skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'll bet Apple won't consider "Install from Apple Store" type messages as ads.

Apple won't consider anything as ads. What they provided was the hooks for developers to implement "Content Blocking Safari Extensions" [1]. To quote the docs:

"Your app extension is responsible for supplying a JSON file to Safari. The JSON consists of an array of rules (triggers and actions) for blocking specified content. Safari converts the JSON to bytecode, which it applies efficiently to all resource loads without leaking information about the user’s browsing back to the app extension."

There will be competing AdBlocking extensions just like on Firefox, for instance. It will be up to the developers to create the rules of what should be blocked and what should be allowed.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
following a European model where banks have historically turned a blind eye toward (or even actively courted) criminal clientele

I don't think this is particularly a US/EU distinction. Switzerland's history of banking privacy and neutrality, possibly.
Like the New York Times....pretty sure they're not all "bullshit media rewriters" there.

Expect a LOT more "Become a member" or "Subscribe to..." websites as adblockers become more popular.
Obama pledges US will build ‘exascale’ supercomputers within 10 years
Blood samples, I believe, can be stored cryogenically for some period of time and evaluated at a future date using tests/techniques not yet developed at the time the sample was originally drawn.

The efficacy of all this depends on having a rock-solid chain-of-custody for the blood samples-- just like evidence used for a criminal court. Not easy.
Mitro lives on as Passopolis
It can be both. If people find the ad supported web unpleasant, doing the right thing for the user experience is also something that benefits their bottom line.
Websites can track us by the way we type – here's how to stop it
> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users?

Which begs the question:

How long will content providers last if they decide to not show content to iOS users?
Adaway just modifies your /etc/hosts file to redirect ad domains to localhost. That definitely doesn't seem expensive...
[Be careful, jokes are usually downvoted here.]
I use Yaware.TimeTracker for this (http://blog.yaware.com/track_time)
I found this title misleading. I thought this would be an article about how much power is consumed by the browsers of visitors to popular sites, e.g. the energy footprint of one day of Reddit's users based on the length of time of the average daily visit and how much battery each of the major browsers consumes in that time or something.

What it's actually about is how much power is consumed by different browsers using popular websites on one machine. That isn't actually as interesting as I'd hoped.
The side effect of this that Apple doesn't mind at all, is that it will help kill the Web and make people more dependent on apps.
And the Ad-network rearchetechture is probably already built. The way all of these adblockers are typically implemented is an IP/DNS Name black list where the requests to those locations are stopped short. There is a super simple solution though, those who want to leverage ads for revenue can just bundle the advertising material into the content of the page rather than including the ads via third party ajax calls. Sure perhaps you could then play another iteration of cat and mouse by trying to tease out ads from NLP or with some sort of visual hashing, but at the end of the day, that is a much more difficult technical challenge than blocking ajax calls or bundling content.
Free Boost.Build EBook: Introduction to Bjam
Absolutely vote with your wallet! It's one of the great features of capitalism that few disparage. Avail yourself of the opportunity.

I get the whole "I want to tell people why I'm not buying their product" mentality and whatnot. I feel the same way a lot of times. But complaining in general isn't going to get you anywhere and even if this HN thread totally blows up, it's not going to sway anyone at Amazon or Clarkson, Hammond or May. It'll literally never be on their radar.

So at this point you're complaining for the sake of complaining. Fair enough! I do it all the time too.

But you're not really telling them anything, since they'll never see it.
If you can get root on your phone you can easily block 90% of advertising. The AdAway already mentioned is great but I also would suggest DroidWall and then you can effectively whitelist or blacklist any Android applications from using the network at all. Some apps only use your network connection to serve ads and in that case you just block those apps.
I have access to the 6th fastest super computer and I'm pretty sure that it is not used to simulate nuclear explosions.
IMHO if you need to break down a task well enough to run on a supercomputer, there isn't a lot more to do to make it run on a regular server farm.

edit: Actually, in the scenarios you'd use a supercomputer for, the added latency and overhead (shoddy servers, network, etc.) would most likely make the run time orders of magnitude higher.
This is the start of an arms race. I expect by the time this launches there will be tools provided by the ad-networks to detect blockers and allow the content provider to block access.
Any language used for producing high performance software requires more than just beginner knowledge, each one just has its own specific things along with general cross-lang concepts to keep in mind.
Ever visited one of those free live streaming websites? 20 layers of ads with tiny close buttons, that sometimes themselves trigger redirects. It's the perfect example of how ads make you want to punch your screen.
More like how long will content providers last if iOS users block their ads? Showing the content doesn't mean anything if they can't monetize it.
Buying an iPhone locks you into the ecosystem. There can't be many people who own one who've never installed any apps from the app store.
Everytime I read such articles I am reminded of my stay in Germany. In those 5 years I behaved exactly the way the author behaves, and shared same thoughts as the author.

