skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got pulled over for driving a Volvo while being non-white. The officer said it was because I didn't come to a full stop at the stop sign. Yes, that was probably just barely technically true at this deserted 4-way stop intersection with great visibility.

He asked me what I did for a living. I should have refused to answer that as irrelevant and none-of-his-business, and I could easily have afforded the unjust consequences (unlike many people who are racially profiled), yet I still felt powerless and coerced to answer. I regret that. I was polite, cooperative, and with my wife. The officer was rude and menacing. The racial profiling and assumptions about how I could be driving a nice car were clear as day.
The U.S. is quite violent compared to many third world countries. Our homicide rate is almost double that of Bangladesh.
Sprint Retrospectives and the Wheel of Change
I don't think using stored procedures should be the focus of the project.

PostgREST is great because it lets you kickstart a CRUD application with ease.

I'm mainly a node.js developer nowadays and I'm using some frameworks to kickstart APIs for my clients - and then I jump in and add features.

What I really want is a solution to build a API server which deals with authentication, exposing my models through REST and other boring and repetitive stuff.
In this way I don't have to focus on everything, but just on the specific problem I'm solving.

I don't think there is a valid solution out there right now.

That's why I'm contributing to PostgREST and I hope to see even more features coming out of it (eg: better authentication, maybe with 3rd party logins).
That script is the best description of Docker I've read.
Relax, he made an joke!
This is sound advice. The technical side of things is important, but do not focus on it myopically. As you are no-doubt already relatively strong technically, it may be worth making a little time to improve your understanding of the business, improve your negotiating skills, etc.

Another useful skill is the art of software project estimation: see e.g. _Estimation Games_ [1] by Rob Thomsett, or Dadhacker's _Keeping Sharp_ [2].

[1] http://www.thomsett.com.au/library/item/estimation-games

[2] http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2267
> Design the app so that no transaction state is kept in the web server, pass idempotent statements through the API with transactional identifiers rather than keep state.

Let me see if I understand what your saying:

1) no transaction state is kept in the web server

So if I'm a bank app, the data to populate the account history table and the form post data to transfer money are not held on to by the web server? You'd have to go out of your way to hold onto that data, unless you had some output caching block on the account history.

Maybe my app is more complicated, and I have some type of long-running job, so I create a job class with all the job parameters, and stick it in Session, Redis, or plain App Memory Cache, while the client polls to see if the job is complete. You're saying don't hold onto the Job class, but just an identifier for the Job.

2) pass idempotent statements through the API with transactional identifiers rather than keep state

How is this done? If the user wants to move $200 from account_a to account_b, twice, how is that handled? Which service generates the transaction identifiers?
Relax. This situation has me riled up too. But s/he was trying to be humorously sarcastic. Not exactly condoned HN comment behavior, and a bit flip given the seriousness of the topic, but not what you thought s/he was saying.

Also the parent says "There are some evidence recording systems..." We don't know if this police department's system is one of those.
So, to start with, it's worth reminding that this is a preprint. It hasn't necessarily been reviewed or anything, so shouldn't be considered a final result.

The basic idea is that they've found an efficient quantum algorithm for solving an NP-hard problem (MAX-E3-SAT). This is a version of the boolean satisfiability problem: given a boolean expression (in this case, in a certain normal form) with N variables, is there some way to set the variables such that the expression is true?

As those familiar with complexity theory will know, if it's possible to solve one NP-hard problem efficiently, it's also possible to solve every NP problem efficiently by adding efficient algorithmic steps. Therefore, we can now use a quantum computer to solve arbitrary NP problems (well, we could if we had a large enough one).

"NP" is computer science shorthand for problems whose answers can be checked efficiently, but cannot be discovered efficiently.

Prior to this, only a few NP problems were efficiently solvable by quantum computers (factoring and things that reduce to factoring, due to Shor's algorithm). With this discovery, any NP problem shares this characteristic. Technically NP only applies to decision problems, but it's generally not that difficult to extend it to computations that produce additional information.

One consequence of this is that it will completely ruin public-key cryptography in the face of a quantum computer: public-key cryptography relies on a hard instance of an NP problem, and no such instances are hard on a quantum computer anymore. This is relatively minor, as we currently use factorization (RSA) or elliptic-curves for public-key encryption, and those were already breakable with Shor's algorithm.

Quantum computers should also be able to reverse hashes and find collisions easily: the NP algorithm for this is trivial. You may not be able to reverse them to the "correct" input, though. If someone were silly enough to use a perfectly good quantum computer to mine Bitcoin, it would be insanely efficient. This is relatively minor as well -- more important than the public key cryptography, but it's not going to cause all computer security to collapse.

