skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. The big unanswered question as far as I know (from a layman's perspective) is whether the matter/energy in the singularity at the center of a black hole even follows the laws of nature as we have observe them or if all of that is out of the window past the event horizon. If you don't know the laws of nature describing what happens inside (and you can't study them due to the destructive nature of those forces), no amount of computation will be able to help.
Please explain the creation myth and pantheon of Gods?
It is actually known that musicians and athletes perform at elite levels while stoned.
Thanks for that !

Really makes me feel much better knowing the best of us feels the same way. I am someone who learns by doing and it would have been better to just enter the job market.
I have a limited amount of time to learn about history, so I prefer to focus on original sources instead of reading descriptions by historians. When you review the source material yourself, you place yourself on the same level as the participants in the events. It can change your perspective in surprising ways.

Here are the most important documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/docs.htm
I don't see how it merges the layers. It's essentially a form of compression.

I also don't see how deterministic ordering, perhaps based on hashing the transaction, would promote censorship or centralization.
So, it's user-friendly for some hypothetical set of users that is not the set of users that currently exists.

That is a reiteration.

Either way, neither of us are saying anything of substance.
Generally Siri and Google's service are pretty good about asking for consent so by definition if the feature is on you must be OK with that. Of course are you OK with someone else's device in your proximity listening to everything you say? That is a stickier problem.
Arduino-Powered My Little Pony Donation Box
And it's a website and not an app, rejoice!
The implied meaning being that the single sociopath in question would not have been able to cause much damage if not for the dormant power of religion within other sociopaths.
Sorry, looks like, I can't update the post (link or title). But here's the website in case you are still interested

http://www.getradiogram.com
logn-

I really appreciate this insight, I think that would really be the ideal solution. I have satisfied myself that it won't be possible- the software we're talking about is one slice of a highly sophisticated network of services operated by the DOE- the largest and most complex school district in the country (and I know of no larger similar educational organization in the world).

I came into this believing that the DOE would address these issues if it could, that the system was simply too complex for anyone to be able to update it effectively. I hope that's true. What is certainly true is that there is an impending crisis in the management of educational data and one way to reduce the impact to our community is to begin cultivating a data management strategy which reduces our dependency and increases the robustness of our digital approach.
UDP is used when it's designed by network engineers. That's why we have VOIP and video streaming - all are served UDP.

dont get me started on the lack of multicast out there. imagine game servers running multicast. one day.
This is probably accurate. We had a similar situation occur frequently on our platform and fortunately Mandrill has awesome built-in support for ensuring your support team never does this to anyone. Read the article here: http://blog.mandrill.com/email-as-a-service-as-a-service.htm...
Paralyzed man can now feel via a prosthetic hand connected to his brain
In theory, but because the change was possibly complex and could be useful if available separately, one of the first thing a core member recommended was to iterate the poc as a genuine package and provide an API to the underlying system (which is now scandir).

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-November... is the original proposal on -ideas.
I think the only correct way to do this is via 'apt-get upgrade'. In other words, you probably don't want to replace the system Python manually, because a lot of utilities depend on it, and you might bork your system. Using virtualenv is the generally-recommended way to run a different version.
I agree Alcor could improve. It clearly has over the past decades, and will continue to do so. Why not participate in that?

Their conference is in October. I'm going. (I signed up with Alcor after Hal Finney; the only thing worse is dying, and I'd like it to get better...)

$1k/yr between membership and a 20y 500k term life policy seems cheap enough to me.
Secure Messaging App with Build in VPN+Tor and Anonymous E-mail (Beta)
relevant article?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009740
I'd love to use Python 3. Alas, I work in the defense industry and am working on a new development project in Python 2.6. Why? Because that's the version that's already installed on the client's systems, and getting anything new installed is such a nightmare of Vogon-esque policies and procedures that I've learned not to even ask.

I'm constantly having to hack around bugs in ancient versions of libraries that have been fixed years ago for the same reason.

I have a feeling the slow adoption rate of python 3 is not due to developers "rejecting" it.
The Republican in you needs to look up IBR and ICR and debt forgiveness for student loan debt.
In a sense, but ‘overlay’ generally means more than just re-using memory — it's reading in different sections of (usually) code in place of others; in modern terms, it's sort of like paging, but structured explicitly and (usually) manually at build/link time.

PDP-11 Unix did eventually support overlays, but I don't think they were widely used. The ‘Unix way’ would be to have (as this C compiler does) separate programs run consecutively with intermediate state in temporary files.
Absolutely you are correct that many marijuana users regularly achieve a high under which they ought not drive. One difference between weed and alcohol, is that the marijuana users are more likely to choose not to drive in this state, IE they don't suffer from the same critically impaired judgement that we often associate with drunk driving. IE they are more likely to be respectful of their responsibility as a driver than drivers that have been drinking.
heh! :)

I remember that one.

