skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Testing for absolute error is often incorrect

True, but in this case it was to test for near-zero values so absolute error comparison is good enough.

Here's a few macros I have been using to compare floating point values for approximate equality. It should be true if the values are equal to about 6-7 decimal places (in base-10). I use this in testing some code that deals with algorithms that have known numerical precision issues. The errors are inherent to the algorithms, not specifically floating point errors (e.g. solving Kepler's equation for near-parabolic trajectories).

Note that it isn't specified whether "a" or "b" is the "gold" value to compare against, so it's measuring the relative error against a rough average of the two magnitudes.

#define ZEROF(x) ((x)*(x) < DBL_EPSILON)
#define EQF(a, b) ((ZEROF(a) && ZEROF(b)) || \
ZEROF(((a)-(b))*((a)-(b))/((a)*(a) + ((b)*(b)))))

I am no scientist, so if anyone has improvement to the code above, I'll gladly take any feedback.
In iojs/node, you can force v8 strict mode through the --use_strict flag, saving you from writing in every file.
I can't count the amount of times I see this text being posted. Yet it takes something like a degree in math/CS/... to read and understand it completely; it is really not suitable for everyone.

As such I bookmarked Essential facts about floating point calculations so next time a psychologist or biologists comes asking me if I already knew matlab has a bug when comparing 0 to 0, I can point him/her to this document. And some proper code to compare floating point numbers using a relative error or so.
Why would a person who isn't a member of ICANN not be free to comment personally on publicly available information using as medium their personal blog?
> According to me, the dutch startup scene is like any other european startup scene. Theres always few success stories and alot of failures.

I agree with you.

To be honest, the high tech and industrial start ups I know of don't identify with the startup scene much. They're seriously working on solving a problem or pushing some new tech to market; they care about something more tangible than an app and growing big. In contrast, all the startup bootcamps, startup meetings, and other startup hypes seem to focus on apps and starting up as an aim in itself. But, given my background in research, I seem to be biased in my preference for startups with more depth with respect to research and development.
What part made you believe the author was an advocate for IF? I didn't get that at all.
Python's support for scientific computing is far superior to Ruby's though. Horses for courses.
While very neat in my experience this has two issues (using Python's line_profiler so it may not have the same problems):

1. it adds significant overhead to execution speed which means savings under line_profiler and savings without it may only be distantly related, not sure how much overhead pprof adds

2. it requires knowing which functions should be line_profiled, because when you have thousands or millions of LOCs, you've got no idea what to line-profile

I've never found "usual" whole-program profilers to be great at the latter, it may just be that I'm bad at reading them but they never really click, and when you've got a few "leaf functions" called from basically everywhere, they end up having a low SNR. Recently however I've started using sampling profilers and flamegraph representations[0] (or sunbursts, but there's no standard tool for that one) and found it to be a significantly superior way of identifying bottlenecks with very high SNR.

[0] http://www.brendangregg.com/FlameGraphs/cpuflamegraphs.html
Find your next travel destination visually
I agree regarding day 2 onwards - the main problem is if anyone else in the house (rest of the family) is cooking, as the heightened sense of smell brings in psychological hunger.
All depends on what you call a "great thing".
The generalisation isn't the problem. It's entirely possible that 90% of the people he dealt with were complete beginners. The problem is referring to those people as "tech-handicap". That isn't 'brutally honest'; it's being mean.

A good product evangelist is someone who can talk about the people they've met in the same way regardless of whether or not those people are still in the room. That is the skill that makes you good at evangelising something - if people like you they'll listen to you. If people see you being nasty they won't, because they'll wonder if you're going to be nasty about them once they leave.
> he central theme as I'd see it is the domination of humans by 'oracles'

That is exactly what Herbert set out to write. In his own words:

> I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

> Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

From Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert:

http://moodleshare.org/mod/page/view.php?id=2453
> When even human experts have a hard time determining which typeface is which you know it is a hard problem

A font is just a series of images with standardised traits. Computers are great at recognising these traits, and perfect for cross comparing them. It's just pixels.
I'd define it as me paying 90% taxes last year, while my country is still getting worse.
What is "evangelist"? I see this term often, but don't really understand it.
> Why not just do a federated network of servers like Usenet?

Or SMTP-like, but instead email messages, federations share content/votes/...
What if it was a deliberate effort from Hacking Team itself to fake a breach, produce a torrent file to be downloaded and compromise whoever is downloading it?

