skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I kind of did an eye roll at the breathless language in the announcement. I'm trying to unpack that reaction, because I actually really enjoy the first-principles approach that they have taken with their work.

I think, perhaps, it's because there's a fair amount of praxis already out there in the enterprise and small business sectors about this, and I didn't really see reference to any of that, Lotus Notes notwithstanding. I know it's nitpicky, but it was a strong reaction so I thought I would share it. I'll try to unpack it more:

Basically, creating data processing tools for humans is such a fundamental application of computer science that we even have a name for it: Information Technology. And, ever since the Mother of All Demos we have been trying to make a kind of "omni-tool" for data processing, and pretty much falling on our faces.

This is perhaps because a "general purpose tool" usually turns out to be a particular kind of "special purpose tool". The question is whether a large enough segment benefits from general purpose tooling, which entails taking on the overhead of learning how to use this "tool that makes tools" in order to accomplish their many tasks. In other words, there's a layer of indirection. Or, are most people's problems disjoint and specific, so that they benefit more from using a few special purpose tools that can then be loosely coupled together.

For example, let's say for my job I have to manage the generation of reports, etc, and post them on a company website that I maintain. I can use a document editor to edit documents, a communication service to send links to the documents, and a web-based CMS tool to post the final reports to the website. It's not clear that I would be better served, or even could be served (due to the network effect), by an all in one tool-builder tool. Three special purpose tools, which can guide you effectively in each task, might be easier to deal with than one general-purpose tool, all user grousing aside.

This particular type of omni-tool could be described as a"Distributed Filemaker." Filemaker-like tools are definitely popular, but tend not to unseat other special purpose tooling. And they have a problem shared by all powerful data modeling tools: they provide you quite a bit of rope to hang yourself with. If you want to really improve in this space, I suggest you focus on providing a data modeling and coherency paradigm that is appealing to non-technical users, yet successful for managing long term data that changes meaning over time. That would be profound, as poor data modeling is pretty much how all of these projects eventually crash on the rocks. Your users will not ask you for such a thing though, as they don't understand it.

In spite of the eye roll, I wish you luck!
That's true, just like innovation in AIDS treatment affects me because I am unlikely to get AIDS. It would be so much nicer if those resources were put toward some ailment that is more likely to affect me.
To ChrisArgyle:
Oh yes, I understand that. Even worse are the wannabe rap artists who will use the entire artist name and title of a track to "trojan horse" their own rap rendition and trick people into playing their music to drive up play counts. They're still getting away with this somehow.

But the commercial trance songs themselves are sampling other tracks (although doing it much better), and also licensing issues down to the one-shot drum samples they're using.

One of my tracks takes a Beyonce vocal stab and it processes it so much you won't recognize who the singer was - unless you knew the steps to reverse engineer it - and, you'd be surprised to find many talented audio engineers who are much better than I can do this easily. When I hear songs on the radio which use a similar technique, I can pick this up instantly. AFAIK, my track hasn't been pulled off SC yet.

Did you also know that many companies (Verizon and TMobile have been known to do this) have audio engineers who will "reverse engineer" a song their marketing team likes from an indie artist to recreate it so they don't have to pay royalties? Its not hard to trick these algorithms, and in many cases they come up with false positives anyways.

Most of the (commercial) "Industry" itself is running off uncredited samples, many of which have been cut from 1960-1980s Jazz/Blues tracks. These tracks still are technically copyrighted[0], but the artists are often not knowledgable over who is sampling their tracks, or in many cases they don't care / want people to sample their stuff. Most of their record labels have also long since died off which would have tried to protect their works as well. You would be shocked to find how wide the range of genres are of producers that are doing this.

In sum, it stinks of a moneygrab. Soundcloud became big enough to get into DMCA's non-artistic crosshairs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
Maybe think of it this way, if you were a construction worker and helped build an interstate, you'd be helping all sorts of criminals do all sorts of horrible things. Plus innocent people would die in car crashes on the road you helped to build. But we can agree that the utility of an interstate far outweighs these drawbacks.
Really cool, and I thought Reply All was just a podcast. If I am understanding this platform correctly this allows each person involved in the conversation to send email responses, and replyall publishes the conversation in an embeddable widget. I haven't used it before so I could be way off.
CFSSL Scan
Yes, you are right there, and thank you for clarifying that. I should have been more clear that the zIIP is useful to Linux through accessing data via z/VM. You can't offload all of the I/O, but you can offload some of it if accessing the mainframe for data. Or so I remember at this point. It's been a few years since leaving my mainframe systems programmer position.
Of Solitude – Montaigne
I don't even bother committing any part of wordpress core. I just commit the wp-content directory because unless you're a mad man, you shouldn't be modifying anything outside of that directory. First rule of WordPress is don't touch core! wp-config is definitely an exception, but better safe than sorry to avoid issues like this.
Falcor Developer Preview
I'd rephrase it as

It's a harmless human illogicality at the heart of math.