Many useful real-world problems are in the NP space: traveling salesman, protein folding, things of that nature. A quantum computer could be used to solve these problems. This would be a really big deal, and overall a great boon to humanity.
American work culture is lousy, but I'm not sure we can all copy Switzerland. There are only so many favorite countries for criminals to hide their money. Switzerland is rich.
Kong is great but adds dependencies to the project (I don't really want to deploy bloody Cassandra for a small API).

And it would be great to have 3rd party logins working in Kong
In fact everywhere of any significance except Africa is already at or bellow fertility rates of 2. As you say education and low child mortality creates smaller families.

The problem is not population (or even food production) but energy consumption. But that effects our first world lifestyle so no one in the first world wants to take it seriously.
I just wonder, does it really matter that it does not run in 20 years?

Most of the stuff we do on the web are momental stuff that is only relevant right now. Stuff like Wikipedia will probably not change much since it's only real purpose it to display text. There is no need for an angular app there and in fact it would be a horrible idea to even make it that way.

The stuff that are meant to last long will if we want to.
Because most of the time it's useless to open source projects that don't compile and run. Though perhaps I am sure there might be someone who might care enough and move in and make it run. I think something like that happened with Tesseract, Google stepped in to make something than was not running, viable.
The paper describes a "proposed" algorithm with a lot of theoretical justification [1]. Is there any way to verify it on a real quantum computer or reliable simulation? I'm thinking of the way that Shor's algorithm was verified [2] using a real quantum device.

[1] I'm not qualified to understand the detail of the paper, although I can appreciate its general outline and the broad consequences of it being correct.

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5707
"Though, honestly - they've got guns, so I've also been pretty sensitive to the fact that if I made them nervous they might shoot me."

That seems reasonable.
This gives the worrying possibiltiy that Apple can benefit from an open source Clang and LLVM now, and in future can make thecomponents required to compile code to their platforms (mainly thinking iOS) proprietary.

They're already moving to encourage / require iOS devs to ship them LLVM IR code - the most logical reason for this is so that they can keep the last part of compilation entirely proprietary in future, taking further freedoms from users and developers.

They design and fab their own ARM chips already, so this is plausible.
How would ad networks respond to that? I can't think of any technically possible way for them to do that (except somehow getting operating systems to build in some crazy DRM scheme).
First post!

:(
More and more cases of voilent killings ... read massacare of african american people by the white americans and police officers.....
Obama shd look in his own shitty country before giving peace lectures to India and the world....
USA the only country where its citizens are targeted by the govt and killed because they are black. The only nation which goes to war with every muslim and black country.
This map shows what different countries view as the greatest threat to the world
hope you are proud of yourself.
Show HN: SqlSmash V2: Faster and Better
Same in NL, but people go around it by making it an opinion instead of a direct insult, then it becomes freedom of speech. As in, instead of saying "You're a dick", you go "I think you're a dick". Subtle, but apparently enough.
Usually, the information is just noise though. And the information is never essential. That combination makes it something I'd rather not use.
IANAL, but I'm going to be frank. The H1B situation is a giant shitshow right now and for the foreseeable future, so don't hold your breath on this one. It has been since 2012 in case you haven't been paying attention since before this year.

To answer your question, the cap is expected to be reached in the very first week of the season because of the lottery, which will begin April 1. In the expected <60% (because you have an MS, otherwise <45%) chance that your application is actually even processed through the lottery, you can only join your employer in October of that year. So essentially you want to get your offer by March 10th at the latest, so have your interviews with them sometime by January. The important thing is you need to find a company with a position that is ok to be left unfilled by a perm till next October.

For most small-to-medium sized companies, this is a long and risky commitment without even getting the benefit of your service. It costs more than hiring a local in terms of USCIS and IRS fees as well as for the HR work. So most companies, unless pressed hard or you have such a compelling case, will shy from extending you an offer even if you are an excellent candidate for the job.

This was not the case till 2012, when it was just a matter of doing a small bit of paperwork pretty much anytime starting from April all the way till around November, and get the H1B ready by October. Until that date, the candidate could be brought on deferred payment with a B1 or other visa and get settled in before October too, and then transitioned when the H1B visa was ready. Now none of these things are available anymore due to much more stringent H1B rules, and essentially it's a logistics nightmare for a US company to hire a non-trade-partner-national.

