of portable ANSI C, compile anywhere there is a C compiler. Very nice.
Innovation Enterprise - London, ONSITE.

I am one of the Ruby devs there and we want to expand our team.

We are looking for Ruby folk who have experience with Rails, TDD, and preferably scaling out existing projects. DevOps skills would also be a huge plus.

Happy to share a full job spec to anyone who is interested, or you can go here; http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/28683/software-develop...

Applications to tosbourn@theiegroup.com
It isn't obvious from the article that the color interpolation used here matches Gouraud.
Little known fact: when Williams, Kilburn and Tootill were building the SSEM (nicknamed the Baby) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experim... - the World's first stored program computer, some of the parts they used such as switches and so on were the same as those used by the Spitfire builders because there was plenty of them around spare in wartime Britain.

When the reconstruction was being built, the restorers had to track down parts from Spitfires that were no longer airworthy to be as authentic as possible.

Source: I know somebody who spent a lot of time talking to somebody involved in the restoration.
Ask HN: It's 39°C (102F) in Belgium, what hacks do you have to cool down?
We're experiencing one of the biggest heat waves in decades, with temperatures reaching 40°C (more than 100F).

Besides the usual fans and swimming pools, what are innovative tricks to cool down?
To me what is important about email as infrastructure is SMTP and the principles of delay tolerant networking and federation. SMTPs store and forward reliability model is a bedrock of communication on the Internet, when all else fails email won't or it'll die trying.

Anything vying to replace it needs to capture these features. I won't trade reliability for real time. There are other real time channels I can use.
My appartment in Arlington MA has FiOS.
Agreed. I have read all six but only still own the first one.
Stop being cheap and power up those air conditioner units!

Other than that, just take very hot showers and drink hot tea; avoid extremely cold drinks (i.e. beer, soda) and beverages that doesn't really help with water retention (i.e. coffee, alcohol).
I understand that, and having a DSL is definitely a good idea, but you need to create a community, which can be hard (and NVIDIA seems to be good at it). I didn't want to be deceptive, I just wanted to highlight that it was not just a matter of peak FLOPS (in fact it never is - as an engineer working on another niche accelerators I know it too much ;) ).
An academic made a list of interesting facts about p9:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~madthanu/qual-notes/plan9.txt
What are state of the art bitcoin miners using nowadays? That might shed light on which platform is more efficient.
A progress bar that takes 20 seconds to load? What year is this?
Death of hierarchy
Oh, so transit is free?
Uhm, I just went and had a look at learntomod.com. Are all of the kids these days software engineers? The "Blocks" language / tool looks waaay to complicated, how on earth are kids learning that?! This video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFi2Xr5uQow well that would be a perfect candidate for a college level class, I believe, in teaching how to use visual programming software.

And even if kids somehow really grasp what is going on in there, aren't they damaged in some profound way when they will actually have to deal with code? I remember the shock and horror my colleagues had when in college we went from a visual Java builder software to actual coding in the data structures course.

And also, learning JavaScript as a beginning language? With all of the callbacks / asynchronous paradigm traps? Wow, that is really incredible for a kid to understand!
Under Windows, to run a program on one host and display and interact with it on another requires a special "remote desktop" client and special hooks into the graphics driver and kernel.

Under Plan 9, the tool you use to redirect output from one machine to another is just "mount": mount /dev/mouse and /dev/draw from the other machine onto this one, run the command you want, and they appear on the remote machine - no changes required to the kernel or graphics drivers or any other part of the system.

Of course, remote display is just one application - since Plan 9 exposes just about everything as a filesystem, you can mount a remote machine's TCP stack or editor session or authentication keys or even actual ordinary file storage, transparently and easily.
Signatures to Remove Ellen Pao as CEO of Reddit Eclipses 73,000
> The pride - plenty of which may now just be mimicry - didn't derive from a flag, it originally derived from the ideas the flag represented.

I suspect the whole point is that a symbol has replaced the values and ideals it is supposed to represent, and that this extra step makes everything 'murkier'.

Being proud of specific things like universal health care or free education makes a lot more sense than being proud of a flag that indirectly might represent these things, mainly because it's easier to discuss these specifics.

