skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a miserable near account cancelation experience with Amazon recently and wrote about it here:

https://gist.github.com/softwaredoug/6f74748822bf52728545

What makes the minor threat of account cancelation so scary is all the DRM they sucker you into. Movies, books, etc just deleted by canceling your account. And there's about 4-5 major companies now that sell e-books, movies, etc all with this model. Why should I trust any of them? Why can't there be a different model. Instead of the Internet destroying the old distribution models, its only created stronger more consolidated control over the distribution of media. Time to visit my local book store.
Canadian company plans inflatable space elevator
It's a constant refrain in techie circles that the people are against mass surveillance but are powerless to stop it.

I don't believe this to be true. I think techies are looking at opinions within their own circles and making the incorrect assumption that the general population has similar opinions.

From what I can see, we have mass surveillance because it is what the people want. We have the TSA because it is what the people want. We have drone strikes because it is what the people want.

People are terrified of terrorism and want the government to take strong measures to fight it. This attitude may well be partly caused by the government, which benefits from this fear, but it is no less real for it.

Our governments aren't the best but they are far from being lost causes when it comes to being responsive to what the people want. The problem is that what the people want is often bad. Efforts to make the government better represent the wishes of the population will fail to make any difference with stuff like this, because that goal is already achieved in this case.

If we want this stuff to stop, we must first convince most of the population that it should. Without that, nothing else will be effective. And with it, change will come easily.
A GPS tracker becomes useless if it can't see any satellites; having worked with GPS before and seeing how effective even a thin layer of metal can attenuate the signal significantly, I'm curious as to how they were able to make this work. It seems highly unlikely that someone smuggling a tusk would leave it in clear view of the sky.
See also: quickcheck[1], hypothesis[2], ScalaCheck[3], etc

[1]: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/QuickCheck/manual.html

[2]: https://hypothesis.readthedocs.org

[3]: http://www.scalacheck.org/
It is not done unnecessarily; death of bitcoin is what I talk about. It does look like a linkbait but did you read it? I'd gladly take a 'no' as an answer to the title if you tell me why do you think so..

In fact on the opposite, your hipster comment might have deterred people from viewing it which is something you must think about. Time lost on HN means this is not going back up.
How DuckDuckGo Rode a Wave of Post-Snowden Anxiety to Massive Growth
Yeah--so, Rust's mission is memory safety without garbage collection.

Is there ever really a situation where you need to write a web service but cannot afford garbage collection?

Rust is a really cool and novel language. I considered learning it, but since I mostly program web apps and services, I decided to go with Haskell instead. it has much better performance than dynamic languages, but is still garbage collected, because managing memory manually in my code seems like a wasted effort.

I chose Haskell rather than Go just because I like functional idioms, but you could just as easily replace Haskell with Go in the above paragraph.

I mean, I guess the fact that you can write a web app in Rust is cool, I just don't understand why you'd really want to, when there are languages like Haskell and Go (and Nim and D...) that give you fast binaries and garbage collection.
Nothing says "hardcore hacker at work" quite like forgetting what day of the week it is.
Ah sorry my bad too:)

HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. IJCAI, AI magazine, AGI conferences etc would be the best place to look at scientific cutting edging work on intelligent machines that includes non-ML work. The research reported in these places is not always flashy like what the HN crowd loves, but represents unsolved problems being solved in a variety of ways.

The Berkley course on AI on EdX is also a good option to understand what is happening in the field. A lot of $$ goes into non ML stuff. Don't get me wrong ML is important, but right now, is not the only game in town. Would be nice to have pure learning machines, but we are quite far from that (despite all the hype and genuine exciting developments in recent years).
I'm not backpedaling; you're moving the goalposts. I said all of those services all the time. In other words, not occasional but habitual use, and that demographic is dominated by the young Google/Facebook/VC techno-elite. You don't like where that thought leads, or how the conclusion reflects on you? Too bad. The facts are the facts.
Banks and Brokerages Should Be Mining the Blockchain
Would a wooden crate have the same effect as the metal?
> Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic.

In this case, we would be talking about a rehab clinic that gives heroin for free to the people in order to get more customers (patients).
YMMV but it's less rewarding that what you would think (5th yr PhD Fin here)
They'll have to outlaw crypto first. And it's hard to put this genie back to the bottle, given that it's somewhat out already.

To outlaw but not make virtually anyone guilty (because some stuff like TLS is extremely common) is a hard task alone, and any attempts at this would be surely fiercely countered.
The 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels were shockingly offensive
Trojan Sent to Dead Prosecutor in Argentina Posted for Community Analysis
Thanks for asking!

It creates a timesheet based on your git history, and then creates an invoice from that. It guesses the number of hours you've worked an any given day, and also shows you your work for that day and allows you to correct the estimate.