True math is often very beautiful. Being unable to prove something one way or another is seen as very ugly. Unfortunately it might very well be unprovable and thus a permanent pimple on the face of mathematics. So mathematicians are going to get all worked up about it for eternity even if it is unsolvable because it is ugly not to be solved on way or another. Of course unsolvable problems have a strange way of getting solved in weird ways after a zillion combined human lifetimes of effort.

It doesn't seem unrealistic that a math problem can be defined that cannot be proven. Someone named Godel had a lot to say on the topic. Turing too. Mostly they get misquoted, I see no reason to add to the existing corpus of misquoting.

I could add a "funny" analogy to some theoretical physics topics here too. Physics is weaker in that the physical world is simpler than the imaginative world so its more likely physics will eventually stop, and stops are invariably at a rather ugly point. Some might say it has already stopped. But at some point it will stop, probably before math hits its stopping point.
There are languages built on join semi-lattices such as Bloom^L for writing eventually consistent programs[0].

The idea being that logical monotonicity removes the need for co-ordination and eventual consistency in the language can be guaranteed by co-ordination around non-monotonic points.

If you like logic-based programming it's a rather interesting language to research.

[0]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gu5lBo...
I was surprised when I realized this too, but it's true. e.g. PyCon Taiwan http://yyc.solvcon.net/writing/2013/after_pycontw_2013/ jQuery Conference http://blogs.splunk.com/2013/09/25/splunking-jquery-conferen...
The original reduction was given by the well-known Cook-Levin theorem. It's really the existence of this theorem that motivated the entire study of NP-complete problems in the first place.

Basically, you can unroll the execution of a non-deterministic Turing machine along the time axis, using separate variables to represent the state of the machine at each time step. All of the rules that govern the Turing machine's execution can be encoded as Boolean formulas, resulting in one giant formula such that the formula is satisfiable iff there is an assignment of variables corresponding to a valid execution. Adding non-determinism (the "guessing") is easy; you just leave particular variables unconstrained.

If the original machine runs in polynomial time, then the number of variables and clauses is also polynomial. And of course there's a straightforward polynomial reduction from SAT to 3-SAT.

No offense, but if you don't already know about this, it's kind of ironic that you're the one claiming CS researchers are "arrogant" for their beliefs about P=?NP.
This is the biggest lump of horse shit. I fail to see how anyone can see this, and still deny that the rich are waging class war on the poor.
Intermediate Python
11 things you should know as a Data Scientist
Can I have an English translation please?
When I hear 'Eve' I think of spreadsheets and menus. Seems fitting for this project.
That's not much of a right, though.
You're totally right that everyone is different and there's no One True Solution here. Which, I guess, is kind of what I was trying to point out.

I think your 1 and 2 are excellent bits of advice, even if convincing yourself to maintain them in the long term can be tough.
Societies that fragile, will collapse irrespective of mathematics. Besides, the fact that current tools rely on the != conjecture doesn't require future tools to do so.
The more correct selling point is that you should be able to get "good enough" performance (usually meaning consistent 60fps) with properly optimized React code.
Is there Hawking's speech synthesis at all (there was an article that his voice is based on some hardware device http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voic... )? I understand it's "just" a "navigation" system (replacing the mouse and keyboard with the facial movement virtual key). If it's so, the title (the "speech system") is misleading.

The project also doesn't use SwiftKey but

https://github.com/01org/acat

"Presage, an intelligent predictive text engine created by Matteo Vescovi."
Nice talk! I'm unsure about the excessive use of analogies. If you don't have a very precise isomorphism it can be unproductive, but the ones you've shown are cool.

About your turnover on the PvsNP problem, did that have to do with realizing that approximations can be quite good for practical purposes? What's the current state of approximations in the field?

I find it interesting because the only application I know where approximations are complete garbage is cryptography, or "adversarial" applications; is that right? In that case P!=NP yields the best of both words: we can build trapdoor functions for adversarial systems but still solve optimization problems well. I find that picture very convincing for some reason (exact solutions are hard, usable approximations are easy).
Telling people about what you have discovered is bad if you can reasonably tell that those people are bad actors who will use the information you are giving them to do harm.

That's why it's responsible to tell the people who can be responsible for mitigating the problem in sufficient time for them to propagate a fix before publicizing the exploit in the knowledge that you are giving it to bad actors.