That said, when it comes to actual pride I agree that many Europeans are very proud of 'Europe' and/or their country, and sometimes there's more than a little hypocrisy in the way we judge the USA.
Render realtime RethinkDB results in React
Bitcoin miners use ASICs, though the progression was from GPUs to FPGAs, since FPGAs are more efficient than GPUs in terms of power.
seems like a massive waste of resources... you're making 800 http requests to firebase. If you don't want to use a database at least setup some sort of cron that just updates a giant JSON file so the users don't have to DDOS firebase.

Other than that it looks great.
The Plan 9 C compiler isn't even 100% ANSI conformant. But quite close.
I wouldn't be surprised if the OP didn't have A/C. It's very common in Northern Europe not to have it.
Nope, they link to a draft of the spec (http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~cforall/refrat.pdf) which dates from May this year.
Quick question: If one were to look for such quantitative figures that you provided what would be a good way to find them.
Deposit your physical cash notes and coins to the bank with your smartphone
Dupo is a start up idea I want to develop that collects the direct cash notes and coins you want to deposit in your b-account and us will make a rapid transfer of the amount you need to dispose for a small fee.

Currently looking for feedback to keep this idea alive.
Dune and the Foundation series are by far my favorite SF series. The reason? Both have unparalleled universe depth. To today I still recite the Dune fear prayer to myself once in a while, I still think about how the Foundationeers used technology as a means to control the Galaxy after the fall of the Empire, I still think of spice as several natural resources on Earth today, etc.

I believe all the books in the Dune series are valuable and even enjoyed the prequels since they gave a background to the story that was just lightly touched in the originals. For me, they completed the Universe and helped me answer the "Why did they do/think...?"

P.S. The Dune 1 game also ruled! It was the first game on my 486 and boy did it help me get a lot of ladies :)
Yes I do generally agree with you. I went a bit overboard - somewhat HN pushes me over the edge sometimes :-(

Lamb metaphore would not do Go the justice indeed. I do like Go, but also do not like some opinion which oversimplify reality.
Ask HN: What are some open source projects in need of contributions?
I'm not sure what to think of this. On one hand this hack into the OS to improve the UX seems genius. On the other hand, what if the next version of the OS is not so easy to hack? Users will be upgrading to a new OS, but suddenly not able to use dropbox.

Also, doesn't hacking into the OS void the warranty?
What is... oh... UTF-16, the gift that keeps on giving... this is, at the same time, utterly hilarious and horribly depressing:

https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

But there is actually prior art here - Java's contribution to perverse Unicode encodings is called "Modified UTF-8" and encodes every UTF-16 surrogate code unit separately.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/DataInput.h...
Which is exactly what grandparent said:

> All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace.
Becase basically you just need to know one set of APIs, this time the file open/close/read part of your C library. The rest is "just" protocols. No arcane calls to open sockets or query mice, you treat everything like a file-handle.

There are plenty of attempts at these outside of P9, of course. Linux and other Unices does part of this with the /proc filesystem. Plenty of scripting languages let you access URLS like files in their IO system. File managers treat archives like directories. FUSE lets you mount a foreign system's file system via ssh…

In Plan 9 this was the core concept and didn't require special treatment. Ideally you'd build your whole user-accessible system around this.

Other attempts at unified APIs were single-language image-based systems like Smalltalk, Common Lisp or Oberon (the latter being a major influence on P9, to be polite). There function-/method-calls took the place of the file system api.

Or object-based systems, where you had an interoperable object protocol taking care of interconnectivity. Doing everything via CORBA or COM calls. Actually, Windows' PowerShell is a pretty decent combination of the old Unix UI and this.

Personally, I see two problems that really ruin things for the Plan 9 approach. First of all, "just protocols" isn't as simple as it seems. So you access your hardware device or network server as a file or set of files. Great, but what do you read and write to that? Conceptually you moved from calling a "do_widgety_thing()" function to a "DO WIDGETY THING" protocol message. API design is still hard. Just like "do everything via REST" isn't the solution to all of your programming problems.