It used to take me an hour to create an invoice - now it takes about a minute.

It's not a huge savings - but for those like me who dread creating invoices it makes me happy to get it done quicker.

Of course the tool is worthless unless you are a programmer checking all of your work into git. I'm trying to find out if this thing could be useful to people other than me.
I shortened the title to fit the character limit. I think this still captures the original pretty well.
I've seen a lot of Literate Haskell in tutorials and course materials, but not really ever in production code. It's too cumbersome to work with when comments are the default and every line of code has to start with '>'.
Here's the dataset they use. I have used this as part of developing and testing the fitness of recommender systems in the past: http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/

This predates some of my more recent work with the grouplens database, but here is a parser I put together for the data awhile back: https://github.com/posborne/mlcollection/blob/master/mlcolle...
Had fun trying out your example. I really like this "You will note that who the player is doesn't matter. X or O is irrelevant, only who's turn it happens to be."
Is there an ethical issue with flooding the market with replica ivory? It would at least raise transaction costs and risks for poachers and their supply chains.
I love how all the Amazon apologists came out to defend their company and criticise any argument against it. They want hard evidence yet completely ignore everything the article says. To counter it, they cite their own anecdotal experience as proof that Amazon's not a bad place to work at all!
Beware of sudo, always, everywhere. Seriously.
By your own statement why would I bother with Go ?

It is equally a new language/framework that is new and hardly used compared to Java, Scala, Ruby, Python etc. All of these have dozens of well made open source packages which will be far more full featured and understood.

And for me I would be deferring front end security to the web server layer i.e. Nginx.
Me too - I hate sending invoices. Is your time tracking tool of the clock in / clock out variety?

Also I'm curious - how do you collect payment? I usually only have one client at a time paying large sums so I ask for a check in the mail. All the online forms of collecting payment seem to take too much of a percentage.
Startup 'Stealth Worker' Matches Businesses with Security Talent
System 0.1.9 release
The euro is one such project. It was known in advance that it couldn't work.

Isn't it a bit extreme and possibly false to claim this? Was there a study that the euro could not work, followed by a conscious decision to pursue it nonetheless?
The full story details some of the tech. It was pretty well thought out. IIRC, the device communicated periodically via sat phone and would cache geodata so that if the sat phone ping failed, it could transmit previous location.
The majority's rule is ochlocracy - a spoiled form of democracy - and that's another, much more general problem. Not sure about whenever this is the actual case or we have something worse.
But I'm sure this (majority rule) is certainly not how modern democracy's supposed to work.
Another thing to note, however, is that not only is the code changing too fast, but also that code doesn't always do what the programmer thinks it does.
I'm not sure how much you want to cut from each, but here are my reactions to some points:

Security: What do you mean? Full audit: not useful. Getting basic TLS cert, copying default-secure nginx config from previous service, not intentionally breaking things your framework provides with an on/off switch. Usually that takes less time than setting up your own solutions.

Backups: If you have any user-created data, "crontab; tar -zcf ...; s3cmd sync ..." - this is literally 5 minutes of work to set up primitive backup that will save you when stuff is on firew.

Monitoring: Pingdom is free for a month - enough before you need actual monitoring.

Those 3 points can be done to an MVP level in ~20 minutes. Why cut them?
I take it these are things you choose to elect and not things you are saying someone should cut. What can and cannot be cut from an MVP/first version is going to depend greatly on the type of product you are launching in general.

Using your list here are my opinions on each item:

1. Testing - in depth testing can be reduced greatly, but at least some minimal testing should be conducted. Especially if you have users signing up, taking user input, or processing payments.

2. Security - again, this one is going to vary greatly on what the product is exactly.

3. All but barest bone features - goes for any MVP

4. Backups - backups are cheap and easy to setup. No reason you can't do at least a minimal back of your data.

5. Monitoring - simple and basic setup, even using something like PagerDuty or Pingdom.

6. An attractive user interface - agree with you here.

7. Paid offerings - I used to be a strong believer in launch free plans to start and add paid offerings later. But if your eventual business model is to offer paid plans then you should start with something from the get go. Setting up Stripe is simple and you can be up and running within a day.

8. User documentation - cut away and add later. A FAQ section is not frequently asked questions if you don't have any users frequently asking questions :)

So to answer your question, what I am willing to cut, or how much of something I willing to cut, all depends on the specific project.
Amazing set of articles. I would up vote this many times over if I could. Thank you my friend!
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3h8678/he_used_to_be_...
The only real time Rust would be better due to lack of garbage collection is when you need performance consistency.