The size would need to be large enough that whoever trying to download it will have to stay a relatively long time.
I haven't had breakfast since about 2007. Well, of course there are days where I do have it when I'm staying over at a hotel, or I'm at an early work function. But I don't make breakfast for myself at home. My first meal is between 12h30 and 13h30. I don't feel any worse (or better) than when I used to eat breakfast in the past, but it's been so long that I really can't tell. I suppose this can be considered a type of fasting because of the length of time between lunch and supper the previous night.

I've never really understood the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day because I've never suffered from any ailments because not eating breakfast. Or maybe I have and I just don't know it? But then I could apply that same logic to times when I got inexplicably ill or just was not performing at my peak and I did have breakfast. My point is that I don't notice any significant changes in my health and or behaviour.

Of course I don't advise anyone doing this (or NOT doing - check with your physician first), but I still firmly believe that there is a lot of about diet and fitness that has to do with the physiology of the individual.

(BTW, if anyone else thought the linked article sounded familiar it might be because you've read it already. It was published 1 year ago)
Fruit juice is sugar. It's debatable then if it's a real IF.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't that the same as static properties on classes in Java?
Yes Australia got lucky. The point I was making is that it is hard to play well when you are dealt the hand Greece was dealt in 2008.
To be honest, after reading that, I don't have a clue why he wants to be an evangelist, or whether he has any clue what it actually means. That description could perfectly describe the reason to become a product manager, or a support lead.

IMHO it should've been an elevator pitch, describing which parts of being an evangelist sound interesting to him. Communication is a key part of being an evangelist.
Awesome. Thank you for the cool word!
There's a whole world of fine and unusual teas to discover and enjoy. When I fast, I want a tea that provides more meaty aromas and a more complex taste experience – a food substitute that also gives a 'cleansing' sensation. (It's hard to be precise about what I mean by 'cleansing', but something like the opposite of the typical cloying English breakfast black tea). A fine kabusecha or gyokuro with their intense umami flavors can provide that. At the moment I have some Japanese 'bancha goishicha', a wildly different style from the green teas made from the same plants, a strange and strangely delicious double-fermented tea with tangy seaweed and mushroomy notes that is like a meal in itself.
How often are research/litrature reviews peer reviewed? All the references are there, you can check them youself with little effort. There are no results that need to be replicated. To verify no bias exists in the presentation of the existing research, you'd basically have to reproduce the entire output of this paper (i.e. go and find and report on every single study out there related to fasting to ensure the results have been fairly presented). That's not so much a review as a replication of the research and I cannot see how a journal would have the resources to do that. What benefits would peer review give in this case?
There's an additional caveat that may be of interest.

If you execute code in parallel, you may pick up different round-off errors unless you take care to combine the results from parallel tasks in the same order every time.

This can be a problem when simulating non-linear dynamical systems (such as the Solar System).
Looks really nice. I'm a big fan of Soulver[1] too, which is basically a more featureful and less minimalist version of this. I've also tried Calca[2], which seems really good but ultimately didn't replace Soulver for me.

On a tangential note, it's really nice to see that the Mac app scene still turns out these kinds of more experimental apps. Long may it continue!

[1] http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/
[2] http://calca.io/
Feature request: Inline comments and multiline calculations woulds be nice.
What a junk comment. Get yourself a culture. This is the kind of BS people say when they mistake marketing with reality. Scratching the surface of western propaganda will teach you that beyond the "Mark Zuckerberg" effect there is an army of bright professionals who have revolutionized their field or industry with hard work, uncommon skills and (most of all) a consistent attitude OVER THE YEARS. At 24, in most cases, you are barely mature enough to actually START having the kind of consistency required to make great things.
I agree; I try to go out and have a small walk if someone cruel is having curry or anything else strong :-)
Also, I'm lucky that I have a separate 'lab' building where I can go and do some hacking during dinner, most excellent excuse to go spend some time with the CNC or 3d printer :-)
> And it's a bit rich to talk about the "competent" Greek economist vs. his "incompetent" EU counterparts when they're the ones with the money and he isn't.

So you mean that all competent economists are in rich countries, and all incompetent in poor ones?

Does the same apply to other disciplines? Like all good mathematicians are in the US and India? All good painters are in the Netherlands? etc

How sad! I now realize that coming from a country with less than average literary achievements, no matter how I try I won't be ever able to write! I thank you for saving me the effort to try!

What a funny world!
In the big WWDC keynote, they said they wanted to help kick things off with a Linux port this year.
Your post has inadvertently cemented how little sense of community I get from being a "tech" person. Tech doesn't feel like a town hall meeting in a new home I just haven't integrated with yet, it feels like commuting into NYC for work and looking around on a subway car.