And then I came back to India and I am so totally different man now, I wonder if the whole autism spectrum has society as an influential input too. Being in India I just have so many friends with whom I can discuss very intimate doubts or facts about life that you can arrive at a peaceful state of mind very easily and function as a normal member of society without ever having a doubt about yourself, while in west in general the focus on individualism means most people don't talk to each other and are always expected to behave a certain way otherwise they will get 'what is wrong with him' look all the time.
I would argue that new users on a forum that have already used other forums will be easier to integrate than those who have never been online before. And those that have used multiple forums will be easier still as they will be used to the idea that different communities have different rules.
Important checkpoints before uploading the iOS App for Approval
Getting the approval from the Apple store for iOS App sometimes become a very difficult and long task. The reason for that is threefold: For more details please visit the link http://findnerd.com/list/view/-Important-checkpoints-before-uploading-the-iOS-App-for-Approval/4661/
In England: It's tricky. You see your gp and say, clearly and persistently, that you want an assessment to see if you have ASD.

Mental health teams are underfunded and over worked, and so if it's not causing you difficulties you might need to push a bit harder. So, if it is causing you difficulty highlight those.

If you have the money you can find a private doctor. I'm not sure of the process to find reliable doctors!

Here's what a UK charity says about diagnosis for children and also for adults: http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/all-about-diagnosis.as...
Sri Lanka Is About to Get Balloon-Based Internet, Thanks to Google
Well what do we mean when we talk about teaching computer science? Most subjects have fairly broad high-level survey style classes freshman year. Even the X-for-majors classes tend to cover huge swaths of the field with a lot of "you'll cover this more in EPS325" hand waving. The purpose is not to lay a foundation of first principles but to make sure you know enough that you can see connections between topics in later classes, that nothing is too surprising, that you understand what you're in for.

For non majors it's usually so you have enough to be "well rounded" or more importantly (with say english or math) you have enough facility in a field that you can use it's tools to further your work in your own field.

Python might not particularly add much over Scheme for the first situation, but if schools wanted to follow Dijkstra's conception of CS students wouldn't end up touching a computer until senior year let alone Scheme|Python|Pascal|Whatevs anyway and Python isn't distinctly worse for explaining bigO and data structures/algorithms (yes recursion support sucks a bit but not so much that you can't teach it to freshman); Python does however aid in the second tremendously because when students leave CS110
152|whatevs they will go back to their primary field and not have to muddle about learning a new language.
Built on Lucene 4.6.1, yes.
You could compare raw FLOPS (Floating point operations per second) but that would only tell part of the story. These supercomputers are highly engineered for low network latency between nodes, which is necessary for many scientific workloads. Google and other companies are generally able to express their algorithms in highly parallel ways, which means there are much reduced requirements for communication between nodes.

Therefore, even if the raw performance in terms of FLOPS sound similar, the two systems will have widely differing performance on real workloads.
Training in system administration. I've been doing it part-time for 5 yeas, would love to do it full-time.
Understanding neural function and virtual reality
Sorry wasn't saying it was anywhere near as much as a cut of ad revenue. Just that they are still getting something from you as a developer.
Adblock Plus is semi commercial, they sell whitelisting services to publishers (you can pay them to have your non-intrusive ads show by default).
If he wasn't on BBC (which as a state broadcaster has far more political sensitivity) it probably wouldn't have been so much of an issue in the UK.

Most of his "controversies" would not even be news in the US. A person on a humorous show cracking a racial/ethnic joke is on TV every night.

We have nothing like OFCOM where you could actually get in trouble with the government for being highly offensive either.

And celebrities behaving badly is typical, so assaulting someone probably wouldn't lead to any major public outcry for his firing. It's not as though Sean Penn has trouble finding work.
Windows 10 review: Microsoft’s new OS is surprisingly futuristic
The analogy is closer to:

Git ~ Text Editor

GitHub ~ Microsoft Word

Sure, git is a commodity service, just like text editors are a commodity product. It's trivially easy to migrate a Git repository to a different service, but quite a bit less trivial to migrate all of the issues, integrations, hooks, wikis, CI services, etc.

When you look at the big picture, there are much fewer players doing exactly what GitHub does.
>The web is 20 years old. I think if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

That's a failure of imagination right there. It took decades for cable to come along and disrupt broadcast television. You never know what's going to happen.
Apparently the reason they're loaded separately in the first place is fraud detection. Bundling it into the page provides no easy way of independently verifying impressions.
It seems a little presumptuous to call this a revolution. "Catch up with the rest of the world" would probably be better term.
This could be slightly misleading. Supercomputers tend to be used for different types of computations.
Show HN: DonateYourStreams – loop tracks and save lives on Watsi and charity:water
We didn't publish to Maven Central. It's not a library, but I guess we could publish there. Thanks for the suggestion.
I don't disagree, but burden of proof.
What does it simulate?