It might be better than some of those languages for other reasons though. For instance I think Rust is more expressive than Go. I think it's easier to learn and more practical than Haskell (though I do enjoy me some Haskell too) and I think it has better tooling than all of those mentioned (except Nim, I don't know enough about Nim to pass judgement).
This tool is more of a timesheet creator than an invoice creator or billing app. It uses your git history to create a timesheet (with guidance from the user to make sure all the hours are correct).

One possibility is you could use my tool to create a timesheet and then import that into Quickbooks. But the tool will also create a PDF invoice for you.

The tool has addressed a pain point for myself personally, but you're right - it may be too niche to be worth putting out there. My market is 'programmers who bill hourly and use git'. Maybe not that many people, and lots of those people might be happy with how they track time already.
This was one of my favorite resources for learning:

http://www.acbl.org/learn_page/learn-to-play-bridge-software...
You would be surprised how often old technical manuals are useful. Examples from my own work:

1) I was tasked with instrumenting the T58-GE-16 engines in a CH-46 [0]. So what did I need to inform my sensor placement and selection? Some schematics and technical manuals, all from the late 1960s, all undigitized.

2) I needed to reverse engineer an old test set. The documentation had been lost to time. When I cracked it open, I saw lots of 5400 & 7400 series chips. Now, this is kind of a trite example, because lots of working EEs still have copies of the TTL Data Book at hand. But still, I needed to refer to that old tome when working on this project.

3) When I worked at a NASA contractor, a primary piece of equipment failed. We needed a replacement in a hurry. Fortunately, someone had kept the older version of this system around. It dated from 1959 (!) but the manual was still around, too. A quick read through that manual got us back in business.

Technology never dies [1]. But without the manuals to understand that technology, things become much harder when you need to use that technology again.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Vertol_CH-46_Sea_Knight

[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/to...
Whenever I'm on a team and I get the opportunity to do code reviews, I strongly encourage it to reduce the Bus Factor
Thanks! This is a great article for what I'm trying to figure out.

One thing I see in a lot of these articles is general reference to the term 'freelancer'. This seems to lump programmers in with writers, designers, accountants, and anyone else who can work on a contract basis.

I wonder how many of the 1 million freelancer jobs posted on elance in 2012 were programmer jobs specifically?
The culture described is by design one that fits an aggressive growth business model. The simplest way to describe it is that you do your time at Amazon the brand and then you downshift in a higher role at a second tier company. The same, for instance, for NYC police: they work hard to build their professional chops and then they write their ticket anywhere in the country.
It is hard on the employees and it takes young blood to do it. In the end, that's the bargain: Amazon imparts a little bit of its brand on your resume and then you have to know how to use it.
Which wiki engine do you have in mind? There certainly is revision control in MediaWiki, Confluence, and others. Granted, I wouldn't use those in place of a source code revision control system such as git. There are generally no "annotate"/"blame" or "pickaxe" features. I would agree with writing something code-friendly in the first place, examples of which would include DocBook and Restructured Text.
Data is broken up into 32k blocks. (That might change to 512k blocks as it gives it a 10x throughput improvement with less CPU / overhead.)

Random of those blocks, based on your nodes ID and the hash of each block's data, are stored on your computer. Before they are, your node encrypts them and throws away the key. All that is ever stored on your harddrive is random encrypted data and no key. The key is the original key that the uploader is provided with. The encryption key is the hash of the data, the ID of the data is a hash of that key. Your node knows only the ID, it cannot derrive the key to decrypt the data. Your node cannot be tricked into storing unencrypted data.

Now, a soon future version will support seeding v1. This is the ability to essentially 'like' a file/website/etc, and that will ensure that your node never throws out the data blocks it does store for that file/site/files_that_site_links_directly. This is mostly UI work that is missing. This feature will also automatically seed for example your Dmails, comments, trust publications, own site, Etc. (Although a UI will let you control it).

After that, more distant, will be seeding v2. This will be more like the file sharing that is similar in concept to how https://peeriodproject.github.io/dl/peeriod_an-anonymous-app... envisions file sharing. Their paper came out as I was coding and I noticed they were the closest in many ideas to mine of any papers I've seen. Their project seems stalled, as most coming out of the academic world are. That is why I started with code and not a paper :) I will write the paper before 0.9 release.
LambdaMOO would be nice.
If you're going to argue this, and especially if you are going to ask that other people provide "hard data", have the courtesy to read the entire article.
Well, that really depends on what your goal is.

One reason for prolonging the game is that it gives your opponent more chances to make mistakes, turning some losses into either ties or victories. This is true for both human or AI opponents.

Another reason to prolong the game against human competitors is if you're playing another game after this one, and you think your opponent will tire before you will. By causing the game to go longer, you gain a mental advantage in the next game.