I don't know what shared credit or shame I take part in sharing that is specific enough to identify with. Do we really respond to events together? A decade ago I may have said yes, but now all the opinions I see getting play are bog standard points plucked from the American political spectrum. Nothing wrong with that pre se, it just indicates to me whatever tech was, it's too large and/or too assimilated to have unique perspectives anymore.

The "voices" of tech are more and more often tech-adjacent rabble rousers or wanna-be standard-bearers. I don't identify with them any more than I do the corporate speech of big brands trying to play up the fact their core product is software in an attempt to use the cachet of tech and make their corporatism more palatable.

Over a decade ago I did have a sense of community in tech, but even then it was a community defined by unreasonable passion in a corner of a subfeild. Now that the headcount has exploded across the board, I'm supposed to own a non-programmer troll on twitter, or micro-aggressions at an office more degrees of separation away from myself than Kevin Bacon?

The only time I felt any sense of community in the last few years, is when someone is telling me I belong to one and online harassment is my responsibility.
> Many calculations still benefit from the extended precision compared to 64-bit.

Out of curiosity, can you name some examples?

64 bit doubles are really precise, to give a practical figure: a 64 bit float is good enough to calculate the orbit of Neptune to a precision of half a millimiter (0.497 mm). That's a distance of about 30 AU = 4.5 * 10^12 m = four and a half billion kilometers.

> The issue also crops up agian on some platforms that can do 128-bit float, but are then truncated down to 64-bits for storage.

Which CPU architectures use 128 bit floats internally? Is it common to use such platforms?

What comes to x87, I'd imagine that the difference in speed in comparison to SSE is already a good enough reason to not use 80 bit floats in most practical applications.

Perhaps some nuclear simulations or particle accelerator physics deal with numbers that vary in magnitude so greatly that increased precision may be useful but these cases are really rare (albeit important).
"Materialized views are not supported through Thrift"
Ask HN: Where to switch from Gmail?
Hello everyone,

I would like to switch from Gmail to another email provider with a bit more privacy. I know it won't change anything but as they say "Be the change that you wish to see in the world.". I have no problem to pay if it's not so expensive. I don't care much about external things like calendar but I would need some import to import all my old emails. I would like also to make my parents switch at some point if it works well for me, we will see.

Do you have any recommendations for a new email provider ? I would like to have some advice on this and your recommendations if you have done this in the past. Changing an email address is not something to take lightly and I would like to switch to a provider who is likely still going to exist in the next 5 years.
You make a valid point that the term he used is harsh and mean. But don't assume he is a bad person, you can't say he isn't evangelist material based on 1 wrong term he used.

If we're gonna hold words against people, well obama isn't president material, because you remember that one time he said the N-word. No president should use racial slurs. You see what I'm getting at.
but yeah, a bunch of dictators
“Accompany Jews in Malmö to protect them from Muslim gangs”
I don't think your view quite reflects reality.

- We have made and will continue to make massive medical advances. Look at things like cancer survival rates, for example.
- Drug-resistant TB is actually treatable, and the reason for its existence in the first place is poor treatment practices that encourage the development of resistance. If this is a failure of anything, it's healthcare protocol rather than science.
Actually quite a lot of people claim otherwise. If you watch mainstream news after a massacre, you frequently see everything from video games, to the state flag, to national attitudes regarding mental illness, to bad parenting, to bullying, to nearly any other non-gun topic blamed for the tragedy.

As long as mass shootings are discussed as a uniquely "US-issue" and not simply as a uniquely "Gun-ownership issue" these red herring discussions will continue. Especially as the narrative that the US is different from the rest of the world is one we love to tell (even when negative). There is a difference, but that difference is only the # of guns. All other sociological differences don't seem significant.

Now as I've said elsewhere in this thread, the issue of gun ownership has a heck of a lot more nuance than the two sides seem to recognize, and personally I find that I don't have enough solid data to be pro-gun or anti-gun, and mostly just want for the country to finally agree this is an issue worth spending national dollars on studying.

But I think so far we're much more likely to end up with studies on video game violence, mental health treatment models, etc, as NO ONE on TV utters anything but rhetoric after these events, and ironically these extremely rare and statistically insignificant (but anecdotally significant) events are the only time it comes up at all.

In fact, the leading cause of gun deaths in the US is suicide. And there's actually some REALLY interesting data and discussion to be had there (such as extrapolating bridge suicide nets with successful suicides before and after), and with around 20,000 annually this is a much bigger public safety issue than a few hundred spree shooting deaths, but it's also a discussion we'll simply never have at a national level.
Yes Australia got much luckier than we really deserved. Having a relatively small population sitting on top of a huge amount of natural resources allows us a lot of slack. I only wish we did more with our lucky situation.
I'm not really trying to do it 'by the book' -- I think it's better that you come up with something that works for you.