The fact that the vulnerability existed before and may have even been being exploited does absolutely nothing to change this.

If it was already being exploited but isn't publicly known then irresponsible disclosure simly makes the problem worse by increasing its availability to more bad actors who weren't previously in the know.
Its amazing how Dilbert has a comic strip about almost every corporate quirkiness.
Kahle's approach works only for static content. It's not hard to distribute static content; BitTorrent does it just fine. The Internet Archive stores static content. Kahle thinks in terms of static content, because that's what the Internet Archive does. But it's less of the Web today. Despite that, it's good to have a way to distribute static content. Academic publishing, after all, is almost all static content. That should be widely distributed. It's not like academic journals pay their authors.

There's the problem that distributing content means someone else pays for storing and serving it. This is part of what killed USENET, once the binary groups (mostly pirated stuff and porn) became huge. There's a scaling problem with replication.

Federated networks are interesting, and there are several federated social networks. A few even have a number of servers in two digits. You could have a federated Facebook replacement that costs each user under a dollar a month at current hosting prices. No ads. The concept is not getting any traction.

Kahle wants a system with "easy mechanisms for readers to pay writers." That's either micropayments or an app store, both of which are worse than the current Web.
Speaking as an Android user/developer:

Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever.

I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
Netflix Releases Falcor Developer Preview
same 404 when posting to facebook (where its spiders automatically extracts a title, blobs and images) where their server IPs are probably not all U.S. based. Weird.
Incidentally, that's part of scalability: knowing when you can drop functionality and the user won't care. For Google Docs, it's highly unlikely that a file with 1000s of viewers is actively being edited by 1000s of users, and more likely the link just got shared on the Internet. So you can drop edit functionality for everyone but the original author and they won't care.

Another example - one that I've heard second-hand - is how Facebook gets consistency on the news feed. Apparently your own writes to Facebook are sent separately to a write-aside cache, and then the webserver merges them back in whenever you view a page. As a result, Facebook is always strongly-consistent when it comes to your comments (you'll never post something and then fail to see it show up), but it's only eventually-consistent with respect to other peoples' comments. But then, you won't know about or care about the latter, because how would you know that you're not seeing something they posted?
Technically either side can. However, it's not a hard guess as to which side actually has the power to impose something like this. And it's not the employees.
Well, they did publish some guidance that shows they would manage to drive down costs by 2017 to be marginally profitable.
I suspect you'd fare pretty badly in a market, even if a better one existed. In Texas's deregulated electric marketplace, the market price for large-scale solar installations selling into the grid has fallen to around $0.05/kWh. Power from a single small-scale residential installation with less reliable delivery is probably worth less than that.
I'd argue that is still fundamentally different than just requiring the signature to keep your job. Getting laid off has different consequences than quitting.

I realize most states disagree with me, but I think it's absurd. If at will employment is so meaningless that it's no different from being fired, it shouldn't even be consideration in the first place. These courts are treating at will employment as a meaningless promise in one scenario, but as having some value in another.
Hello friends,

I'm one of the founders. Zero-days are exciting but we're especially good about the things that don't stay on the top of HN all day. Silent killers as it were.

Today we support Ruby and Ubuntu but we're expanding quickly! And if you're interested but don't have the time to try us out today, we also made http://isitvulnerable.com/ to demo what we can do.

Cheers,
Then it's not "for everyone", is it?
P2P Payments App Xendit Launches in Indonesia [YC S15]
Ask HN: External mini DVD drive
I have some mini dvds that are getting up there in age, I was hoping to copy the data over to my macbook pro. However, I do not know where to buy an external drive that can read mini dvds. The super drive from apple would jam if I tried to insert a mini dvd. What external drive would you suggest for this?
I am a lawyer - and the headline is completely misleading.

Continued employment is, in fact, new consideration. Each new paycheck you get, in an at-will employment relationship, is further consideration.

This meshes perfectly, without any dissonance, with the commonly understood function of at-will employment.

The judge did not say that you can impose non-compete retroactively, for no new consideration, or that non-compete can be imposed on an employee who has an otherwise negotiated and executed employment agreement.

In other words - this represents absolutely no change, whatsoever, from the commonly understood function of at-will employment. Water wet, sky blue. Move along here, folks.
I'm not an expert at all, but from what I've read the consensus seems to be that the Allied countries would have won in the end, but it could have taken one or a few years longer.