Now, these may be considered "unfair" or "unsportsmanlike", but explaining that is left as an exercise for the reader.
I am deprecating GitHub. It would be sort of a hypocrisy to host there.

You can join us on IRC: #morphis @ freenode! (this is first announcement of that :)

Come the Disqus feature, github becomes deprecated. I also envision adding GIT over SSH protocol to MORPHiS. (MORPHiS is already SSH protocol based.)

Dmail will be exposed through POP3 and later IMAP. It will also support IRC protocol. It will also support SFTP and RSYNC.

All that stuff takes is time to add higher level stuff that the underlying layer was archtected from the beginning to do (SEE DMAIL!)

If anyone wants to join me, I WOULD LOVE HELP TO MAKE THIS GO FASTER! Join US!

This is going to be awesome.
Are these the same ? http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m5...
Learning New Information Is Easier When It Is Composed of Familiar Elements
> No one would (should!) ever consider writing a webservice in C++, simply because it's unsafe to do so

That's a pretty bold statements. By the same account, you should not write a webservice in rust because it's unsafe. One example is Rust's treatment of OOM cases.

Today, if you run into OOM Rust will panic. Technically, you can have it call a oom handler, but you cannot call many common function in the handler since they allocate memory, so it's not super useful.

Here's the bug, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27335 . And, here is the original one https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/14674 . (Side note: I find the habit of closing bugs and reopening new ones kind of annoying, since it's hard to track how long it's been know / around).

I imagine as a malicious client you could try to DOS an application by 1. forming a message that will cause the application to allocate a lot of memory (as temporary buffers). 2. Send a lot of messages causing pressure on the memory subsystem. You can of course try to not have these issues in your application, but Rust doesn't explicitly save you from the,

On the other hand in C application, you can try to close the offending client's connection and in C++ if you get a bad_alloc (and you deal with it) you'll end up unwinding your stack (and free enough memory to continue on). C++ makes it even easier to handle it at the top level and let RAI take care of the rest.

Yes, in Linux you can die in the system oom case. But, 1. you can turn that off (and you should at least on some systems), 2. depending on your over commit policy you'll get an error instead of OOM if you allocate in a too big chunk.

I personal like Rust and I'd like to see it succeed. But I think the Rust marketing is getting away from what Rust is able to do in it's current incarnation (1.2). Simply, in it's current incarnation there's lot's of unsolved problems (big and small).

So please stop making outlandish claims.
Understanding the $100M Search for Intelligent Alien Life
FYI, your nodes ID is a SHA-512 hash (everything is SHA-512 hash) of your node's RSA-4096 public key. (All crypto is: SHA-512, RSA-4096, and DH-group14-sha1 (for compatability with openssh)).

That relation of your node's ID is one of the Sybil proofing measures designed early on.

I designed everything to be transparent and modular with crypto so I can switch to better algos as they become available (quantum proof, I am watching you!). The first addition will likely be ECC once I have decided upon a safe (as in non NSA backdoored) ECC curve which I believe the community has not proven yet as safe as RSA-4096.
This site has a mpaa rating filter. Have you found it yet?
Many people use VPN services for privacy, to get around geo-blocking, hide torrenting and so on. Where I live, at least 25% of Internet users do so. Tor use is less common. And so I access Tor through VPN services. And don't obviously stand out more than 25% of my neighbors.

But yes, it's complicated. I've been writing how-to guides for years, and people's eyes do tend to glaze. Still, I'm sure that it could be automated.

Smartphones are the huge problem. They're intentionally designed for tracking and surveillance. And they are the primary channel for Internet access in many places. So it does seem pretty hopeless :(
Mikey Boy Rap
I think that if you look at elance/odesk/upwork, you can actually rule out all of those developers because they get paid through the upwork platform - they wouldn't be sending invoices based on their git history. They might have other clients that they invoice directly, but I wouldn't count on it.
This is one of my favourite demoscene's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auagm5UBTwY
The Immortal Leagues Are Coming
Procrastination matrix
What I meant was: "The assertions made by the New York Times piece are corroborated elsewhere." That is, to those who know AWS, it wasn't a terribly surprising article (Tim's shock notwithstanding).
The "advantage" is the convenience mentioned in the (short, succinct) article: I can enter my password for sudo in one terminal window, and escape having to type it again in the other terminal window(s).
There's no "anonymously" there. Maybe buyers use Bitcoins, and maybe they've mixed them well enough to hide the money trail. But for the most part, they provide meatspace mail addresses. To sellers who truly are anonymous. Who may be LEA. Who may ship illegal drugs at homeopathic dilution, and SWAT right after delivery.
Fancy UI or not, it is an absolutely invaluable tool when profiling code on OS X. The memory leak detector is really neat too, and has helped me numerous times track down where I am leaking memory.