In the meantime, I'm not sure if you've done it already, but you should have the OPT option available to you if you graduated from a US institute, which will give you a year + 18 months since you're in the STEM service. This is low overhead for any potential employer, and you can ask them to resolve an H1B or other visa while on your OPT.

Source: wrestling with USCIS for my visa for the last 3 years
Don’t Read Blog Posts Unless You’re Taking Something Actionable Out of Them
Yes, but it’s not widely accepted.

And it probably never will be – transactions speeds are horrible (even international wire transfers through SEPA are faster than Bitcoin transactions) and the energy usage of the mining systems is growing exponentially.
Please stop this bizarre insistence that OS X = BSD. Different kernel, radically different OS overall, not open sourced.

Still shares some userland, but this is irrelevant.

For a true picture, look at how well their open sourced Darwin OS project is doing in terms of update and support.

Apple gutted the FreeBSD core team back in the 90s, hiring them all away.
Show HN: A simple, tiny template system. Stop repeating yourself
Fair enough, like I say it just flagged up being as keybase is in invite-only alpha. My mistake!
> "Geoengineering raises huge ethical and political questions, nationally and internationally."

This is true though. We have some treaties[1][2], but not enough, and it still needs to be thought through.

What happens if, say, country A is being badly affected by climate change, and they have the means to pump tonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere? They think it'd help with global warming, but country B doesn't and think it could make the climate worse? Who gets to decide? Do A and B then go to war over this?

No disagreement at all that the research should be done, but it raises huge ethical and political questions, and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. When it comes to technologies that could change an entire planet's climate, opposition as the default position seems entirely reasonable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Modification_Con...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Biological_Diver...
I hack on Guix daily, yet I'm always surprised by the number of new packages and features that make it into each release. I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't get my Linux container implementation in this release, but it should be ready for the next one.
A lot of the Bitcoin proponents are anarcho-capitalist – "I don’t want to have governments building streets from my tax money, I’d rather have every road be a toll road".

Check #bitcoin-assets on freenode, I hung out there for a few weeks, and it’s... crazy.

"How will the government force me to pay taxes? I don’t own bitcoins, I merely happen to have the piece of knowledge that is required to spend them"
Most of the time that's true. Though I've seen some open source software projects being put on Kickstarter, and every one of them ends in disappointment. Either too low pace, or half of the promised features are cut. (Some joke about software estimates.) It's impossible to complimentary increase or rightfully decrease your contribution depending on performance it's one-off funding.
Some counter-points I've heard made:
1) Performance. Stored procedures are fast, meaning it will be longer before you need to scale out.
2) Security. If you only use stored procs, you're a lot less exposed to SQL injections etc.

I don't really have a firm opinion either way, but it's not as clear cut as you are making out.
But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs.

Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.

I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.

Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.

So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.
One of the points of Scott Aaronson's excellent "Quantum Computing since Democritus" is that if you can quickly solve NP problems, you basically have super powers. Forget about SAT or Travelling Salesman, you can now do fast automated theorem provers and the like. Depending on how it were solved, you wouldn't read about P=NP on arxiv, you'd read about someone making billions on the stock market. Aaronson describes it as being comparably implausible to having faster than light communication.

If this paper is true, then it looks to me like quantum computers would be a means of doing that. I'm skeptical. Know those sci-fi stories where they hand-wave a quantum computer to have infinite computing power? Then they simulate the universe or hack all the computers simultaneously or whatever. That's all a laughable misinterpretation of what current state-of-the-art quantum algorithms can do (even if we remove the technical details of constructing the machine). Well, if this paper holds up, then that's a whole lot closer to the truth, maybe!

(Disclaimer: not an expert. I really hope to see Aaronson's analysis of this soon.)
I've noticed that many buildings built during particularly faddish architectural trends tend to very quickly become maintenance nightmares, with repairs costing more than a tear-down and rebuild. It seems lots of these office buildings all over the country were built quickly, to low quality and now nobody wants to move into them. It's not just SV that has this problem.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building the FBI is currently HQ'd out of is 40 years old, and by all accounts should have been razed to the ground 10-15 years ago, only slow government processes keeping the Bureau in it at all.

It's expected to cost $850m-$1.1b to renovate and fix all the problems in the building and bring it up to Class A space (with inflation over time the total number would creep towards $2b). The government has decided that it would be cheaper to move the entire Bureau HQ to another site and build an entirely new building than fix this one.
StarBooks: the distributed library concept – part 1
How it feels to cast the International
If Edge is not on approximate feature parity with Chrome (it isn't), then the benchmark is meaningless.
I've been wondering about this as well. I mean, there's lots of interesting stuff here on HN, but the deeply technical stuff is far and inbetween. And due to the way topics very quickly drop of the first two pages it's hard to discuss more technical stuff.