Thanks.
The worst are pop up ads that occur in the middle of rapid tapping. Multiple taps can register be the OS responds. At least on Android, it will launch a new tab for each tap on the ad with each tab attempting to launch the Play Store. This is mostly confined to mobile games, but it can also happen when trying to quickly scroll.
It might not be a bad thing if it did trigger a more above-board means of both paying for content and producing content that people want to pay for. At the moment it's a clickbait race to the bottom.

Also, bear in mind that we're having this discussion on an ad-free website.
> The people who think passwords are hard will keep getting older and will be washed away.

I wonder if younger generations use more secure passwords. I'd guess that the typical user does not.
Seems to be the case all around - I have a "smart" TV and the Amazon video app is astonishingly bad. As a big fan Top Gear, I was really hoping the gang would end up on Netflix.
Exactly - that will hurt the UX like nothing else ever has. If people find out web sites don't work on their phone or tablet - the dumping of that platform to the competitor will be rather quick. Partly why Windows Phone didn't fly was IE - the websites looked crap compared to WebKit based browsers. Microsoft had to do unprecedented stuff like emulating WebKit to get over it.
Sorry, but the UK gets the crappy end of the global warming stick. Increasing temperatures melt the Greenland ice sheets, which decreases the salinity of the north atlantic. That shuts down the processes that drive the gulf stream, which brings warm water to us and gives us a warmer climate than most regions at our latitude. So global warming may well end up making the UK colder.
Indeed. If you, as a content provider, depend on such ads then I'm sorry, but your business deserves to die.

I wonder how long it takes for people to learn that they can earn money by not being assholes to their customers?
Although you are of course right there is something underlying interesting about what could be done to track us in order to build a unique "ghost" of us that can can be used for many purposes beyond logging in.

But given I am not an expert in this field I would like to turn around and perhaps ask you, what is the bigger vision?

Surely biometrics in all sorts of shapes and forms comes with it's own issues and shortcomings.

Isn't the idea to make it good enough not necessarily 100% airtight (although I do understand that the scaleability of technology makes it the requirements many times higher than between people)?
If you're on Android, there are so many possible different solutions to the problem. You're not crippled to what Apple deem fit for you to have.

Off the top of my head, I can think of four more, other the suggestions in that blogpost.

- Firefox + uBlock. (Superb. Best mobile browsing experience.)

- Xposed Framework and something like UnbelovedHosts. (Probably root required)

- Ad-Free Time with MobiDNS. (Like $3 a month, additional benefits included. VPN/DNS redirect hybrid.)

- An ad-blocking proxy or VPN.

You aren't stuck waiting for a solution from a competitor that's late to the party.

We've been blocking adverts on Android for longer than Apple have let users change their onscreen keyboards...
compiler : https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp
build automation : http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/
deedle : http://bluemountaincapital.github.io/Deedle/

And there are plenty of other very cool open source projects written in F#.

Most of them can be found here
http://fsharp.org/community/projects/
Please don't use the combination of red and green as early option for category colors. Many people have color vision problems and that combinations is very problematic for them.
> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users?

Good luck with that. iOS users make up a significant percentage of web traffic and are demographically the most valuable (generally of a higher socio-economic status). By alienating them they won't be coming to your site which means no opportunity to upsell them to a paid version of the content.

Advertisers don't deserve much sympathy from me. They have trashed the customer experience.
Maybe for embarrassingly parallel tasks, but if you require nontrivial interprocess communication, a server farm can't compete with the interconnect of a modern supercomputer.
Show HN: Python script to watch directory for changes and copy modified file
Hey all, I'm not super familiar with python but a friend of mine thought it would be cool if he could have a program watch his directory for changes, and save a copy of his file to an external drive.

Any code comments, suggestions, etc would be extremely helpful.
This page made my laptop scream. It never stopped trying to load something. I run ABP, perhaps that's the "fault?"

I also tried to find a sensible place to point that out to the BBC, but nothing was obviously (to me) the right place.
Sage 300 ERP re-imagined? Now Web Based and better looking
I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but a common application for government-owned supercomputers is simulating the degredation of nuclear warheads. The degradation of the fissile material as well as its surroundings is highly critical to a nation's security, and also very hard to model well.

Of course in an ideal world those cycles would be used to help cure cancer, but given that these warheads exist, it's probably a good idea to invest resources into getting an idea of what shape they're in.
10 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster.

