skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How is it that we can find an unfathomably small sub-set of possible symbols--a mere 26!--that are capable of encoding any idea whatsoever?

That's not an equivalent question. Any repertoire of N distinguishable symbols for N>1 is essentially equivalent.

But there's no reason a priori to believe that the laws of physics should be modellable with mathematics at all, let alone that we should be able to figure out what those mathematics are, let alone that they should turn out to be simple enough that the model (or at least a very significant chunk of it) can fit in a single human brain.

Consider dreaming: when you are in a dream state you are living in essentially a solipsistic world where science doesn't work. There's no inherent reason why that could not be totality of your existence. It's just an accident of biology that you wake up occasionally and get to experience the "real" world, which we consider "real" because it seems to behave according to mathematical laws. The existence of such experience is not a given.
FinCEN Rules Commodity-Backed Token Services Are Money Transmitters
Well, what is the alternative? Germany admits they've juiced their export driven economy via an artificially depressed currency, then either (1) leaves the euro themselves, or (2) agrees to permanent support to the less-productive peripheral countries inside the currency union?

You may find this interesting:
http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/when-do-we-decide-that-europ...
Frequencies (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spa1BLMFqQU
> Pretty sure Gmail's backend is C++,

Define "backend". Pretty sure the core business logic of Gmail is written with tons of Java. C++ is used for generic "infrastructure" software, not for writing Gmail's business rules.
Definitely. Austin was just the first example that came to mind, but I think you're right that spreading out to several regional hubs is also likely (and preferable, IMO).
This is really interesting, but it also makes the failure points of computer generated music evident. Namely: it works best with simple, "jammy" music; it requires a large existing base of music to pull from; and it has no way of using compositional techniques for rhetorical effect. (Increasing/decreasing tension, "going somewhere", expressing emotions, etc.) In other words, it can't create innovative music or music that has something interesting to say. It can only recombine the past.

I like the idea of using these tools for educational purposes, however. Can we derive the "rules" for music of different cultures by feeding them through this kind of algorithm? If so, it would give us a fantastic insight into different musical traditions around the world, even if it couldn't write that music for us.
UC Davis' Augmented Reality Sandbox
Context/Background link: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4683

tl;dr: A technical manual reseller in Finksburg, MD is throwing out 25,000 high-quality paper manuals from as far back as the 1930s this week and Jason Scott & friends are driving there with "$900 of banker's boxes" to save whatever they can.
I think people, including Amazon employees, try to put things down to some difference between AWS and retail. With the amount of cross-pollination between those two giant sides of Amazon, I doubt there's any significant macro difference in culture.

I know people who have been dissatisfied on both sides.
Why does he work there, then?
The euro is necessary for the E.U. to remain economically competitive internationally. The problem lay in the implementation, and not mandating a fiscal policy for membership (e.g. something similar the austerity measures).

"Game Theory" in the context of this article is assuming that all countries on the Euro will rationally avoid mutual destruction. To do that, they all need to agree to the fiscal policies that would have prevented Greece and others from getting to the point that they're at now.

But that's not happening - there doesn't appear to be a universal fiscal policy for the Euro in sight and they're heading for mutual destruction (i.e. the countries are not behaving rationally and game theory doesn't apply).
Yeah, my first reaction: since when JS is a valid target for demos? ;).
Lens: Free Responsive Photography HTML5 Template – Smashfreakz
With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!
And today, I was reading that facebook's mobile messenger has 18000 classes, and is about a 100mb, this doesn't take into account other dependencies it has on the OS. These demos are 100% standalone, no external libraries. Progress is a funny thing.
GearsGearsGearsDizzyFunLandBuildingSet(디지펀랜드빌딩세트)Spin재미있는장난감jugueteTOY遊び
Just found it using Google. I think I had to end up quoting various parts of the title, adding "PDF" as part of the search, and going past the first couple of pages of search results.
You can factor in the opinions of parents, students, fellow teachers, admin, as well as test score improvements, college admissions etc.

I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.

Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.
Why would an unprivileged app be allowed to make such changes?
With a million monthly page views it's probably worthwhile paying a few grand to a lawyer for help with this ...
Yeah, hassan II mosque is awesome.

If you go to Fez they mostly make all the stuff they sell by hand. There are the vendors here and there that import their stuff from china, but the ones that do make it by hand advertise as such, and they make the goods right in front of you.
He did list the reasons why he might have little idea about the realities of Amazon as he works in a remote office on a niche product. After reading his disclosures, I'd say that yeah, he may not quite realize that he doesn't know what it is like for the mean Amazon employee.
>We have plenty of evidence what the steady state (based on historical data and our understanding of physics) will be; I suspect you are not familiar with it (you still didn't tell me what exactly is the thing that you find in a disagreement).