Fasting with just water is a bit tough, as you can get a metallic taste in your mouth that is rather disagreeable. So that's my 'fix' for that problem.
I'm on windows trying to download this. qBittorent gives an error message on import, utorrent does nothing (0% metadata loaded) and transmission loads metadata to 100 % and then starts over. In the logfile it says: "[ERROR] Hacked Team: Invalid metadata entry "path"". Transmission version is 2.84 (14386). Is there anyone loading this torrent on windows?
The "/s" means he's being sarcastic...
In cases where the iteration can’t be avoided, it’s vital to understand you won’t get the expected result. A certain amount of rounding error will always accumulate.

You can track the error and account for it during iteration to avoid errors accumulating. See, for example, Kahan summation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_summation_algorithm
Nice. It would be nicer if you actually put any effort in describing what the heck is this instead of describing what it is written in.
Based on prior Apple behavior, they will first ship iOS and OS X, and then they do all their open source drops after the releases.

Presumably, new iOS and OS X will ship this fall, so the open source drops will come soon after. Hopefully fall, but winter at the latest.
Basically everything that can be done with 80-bit floats can be done with techniques such as compensated summation and double-double arithmetic. This requires several 64-bit operations per operation, but those operations can take advantage of SIMD capabilities when processing several inputs in parallel.
Lexical Scanning in Go (2011)
I think he is referring to the fact that the result should be around 0.8999, not 8.9999.
Around 2004/2005 I think. I'd always been interested in computing, and wanted to learn some programming. I'd seen these posters up with BASIC code on them and naively assumed that's the kind of thing we'd do, only to turn up and literally to given print-outs going step-by-step how to use a word processor. "Click Start" (screenshot), "Move the mouse to Programs" (screenshot), etc. It was completely demoralizing for someone young and curious. And the teacher had zero interest too--no desire to hold a conversation or explain anything. (Not sure what those BASIC posters were about after, maybe that was for A level students).

I understand that perhaps you wouldn't teach programming in ICT, but I'd at least have hoped to learn more about computing generally. The whole thing was just a very sad experience. No one there learnt anything new. Most spent their time playing games or being bored.

The only good thing it taught me was that I was better off teaching myself when it came to computing, at least given the alternatives available to me back then.

Edited to add: The sad thing, for me, is that I chose ICT over a foreign language (I couldn't do both in my school), while I was then top of my class in German and would've liked to continue it. But I didn't, and I'm mildly irritated about that to this day--I'm only now picking up German again. My school offered very little guidance, all things considered, but I took it for granted at the time that that's just how the system worked.
but in this case it was to test for near-zero values so absolute error comparison is good enough

Unless you are working with small numbers? Suppose you are dividing 1e-30 by 1e-30 than the result should still be 1 so if you return 0 when the second argument is < 1e-6 then you're screwed.

I think boost's close_at_tolerance does what your macro tries to do; basically you say 'here's two numbers, check if their values differ no more than x% of their value' With the advantage that it is not a macro and guards against overflow etc: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_37_0/boost/test/floating_poi....
What I want so see now is legal action, anything else is not relevant.
It is, quite simply, the tagline of his website[1] that the OP linked from: "Strength Training & Intermittent Fasting At Its Best"

[1]: http://www.lift-heavy.com/
I apologise if this sounds bad, because it is.
Maybe there's some truth to the "Germany should show compassion like the allies did".

To quote,
"he Allies also confiscated large amounts of German intellectual property (patents and copyrights, but also trademarks).[27] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the US pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany"

Reference here,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indu...

If you do the research, the U.S. Leveraged a similar deal over the UK to obtain all patents royalty free as an incentive to enter WWII.

There may be some leverage that can be applied. These corporate and IP raids netted the U.S. hundreds of trillions of dollars.

I was first devastated when I first found this out. It reminded me that the line between the "goodies" and "baddies" was not so clear.
That's a very poor TL;DR. There have been many studies involving animal responses to fasting. There have been fewer human studies due to the difficulty of performing controled studies on humans but reading this report will give you an idea of where the data is lacking. Saying 'no one has studied it properly' comes across as a little unfair.
Hướng+dẫn+làm+món+cá+kèo+kho+tộ+miền+Nam+-+Bắc
Shareware is not dead, but I would say the term 'shareware' is.

These days it's just software. You have free software that gives you a limited user experience or timed trial to decide if you want to buy the full thing.

Look at any app store and look at the free rankings. It's practically full of nothing but "lite" versions that only exist to give you some features to help you decide whether you want to pay for the full version.

If anything 'shareware' is more alive than ever although it goes by different names these days, 'lite', 'freemium', etc.