Second of all: This aims at a high level of genericity. And in this world of the web, apps and services, that's not popular due to lack of a commercial appeal.
The feature may not be in the C++ standard but the main compilers support it anyway (__restrict__ in GCC and Clang, __restrict in MSVC).
Given that most projects, the power costs are much higher than the upfront equipment costs and that the dominating factor on computational density and interconnect speeds is our thermal budget, I'd think it's really a question of Tflop/watt.
Watch a Malibu Hair-Pro Cut Like a Boss
If the e-mail is simply stored persistently until it's fetched succesfully (over HTTP), isn't that delay resistant networking? Are persisting proxies really important?
I really enjoyed the sequels, personally. I think the 2nd and 3rd have some low points in them with the very unappealing Alia character taking up a lot of the text. But the 4th book (God Emperor of Dune) really reframed the series as an aeon spanning meditation on civilisation and governance and institutions, while building around the fascinating concept of prescience. Then the 5th book is a real thriller with shades of the original. It also has a couple of great twists.
This sounds extremely exciting. But there's one question: how do I tell someone to subscribe to a stream? Do I need to email them a link to my stream? The killer feature of email is that it allows anyone to contact anyone else.

Also, issue tracking is something that could be replaced with a stream...
Eat Butter – 80's fat study flawed
Go to a public library which has an A/C, get some work done or just read a book :)
I think you'd configure your client to pull e-mail as a stream or a collection of streams (with filters). You can then in your client fuse or split the streams into the rest of your streams. It could be a pretty fluent transition in my imagination.
A public job offer to Victoria Taylor
Okay,but what does this buy you other than some leaky abstractions? A local file is not the same thing as a remote file, a local mouse is not the same thing as a remote mouse, and a local file is definitely not the same thing as a remote mouse. All that code in Windows that Plan 9 'doesn't need' contains a lot of logic for dealing with remote displays and input devices that is probably going to have to reside in your application if the OS isn't providing it. Simplicity is only a virtue if it's real; false simplicity is just kicking the can down the road for the next poor bastard to deal with.
Sounds like Usenet re-invented, where stream == newsgroup.
Very interesting. It seems recessions always accelerate economic shifts. Any similar articles about Europe?
No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage
To help you sleep lay a damp towel over top of you. The evaporating moisture cools you nicely.
What about systems other than Linux?
the results were far from what we wanted

That could be the reason why they didn't want to release any source code.
sadly, kuro5hin is dead; this post is from 2009
I imagine that if you have more instructions (a few hundred) the overhead of the switch starts to become significant. At 256 opcodes you need 8 jumps, and hence 8 CPU cycles. That's non-trivial, especially if most of the opcodes can be implemented more quickly than this. For example, a quick Google search says that for an Intel CPU, addition is 1 cycle and multiplication is 3 cycles.
Taig 2.3.1 download release to be with latest bug fixes
Redstone is neat, but try it with a mod such as RedLogic. It gives you the basic logic gates——and, or, xor, timers, pulse formers, etc.——which makes it all much simpler to get started.

It does mean you can skip much of the "physics of redstone", but I don't know how valuable learning that is in the first place. The physics of Redlogic is a fair bit simpler.
A quiz on US States
I think it's purely intuitive concept, with no clear definition. But without it, literally every particle in this universe is making an impact.
I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense. What would be the one paragraph summary of this paper?

The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many different areas of science. Was the intent that the reader will understand, or just be impressed by the math?

The mention of Deepak Chopra in the Acknowledgment section lends further support to my "perception" that this is not a legitimate paper, but an intellectually-dishonest attempt at disguising improv-style nonsense behind impressive-sounding physics jargon.
Ask HN: Why Node.js and for which type of App?
Hi guys,

i'm a computer scientist student and previously read a lot about Node.js. But, to be honest, i have not really a feeling for what i can use a node.js App. Is it a desktop application where i can use html to render the views and the communication between view an backend works i.e. with a RestAPI? Or is it for pure web applications?

Thanks a lot for your inputs.

edit: started yesterday with the node.js tutorial from Visual Studio Code and was just curious what type of app i can build with it
My Amiga 1200 setup
Do you think today's median worker would take a 20% (adjusted dollars) pay hike in exchange for having to live in 1973's economy? I don't think so (I wouldn't do it for 100%!), which suggests your statistics are painting an incomplete picture.