I suspect you and I have far different thresholds regarding what consists of "evidence", and I'd like to point out there's a difference between the words "difficult" and "impossible". In any event the "difficulty" of validating predictions hasn't stopped people who ought to know better from spouting off like it all came from a burning bush. So far this is what we've seen:

* "We have a model showing the earth is warming catastropically, and CO2 is the culprit. Look, in ten years average global surface temperatures will be $today_guess warmer.

* (ten years later) "Well, sure, what we've measured isn't anything like what we predicted. Of course, we have a new model that agrees 100% with the historical record."

* (ten years later) "Huh. Well, look, it's really hard to figure out what the temperature is gonna be in ten years, so let me tell you what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years, long after it matters to anyone alive today.

There must be tens of thousands of people who've gone broke trading on stock market models that match previous data.
That Sugar Song – Official Music Video
Published in 2007 & 2011. Are there updated editions?
You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new and friendly. Before we littered it with cat pictures, we had links to family and friends pages. We had our email on it too before the spam wars.
BART and Caltrain only work because very few riders bring bikes. The platforms, the doors, and the seats are all too small to accommodate many of those things. Widespread use would require a redesign that probably couldn't accommodate today's demand, plus a huge number of showers installed at downtown employers.
It should be trivial to federate it via Matrix.org if they felt the urge :)
It was impossible for Greece to exit, because the politicians elected at the time were campaigning on using the lower interest rates of the Euro to fuel government funded jobs and projects.

The more conservative politicians, who would have maybe had the foresight to leave, were elected out of office by the people.
That is classic Jobs -- sort of techie but not understanding what any of the words mean, very demanding, and sensitive to the customers' biases.
Learn threat modeling first. It will change the way you think about programs.
I'd like to ask you something.

When working on a project (that may sound boring like a stock-management system), and during the endless development of this (keep adding functionality the employer asks for) starting to want to use this system yourself for daily stuff (hey I have a lot of electronics that could and would profit from a stock-system to find all my shit).

Oh and on top of that constantly keep having thoughts about how I could improve the flow and stuff.

Does that fit into that description of "techies who are more excited to see the end result in the hands of productive and happy end users than they are about the technology used to build said solutions"?
And indeed, even when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC), the Objective-C crippled performance. Windows crashed a lot (like Mac did before OS X), but it was fast because it had no isolation between components.
Neat! I'm curious: did you come up with this on the spot, or is this actually something you use?
To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features.

For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.
Right. In Vinge's True Names, all network traffic is monitored by governments. So it's necessary to use cover traffic and steganography, in addition to encryption. That's where Tor seems headed, with ever better pluggable transports for bridges, and maybe even ephemeral website-like bridges from AWS etc.

But eventually, it may be necessary to get serious about steganography. With pervasive streaming HD video, covert channels providing even 0.1% of throughput would be workable. The harder challenge would be plausible deniability. If the steganography fails and that SWAT team arrives, you want them to discover that you've been compromised by covert-channel botnets. Just like every other user and server on the Internet.
PGP/GPG are tools we have because the technical solution trumped attempts at force and law. Governments can do nothing to stop it. They have no control over mathematical realities. Force and law have no bearing on mathematics. A technical solution will always trump a violent or political solution.
> a malicious process on your system can still elevate itself by patching the shell (in memory, using /proc/id/mem)

On most desktop operating systems, that functionality has been disabled. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. all have Yama, which disables the ability for one process to access another's process via ptrace or ptrace-equivalent mechanisms (like /proc/*/mem) without special permissions. OS X has no procfs, but the equivalent functionality, using task ports, has had similar restrictions since the 10.5 days -- see `man taskgated`. You can't call task_for_pid() without having a particular code-signing entitlement or having administrator privileges.

This is why Xcode prompts you for administrator privileges when you first run it; gdb / lldb needs to be able to trace other processes and access their memory, and a normal process can't do that.
You never get curious about things you've been working on? Curious enough to want to quickly dig in and see how things are going?

I work on stuff that I find immensely interesting, it's not unusual for me to pick up my work's laptop, jump on and have a look at stuff. Not because I'm expected to or required to (to the contrary co-workers grumble at me when I do), but just because it's enjoyable. Does it come at the expense of anything else? Nope, my family comes first and foremost, the laptop quickly disappears. I've other hobbies that I do over the weekend.