Also, several very decisive battles took place on the Eastern front (Russia).
It is good that we keep trying at this problem. Does it feel that as an industry keep trying to solve this problem and never "quite" get it right? I have read about the old "CASE" tools or old VB approaches, for instance. Even Microsoft Access now can generate applications on Azure backed by SQL Azure (SQL Server for the cloud), then there was some Intuit tool (can't remember the name). One can argue Excel itself was quite good at some of these apps. More recently seems like Dabble or Popfly were a thing at least for a few months.

Every time something like this happens, "real developers" feel threatened, while business users love them for their side projects when the "real developers" are too busy to care.

Maybe these types of tools are always destined to come up again (since we reinvent the platforms all the time), and then a few users use them, while real programmers for the most part simply yawn once more.

Are we ever going to push programming to a level of maturity where we can use building blocks and be real productive, yet have the flexibility to create real, sophisticated applications?

Seems we never quite get there.

But it is positive to see that new generations of developers don't stop trying.
I wish I could say that I overstated my claim but that's honestly what it seems like to me.

I understand the desire to seek out novelty through exploration but from what I've witnessed it looks like social media prevalence is a strong driving force (for our generation at least).

The note about responsibilities during that time period strikes me as a valid reason I suppose.
I've not encountered discussions of solar panels in firefighter training, but my intuition suggests it's probably not a big deal. For nighttime fires, the panels won't be generating any electricity anyway. For daytime fires, smoke and water will likely occlude the panels and decrease their voltage. Firefighters ventilating the roof would need to be trained to avoid HVDC wires connecting a series-connected panel array to the inverter. We might also just lob foam onto the panels and turn them off that way.
I think all of the hardware will be very proportional to the size. In my case I had micro-inverters on each panel, so it was directly proportional, but this was actually more expensive than having a single large inverter (though more performant).

However, the marginal cost of things like engineering, installation and inspection will certainly go down with the size of the system. How much of that passes to the consumer I don't know, but some of it certainly does. You can imagine the cost of putting 1 solar panel on your roof is not going to be 10x less than putting 10 of them up there.

It is hard to get exact numbers from solar sites as they are very sales-oriented, but it seems like the hardware cost is estimated at anywhere from 20-50% of the total cost of the solar system. The rest of it is engineering, installation, inspection, customer acquisition, profit, etc.
That was my first thought at well. From the article:

The Court framed the issue as:

…whether non-competition agreements require additional consideration beyond continued at-will employment before binding agreements are formed. The issue arises if a current employee is required to sign such an agreement as a condition of continued employment, without any further benefits or consideration.

So, this isn't really anything new for jurisdictions that support at-will employment and don't require reasons for termination. Not really any different than an employer telling you your expected duties have changed. You still have the option to quit, they still have the option to fire you.
"The bottom line regarding normality is that the burden of proof is surely on those who would
maintain that the formal machinery of digital physics is
in principle
insufficient to model something
as straightforward as submerging nails in, and retrieving them from, a bucket of soapy water."

I think the idea of alternate physical systems doing computation is really fun. I personally have a throbbing heart-on for cellular automata, specifically Rule 110 and inspired by Greg Egan's "Permutation City". But that's SF. But that's just emotional attachment.
A non-constructive proof would be hilarious. Or something constructable that works out to big-oh N to the trillionth.
http://www.ehlaw.ca/publications/nov05/Positron.shtml
Well sometimes I go crazy when I'm alone, and other times I go crazy when I'm with a group. The reason I don't buy the dichotomy is that if these two things can be true for the same person, is there any value in making the distinction? They seem to describe moods (that some people have more often than others) rather than personalities.
Excellent resource! Does anyone know of comparable listing for the C64?
I've tried half a dozen libraries to solve this problem for Literally Canvas (http://literallycanvas.com). They all have one or more dealbreakers. In this case, it's superficially that the controls are too close together to be touch-friendly. But it looks really extensible and easy to change, so I'll give it a shot anyhow. Thanks!
Link dead. . Google error. .
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071672
Having the HTML and JS in the same file makes sense, since the HTML and the DOM manipulation code (which is what you usually see in the .jsx) tend to be tightly coupled; when they are, putting them in separate files really only gives the illusion of modularization.

Having CSS in the same file will either make sense, or not, depending on how you view the html. If you feel strongly about the separation of semantics and presentation, then you will still want to keep them separate. Many people are just trying to get what is in the webpage to look like the design prototype, so their CSS would end up tightly-coupled anyway, and the previous argument to JS+HTML applies.

[edit]

Also, a lot of what is in .css right now isn't about making a paragraph look like X, a quote look like Y, etc. but rather about applying styles to specific DOM elements for various reasons. Once you're at that point, the downsides to CSS clearly outweighs the advantages.