I used it when hopelessly trying to RE some applications (either Aspack, Securom or Safedisk). Dat self modifying code :3

Got to learn a couple of things thanks to RE. Never became an expert, with college becoming more demanding and then lack of interest, but got to work around some shareware and crackmes. My most "notable work" was dumping an UPX packed executable and rebuilding the PE tables.

A shoutout to all the +RE and Cracking4Newbies and REA people for all the help and tutorials.

fake edit: my first introduction to crypto was from REA... Vigenère cipher comes to mind.
No, but they are building a military installation far out in the south china sea, and making claims that well established shipping lanes of strategic importance to many countries are now owned by them. They have harassed, threatened, and sunk Vietnamese, Filipino, and other countries sovereign vessels and aircraft. This is naked, calculated aggression to achieve territorial aims.

On the other hand, the US has treaty commitments to many countries for mutual self defense, and is probably over committed.
Trending in China: Cheerleaders for Programmers
Is Py3 ready for prime time? Do all the right libraries have support now?
Diablo didn't invent cheating in internet games. I was writing bots for nettrek back in 1992, and it had been going on for a lot longer than that.

Nettrek probably invented anti-cheat practices including RSA signing the binaries and moving most of the logic to server-side. You could program info borgs to give you better display of information than other humans, and you could program combat borgs that simply reacted faster than humans could (particularly with automatic tractor/pressors, auto phasers at close distance, and auto aiming torps), but cloaked ships had their positions randomized server side so you couldn't get magic accuracy to lock on them, and torp wobble and hits were all computed server side so there was no way for client hacking to change the basic physics.
Care to share some highlights? Fifth to second sounds like a big difference!
Scientists discover cause of and potential treatment for muscle loss from aging
Well... those are examples of designing custom protocols on top of UDP. These network engineers, who I assume are specially trained in some secret govt. facility for network commando training, actually have to understand the problem at hand and design something specifically for the problem. Calling these protocols just "UDP" is like saying something like "I use wheels to commute from home to office everyday"
I did an interview once where they asked me questions around the implementation of a hashmap. At the time I'd been working about a year out of university, and had not in that job come across any situation where I'd needed to know anything about how hashmaps worked under the hood (if anyone had a first job where you did, I'm happy for you, yours was a lot more interesting than mine). Any remnant of an explanation I'd got from my CS degree, most likely in first year, was way back in the mists of time. In the pressured situation, I simply admitted I didn't know.

At this point the interviewer's face soured, and he basically wrapped up the interview straight away - it had been running about 5 minutes at that point, with only one question before that, so it was pretty obviously being cut short.

Immediately after the interview I went to Wikipedia to look up hashmaps, instantly understood the basic mechanics, and 5 minutes later could have given a stellar answer to that question.

If that interviewer was looking for someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of data structures, with flawless recall under pressure, then his question served him well in filtering me out. I sincerely doubt that's what he was looking for, though.

Since that experience I've been very careful, doing interviews myself, never to ask straight-up knowledge questions like this - or at least if I veer into a question like that, allow the candidate to explore the idea (even tell them the answer, and just talk about it to see if they get it) if they initially don't know. That will get you a lot closer to what you're actually trying to assess them for.

It's very easy to fall into a trap of interviewing with a 'mirror' approach, where you assume that the candidate must know what you know, or else be bad. Kind of a paint by numbers, where the finished product looks a lot like you. But everyone learns on a different path. You need to remember that there was a time where each concept you use take for granted every day in your job was once new and alien to you, too. You picked it up just fine, and so can they. In fact, this is by far the most core skill you are looking for - that ability to actually pick up new things and use them.
Aircraft Carrier (In)Vulnerability [pdf]
I really do wonder how much of these gaps can be attributed to the universities themselves. Elite universities are more likely to attract successful and motivated and thus will "produce" more successful graduates than other universities. No name state colleges are more likely to attract the less successful high school students and thus they will likely produce less successful graduates. I bet there is nearly as much correlation between SAT scores and pay as the eliteness of the attended university and pay.
Hi dear
So get a LTE tablet then.

But my annoyance with tablets with a mobile connection don't have access to text messages.
>> edit: Ah, I see the snag. There isn't a second event horizon inside the black hole. Just because opposing gravitational forces cancel each other out in the center (and space is flat there) does not mean time is any less distorted by all the surrounding mass.

Exactly. The relationship between mass, space, and time is complicated but there is a causal link going (roughly) in the direction of mass -> space -> time. The presence of mass warps space which dilates time (ignoring special relativity and quantum gravity which makes it weirder). The combined effects of the gravitational force (pressure) necessitates an increase in density, which further warps space, which further dilates time around the singularity.

Time dilation isn't "fighting" the force of gravity and the warping of space, it is an observational effect that is only meaningful outside of the reference frame of the singularity. All other forces and phenomenon are already dependent on time so if the laws of nature do exist inside of a singularity, the existence of other effects like brownian motion will be entirely dependent on the mass/gravitational forces (aka they likely wouldn't be relevant due to the overwhelming effect of compressing matter and energy to such a small volume).
Ask HN: How would you introduce kids in rural India to computers?
A friend of mine wants to introduce school kids in rural India to computers and could use some advice.