Let's not cherry pick one sentence in a blog and turn it into a epic.
Ask HN: Is it possible to overwhelm a web-crawler with infinite links?
mysite.com/:id

shows some text, links to

mysite.com/:id+1

Would a crawler keep hitting these infinity of pages? What scale would it take to bring down a crawler?
‘Adventure Time’ Creator on VR (on Twitter)
Don't really understand your reply. Linux and GNU and {free,net,open}bsd are created and maintained "for free". Can things only have value if they cost money?

Is the unix certification only for large companies who can afford to throw money at the open group in order to get certified?

According to the wikipedia page:

> By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties

Right.. Please tell me how this is not a meaningless certification?
FreeBSD is more unix than OS X, and would likely have no problems running the test suite, but is not certified as "real unix" because that certification is about money.
Well said - the point the article missed is that the politicians in the E.U. are still behaving rationally, even if the countries are not.

If the politicians agree to an austere fiscal policy with the Euro, it will mean setting their economy back in a very visible manner and jeopardize their re-election chances. The countries in the E.U. are still very nationalized, and competing political incumbents will be able to spin the policies as sacrificing their own country for someone else's mistakes.

The politicians are still acting within their best interests to keep their jobs, even if that means sinking the Euro.
SS7 Cellphone Network Vulnerability
He is high level and in the Vancouver office.

Everyone I've known who worked on AWS in Seattle have sounded exactly like the NYTimes article (so no, it isn't just the e-commerce side) and I've never heard any positive feedback.
Not quite. Megademos are simply really big demos, the very first example of which being Second Reality by Future Crew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTjnt_WSJu8

Nowadays megademos might be put into the wild demo compo, but from what i know parties put length restrictions on those as well. The primary purpose of wild demo compos however is to allow platforms that do not compare well with the classic demo platforms, such as the various ARM mini computers, game consoles or really old computers.
The SS7 based cellphone networks are vulnerable and routinely exploited by all actors in play.
>but it's not a huge deal if you're competent; those who are mediocre performers will be impacted most.

That's not how it happens in real life. You get a mediocre manager who then gets rid of the competent people. In a toxic environment, no one is safe ever. And that is precisely the goal of the environment.
> One reason I am super gung-ho about Golang for an API or website, is it came with the net http listener package, html/template package, and has several fairly well made open source packages (and standard packages) for secure sessions, CSRF tokens, output filtering, shelling out, so much more...

I'd argue that it's not a good thing. net/http is flawed. They either should have done like Nodejs , provide something barebone or provide something with more features. Why provide some embryo of a router(since it supports some form of string pattern matching) without supporting route variables? The result is people go through hoops to try to keep a certain level of compatibility with the default handler signature while trying to add features, and it leads to a galaxy of horrible packages,because net/http is all you need ... no it isn't .

> Without these types of features, people are doomed to build web-apps no more secure than everyone's first, broken, PHP webapp.

But Go net/http doesn't magically make an app secure either, on the contrary. It doesn't put some CSRF token by magic in your forms, or force tsl , or force strong parameters when de-serializing form data to an entity that has to be persisted in the DB , or come with any kind of extensive data validation framework , or force http only cookies by default ... so it's not much more secure that your first broken PHP webapp ...

My point is Go isn't magically more secure nor superior to the things you are "afraid" of.
You need to look him up and read more. He's not your garden variety hire.
On the Origin of Circuits (2007)
Bash isn't particularly hard. Unfortunately, it carries a significant amount of historical baggage that make things very confusing. Many examples and existing bash scripts usew these older feature which can make learning bash even more confusing.

A couple examples of what I mean are:

# old style command substitution (don't use this)
echo "`ls *.mp3 | wc -l` MP3 files in $PWD"
# new style
echo "$(ls *.mp3 | wc -l) MP3 files in $PWD"

# while it is used in some place, the use of $*
# to mean "all arguments" is probably always wrong
for i in $* ; do do_something $i ; done
# instead, you almost always want "$@"
# (and always use quotes on variable expansion)
for i in "$@" ; do do_something "${i}" ; done

A lot of really nasty sometimes-incorrect behavior goes away when you use the modern replacements.

Another big thing that confuses people at first with sh/bash style shell script is that they treat it like a regular programming language. Instead, realize that most of the magic happens as "expansions" of the command line. Thinking about bash a something closer to a fancy macro language doing simple string manipulates can help a lot.