More often than not I find there was an interesting discussion on some entry, but all the discussion ended 8 hours ago, and nobody will read it now.
Totally agree with your point and I think it is also the reason why we today don't have planes that are so fast as the engineers back in the days dreamt of.

Maybe we don't understand the need for it right now, but if we had kept on improving and "wasting money" on improving the speed and finding new materials we might already would have solved space travel.

As the author points out, spending money on bombs were more important and I don't understand how this is a good thing.
Yeah, I was talking about small to medium sized offices. For large deployments, you'll still need network admins etc, but my point was simply that the general need for these skills is in decline.
In case someone takes his comment seriously, there's mine. In case someone takes my comment seriously they'd agree with the grandparent so no harm done.

There's the chance someone would agree with the grand/parent ('malfunction...', secure, etc.), read my comment, and think... well that's ridiculous.

Case study for "'/s' considered harmful"; Would-be PhDs take note.
I really, REALLY want the cops to be at fault here, but I just don't know about this one. The sound seems to be mostly intact, unless there is some kind of offset because it does crackle and spit at one point. A lot goes on between the suspect and officer ON camera and I wonder what could've possible happened off camera bad enough to warrant being hidden when what's on the camera is already there. I mean, this guy pulled her out of her car and threw her on the sidewalk because she got a bit snarky over a ticket.

Another concern is the absence of a timestamp. This I'm not as worried about because they probably cropped it out. It's definitely understandable, especially for public-facing video to crop out some of more sensitive metadata like time, officer info, car info, etc. It's not nearly as concerning as the video itself.

Then there is the case of the actual jumps themselves. What makes me doubt is that they aren't just jump cuts, there's some stutter and back and forth motion for each cut, and there's also some video artifacts for each one.

I despise the police, I really do. The very idea of police is repulsive and disturbing, in my opinion. That being said, I think LA Times is definitely suspect here for such a bait-y headline over what looks to be an actual video issue. I mean: "arrest video has continuit problems, anomalies"? No shit, the video is messed up. It also has the entire dialogue between the two leading up to the arrest, it even has a whole other stop from another time!

I just don't see the possibility that they are hiding something, when there is so much on tape already.
Well, it's not exactly hard to disable: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2824784?hl=en
The form of the blog post reminded me very much of Jon Berger's Ways of Seeing, a life-changing political book on art history that changes the way you look at the world.

I'd be surprised if the author hadn't read it, or one of its descendants.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ways-Seeing-Penguin-Modern-Classics/...
I was going to offer an invitation, but I don't know you, and I cannot get enough information about you to ascertain that you are not going to be an unpleasant fellow.

How about this: tell me what you think about women in science and technology. That is an important question to me.
Just want to shout about this very comprehensive course by Caltech professor Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
Isolated/far from really effective startup hubs... I would say many countries in Africa and Asia, many cities in Russia, Brazil, China, Australia, etc...
Good catch. Also, from the sentences you've just quoted: "a incorrectly" instead of "an incorrectly"... Now, is the author doing these misspellings deliberately?
He mentions a subreddit dedicated to no rules slowly but surely being taken over by the same kinds of rules lawyer-ing they were trying to escape.

I am so, so glad he mentioned this, because I have seen it happen to two, mid-way three, communities online where these exact societal issues work together only up until they really start to get to know one another, at which point they realize they're at odds. Sometimes it's a clear schism, but the ones that hurt the most are those that remain but are quite clearly forever changed in the favor of one side. It's almost as if they treat it as vindication and banishing a group of people for differences in opinion is, as I said, typically the antithesis of these groups.

My guess is that every online community suffers this sort of breakdown and reinvention if it lasts for more than a few years, but that social justice and other more "modern" ideologies are just the latest and most visible / tracked step in the greater phenomenon.

The internet brought us together, we struggle with that fact every day! :)
Here is the author's previous publication track record:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=CZz2XFIAAAAJ...

His co-author is more infleuntial as measured by number of citations:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=co2yqKoAAAAJ&hl=en
That picture looks like a mugshot. When that link opened up I thought, "Gee, you'd think they'd mention that he was in prison!"

That's really cool. I don't think that just because a person doesn't use a word regularly, that they don't 'deserve' the word or can't play the word on the board. There's THOUSANDS of words, nobody uses all of them.

I hate this attitude towards people who play games over time, and they start showing signs of game theory during play, and suddenly it's 'not about the game anymore', but it's always BEEN about the game. The goal is to win!