Cost of living goes up when there's more desirable stuff to live on, not just bare monetary inflation. And wages aren't equal to income. Also, demographics! Many more workers, including more per household and more newer to these shores.
You shouldn't be making large grids for the web. Terrible practice. You should paginate.
MIT: Solve
Actually, a lot of internal business style applications fit Mnesia's model too (if you're hosting them in a single datacenter). While it means you'll need to manually deal with netsplits (or write your own code to address them, or try to borrow https://github.com/uwiger/unsplit), if you're hosting it internally on your own servers, that might be a rare enough event (and with sufficiently minimal likelihood/consequence of things going down, coming back up, etc, such as to introduce problematic inconsistencies rather than downtime/ignorable inconsistencies in the event of major network/system thrashing) as to be worth it for certain things.

Something, like, say, file processing. You have a watch directory, you want to be able to process everything that lands in that directory in a scalable manner, but don't want to re-process the same thing (but it's okay if you do, just inefficient). Mnesia is probably fine to keep tabs of what you've processed already; in the event of a netsplit you can just let all sides of it keep going, until you get around to fixing the cluster. Your inconsistencies just lead to inefficiencies, rather than real data loss, and you have a clear path to fixing them (just dump the data on the partitioned nodes, and rejoin them to the cluster). As such, you have a more resilient, scalable system than you would if you just used a centralized database, while not having to configure and manage a separate DB.

That said, I like the idea of being able to swap Mnesia out for something a little less warty, if it's pretty seamless in operation.
Nice pictures, but they should really have indicated the filesize for the 3000-sample version and given more details about this part:

the samples can be saved and zipped up

Depending on the algorithm the results could vary wildly - there could be some characteristic of the samples that make them encodable in a smaller/easily-compressible way.

It also reminds me of this:

http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/50299/draw-an-im...
Metaprogramming to the full power sounds like Lisp. It doesn't have goto.
Please actually try researching the concepts and papers about Plan 9 and Inferno before making such sophomoric statements as "A local file is not the same thing as a remote file." As if no one has thought about this before.
AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency [pdf]
What a weird typing / prolog-cut mechanism.
I'll chime in with this conceptual map of the article (as far as i read it anyway):

Perception->Visual perception->Ontology of visual perception and consciousness->Quantum physics->No.

edit: Actually, when i think about it, there's something analogous to Goodwin's law in papers/articles about the mind and consciousness. Whenever quantum physics becomes a topic the whole article just unravels into nonsense. This is of course obvious to anyone who've studied the physical properties of the mind (We don't even understand how whole braincells work together to form mental phenomena and conscious thought, so anything on a sub-atomic level is just out on a bike-ride (Norwegian idiom, sorry)).
A company providing a service might turn to open source a software project if they do not want to turn into a software company. If I understand correctly MySQL AB was a company that developed an open source DB but made money selling support and training (and also sold a non open version of MySQL). The company later sold for $1 billion, so there must have been some benefit.
Which other niche accelerators?
I understand from what you're saying that bitcoin is continually dependent on social customs that have already reached the verges of failure.

At the moment (some) miners are motivated to avoid 51% attack because they gain more from protecting Bitcoin's value than they do from profiteering with a 51% attack.

If that stops being the case, even for a moment, then the 51% attack will happen.

http://www.coindesk.com/eba-51-attack-remains-bitcoins-bigge... [2 weeks ago]
It didn't just pass 73,000, it "eclipsed" it, says a website whose every headline seems designed to stir up sentiment against a progressive agenda.
To me the problems with email have more to do with spam and privacy than threads and real time.

We shouldn't have a unique address but rather give a unique random token to anyone asking for our email address which could be severed (or bound to receive from a single address, ie that counterparty can not transmit that token to anyone as my server wouldn't receive mail from another address).

We should have systematic guarantees that the sender is the mailbox it pretends it is.

Encryption in smtp should be mandatory.

We should have an easy to use content encryption (pgp style).

Ideally you would like to decorrelate the address from the service provider (lots of people are prisoners of gmail, hotmail or their ISP).

I am sure we can make the chistmas list much longer but to me these are the major issues with the current system.