Finally: RTFM. Seriously. Modern versions of bash have a very nice manual. Cargo-culting pieces of existing scripts may solve an immediate problem, but it won't teach you the real language nearly as well as simply reading bash(1) (especially the "EXPANSIONS" section).
It's not (see my other reply), but for why it used to be allowed, it's because the traditional UNIX security boundary has been user accounts. Any process running as user id 1000 has the same permissions as any other process running as user id 1000, and so it's permitted to mess with those processes. It can't mess with user id 1001 or (of course) 0. But Minecraft running as uid 1000, Safari running as uid 1000, and bash running as uid 1000 are all considered as the same entity.

In this model, the real problem here is sudo, which bridges a uid-1000 session to a uid-0 one. If you're administering a security-conscious, multi-user UNIX system, you should not be using sudo from your regular account. Either make a separate account and log in as that, or log in as root directly. (But if you want your Minecraft and your bash to not be able to interact with each other, the traditional approach doesn't have an answer for you.)

Of course, most UNIX deployments today are not multi-user remote-access systems, the way they were 30+ years ago when this policy was set. Most desktop UNIX deployments are effectively single-user systems, and the UNIX isolation model doesn't make much sense there. As a stopgap measure, direct access to another process's memory has been disallowed, but there are other ways for processes that share UID to mess with each other.

However, the most common single-user UNIX systems today are smartphones, either Android (Linux) or iOS (BSD + stuff). Android takes advantage of the UNIX model by assigning each app its own user ID. Angry Birds running as uid 1000 cannot mess with the Chase mobile app running as uid 1001. iOS technically runs all apps with the same uid, but applies extensive kernel-level sandboxing to limit the ways that apps can interact with the rest of the system, which essentially eliminates the rest of the leakiness.

There's a Chromium security document that expands on the traditional "1-part principal" model (identity of the human) and how we need to get to "2-part principals" (identity of the human + identity of the app), which I hope that someone will figure out how to extend to desktop UNIX someday:

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/prefer-secur...
The euro does come with a mandate for fiscal policy. It just isn't enforced since so few countries have been able to abide by it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maastricht_Treaty#The_Maastric...

What would you suggest as the enforcement mechanism for such a mandate? You can't kick a country out of the currency.
Let’s Build a Web Server. Part 2
Helpful Pinterest Stats for Marketers and Advertisers [Infographic]
Show HN: Tracker is a music tracker interface written with PX2 in Parenscript
> The euro is necessary for the E.U. to remain economically competitive internationally

That's bull. Norway, UK and others are doing pretty fine and they do not have the euro. France,Spain,Italy,and Greece are a complete disaster,only Germany is doing really well and it's clear it has nothing to do with the euro.

> The problem lay in the implementation, and not mandating a fiscal policy for membership (e.g. something similar the austerity measures).

Oh yeah, Euro is broken , so what do when need? more Europe, more power in the hands of a few ... no we need to get rid of that stuff asap and less concentrated powers.

There was no need for a monetary union. At all. It didn't bring back all the industries, it didn't create jobs (10% unemployment in my country,...) , it served no purpose at all.
I thought it was fascinating how many accuracies in that article played out, makes me wish I had bought some houses for $129,000 in San Francisco in the 80's :-).

But perhaps more interesting is the salary question, because there is so much resistance to raising salaries it pulls companies out of the Bay Area. (which has been true since I started here in the 80's) I am not sure what the opposite of a bubble is (not enough increases relative to the market) but as far as I can tell the whole country is in one of those. At some point someone is going to just say "Screw it, staff for effectiveness even it it doubles our HR cost." and if that entity successfully captures the top performers it will seriously outperform all of its competitors in the market and light off a wage war which was what happened in the late 70's and 90's in the Bay Area.
It might be possible to kill a naive crawler with some infinitely-spiralling link web. However, most modern crawlers are built with this in mind and will stop after a certain recursive level is met.
That's not really true, though.
Start here for some reading material: https://github.com/paragonie/awesome-appsec

Get to know the static analysis tools out there, check out OWASP (for web apps), and learn threat modeling. Application security isn't a one-time thing, it's something that is constantly evolving and changing. Learn the processes, then go into the details from there into your chosen technology stack.
I've also read this book, which is good but doesn't go very in deep with the technical stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Software-Security-Disciplin...

Application security isn't just about programming either. It entails elements of risk management, architecture security, configuration management and many other disciplines to be performed effectively.