It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.
Indeed, I'm surprised that people never mention this. Google probably has been working on this for a while now. Just bundle the ad and the video in the same stream and check timing to see if the ad has been watched or clicked on, same could be done for text ads, just serve them from the same ip as regular results, at least on mobile native apps. They're probably not pushing it for now as adblocking is not yet that much of a problem on their bottom line and they don't want to give hackers the time to work around these anti-adblocking techniques.
>However, it does give us a concrete, non-hand-wavey algorithm which can reasonably be considered "AI, if we ignore resource constraints".

No, not really. "If we ignore resource constraints" is ignoring most of the problem. Using Kolmogorov complexity in the Solomonoff Measure also constitutes ignoring the problem of generalization by assuming an optimal compressor into existence, which again is an issue of the cognitive resources of training data and processing power. Bayesian updating means it will achieve optimal expected reward, but also that AIXI can be "fooled" by the hierarchical nature of real environments' variance[1].

And the whole thing pays no attention to knowledge representation whatsoever.

It's basically a grand victory for the fields of AI and Machine Learning that still tells us basically nothing about how an actually existing, embodied mind has to function, except that statistical learning is most likely the core mechanism in some fashion (after all, neural networks show that the real thing isn't even necessarily Bayesian in any sense).

[1] Benjamin B. Machta, Ricky Chachra, Mark K. Transtrum, and James P. Sethna. Parameter space compression underlies emergent theories and predictive models. Science, 342(6158):604–607, 2013.
There have been FinTech meetups in Boston and NYC going on for a while now. Predictably popular (given the two cities' role in finance)

Will not comment on whether it is a fad/scene word :-)
> Also, bear in mind that we're having this discussion on an ad-free website.

That's a totally wrong comparison however. Nothing fits.
I've seen some estimates of costs per package shipment via drone at less than $1, while currently amazon might pay $6 per package.
If you Google for London Clay you will learn that UK used to be full of tropical plants. Why not have that again?
37M Americans don’t use the Web. Here’s why you should care
Thanks! Also came across gwhois.org that seems to take a novel approach to the problem too.
> The supercomputer would be 20 times quicker than the current leading machine, which is in China.

So given Moore's Law, by the time it's finished in 2025, it will be 50 times slower than 2025's fastest?

Yes, yes, Moore's Law is slowing, transistors on a chip =/= flops, etc. Still seems like they'd want to aim higher than 20x in 10 years.
Escape analysis hasn't lived up to its promises/potential, IMO. Current Hotspot uses control flow insensitive escape detection, meaning an object that escapes on any path, even if that path is never taken, is considered escaping. This can be improved to be CF sensitive, and Graal does that.

Secondly, beyond trivial examples, sufficient inlining needs to occur for compiler to have full horizon, and that can fail for a variety of reasons, even with run to run variance of exact same code shape.

As you say, there's no control and you're fully at the mercy of the compiler's mood that day. This is well into Sufficiently Smart Compiler land ...

The bottom line is that anyone for whom those allocations can be problematic take manual measures to ensure they don't happen and do not rely on EA.

Value types should help for a few reasons, however they appear to be somewhat limited (e.g. immutable, cannot be passed by ref).
I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience. Ironically hiding adverts is a just a side-effect; the improvement comes from speeding up page loads, and cutting down on cpu usage and bandwidth use. (I install Adblock for my mother to stop her seeing scams, but that's another thing entirely.)

I've spent the past week optimising How a Car Works for speed (mobile is 55% of our traffic now).

The average uncached weight of an article is 1.1 MB, of which 70% is Google Adsense and Facebook (the only two 3rd party scripts I include). I can't trim it any further and it's very frustrating - suggestions welcome btw.

Almost the only suggestions that Google's Page Speed tool has left are to minify the scripts that Google and Facebook themselves are serving.

I use Adsense because it's easy, pays fine, and the ads seem reasonably relevant. But the weight of crap being downloaded is absurd and I hate the idea of wasting some Kenyan's precious data allowance on an irrelevant advert that might earn me $0.01.

In fact, I'm going to use geolocation to not include Adsense in countries where I earn nothing.
It's nothing super technical, just a fun little project I did with my sister over the weekend to show the YC Fellowship folks that we can ship something together.

Simple concept - loop these tracks on your favorite streaming music service while you work, meditate, or sleep and all royalty payouts will go directly to Watsi & charity:water.

In my mind it's the equivalent of donating spare CPU cycles to SETI or script-clicking those "donate rice to a hungry child" ads.

Idea came from a combination of two things - a band who uploaded silent tracks and had their fans stream them to generate tour money, and Taylor Swift accidentally uploading a track of static that hit #1 on iTunes.

There are tons of ambient noise & nature tracks people use for work, meditation, sleep, etc. available on all of the music services. The only difference is we're putting our royalties to good use!