Key questions:

- What learning material to use and how to source?

- What programming language to start with?

- What software to introduce them to?

- What games to introduce them to?

Key constraints:

- The kids don't know much English and speak a local language called Odiya. There aren't any technical publications/resources in Odiya.

- Poor internet connectivity.

- No computer experts on the school staff.

Any other advice/help would also be appreciated.
I guess journalists read HN looking for stories? I was suprised to spitbol mentioned on HN and now there is a story on Vice news?

Alas, the interviewer asked no technical, interesting questions. There is a portable assembly language called MINIMAL that is used in spitbol. This could be a topic for an entire story itself.
How I Open Sourced My Hamsters for Science
Yes -- I write ~95% of my python code in 3, and scrapy is the only library I commonly use that doesn't support it. Here's a listing of package compatibility: http://py3readiness.org/.
Have a look at v7 sh(1) and you'll feel better.

e.g. http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...
Isn't the problem with multicast is most networks filtering it out or not supporting it? Thus it only stays useful for the LAN network scope? So I cannot just multicast to 5000 random IPs on the internet.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
I am impressed that it upgraded cleanly over my previous installation of Python 3.5 release candidate.
Just looked up Solomonoff induction; assuming it's an accepted mathematical formulation of Occam's Razor, your definition of Voltropy doesn't sound like fringe science at all!
I realize I can't convince you, its part of what makes it sad for me.

> The upfront cost and risk is too high for the
> expected outcome.

I understand this is your thesis but you don't have the data to actually argue it. And those who have done the research have come to a different conclusion than you have, so its a good place to start to understand what they considered relevant versus what you consider relevant. There has been a lot of work done on this so its easy to find papers and articles to read.
30,000-year-old giant virus released from its frozen Arctic tomb
Statistically significant for what question?

"Traffic fatalities are going to triple because of pot!" needs much less data than "traffic fatalities might increase slightly because of pot".
Pixel (px) height getting converted to points (pt)
Thanks for mentioning this, I'll definitely check it out
I'm pretty sure the guy running the department was a full professor, yeah.

They don't say anything about how they get their data, which is a little odd.

Yeah, the numbers on the second page seem more realistic to me. They give more like $95k for a full professor -- which, after Silicon Valley adjustment and the extra $30-$50k you mention is more like $130k-$175k for a full professor. That's much closer to what I've seen than $195k.

So I think the first site is just wrong in how they're estimating, at least for CMU.
Respectfully, I'm not sure what was hyperbolic about my statement. I meant it quite literally: The United States was taking a hypocritical position during the crisis.

This doesn't bother me in some moral sense, because I'm fine with states pursuing their own self interest. But the issue is still important to point out, because it punctures the mythology of noble American statesmen carefully managing a crisis instigated by the Russians.

Even though morality is subjective, in game theory reciprocity is a logical Schelling point. This isn't just post-hoc criticism of American policy; the Russians were actively pointing out this contradiction to the United States. Kruschev accused Kennedy of sinning against the very laws of logic. And he was right — which is why the U.S. ultimately agreed to the Soviet's proposed tit-for-tat withdrawal of mid-range nuclear missiles.
Another excellent reason to write your own query parser instead of using Lucene's. Lucene's query parser is way too powerful to expose to end users.
This always happens when there is a public hysteria over a new threat. Innocent lives are very quickly ruined, charges get dropped and evidence fails to hold up in the courtroom on a frequent basis, and despite all of this the actual criminals continue to operate successfully afterwards (just as chinese espionage continues to be successful at the present).

The same type of failed wrongful convictions - typically involving people who are easy targets - as a result of rabid law enforcement and media fear mongering can be found in terrorism in 2000s, drugs in the 1980s-90s, biker gangs in the 60s-70s.

Instead of taking a logical and well-reasoned approach to the enforcement of legitimate societal problems history just keeps repeating itself.
Is there a data source link? Can't find it anywhere and I'm just jumping from article to article when it highlights their data source -_-
Was Rasputin murdered by MI6? (2014)
it would seem that there are many bug-free software pieces out there.

I don't think that you can consider CPUs to be bug-free. Just to pick one, Intel got SYSRET wrong: https://blog.xenproject.org/2012/06/13/the-intel-sysret-priv...
and the other one: https://python3wos.appspot.com/
I live in a very heavy snow area in the North East US (Buffalo region) and we definitely don't "dig up every street every winter for repairs". What is usually done is that when the snow thaws and the temperature warms a crew will come out and fill necessary holes in the pavement, not dig up streets. This process is very fast, it only takes a few minutes per hole and would definitely not include digging up the streets.
How to Elect a Leader Faster Than a Tournament (2014)
Indeed, TCP appears to be the universal network hammer...
How to Speak Data Science in 2 Minutes
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/

It's climbing the front page right now.
Yup, selection effect bias. There was a long term study on this (sorry no link, I don't remember exact details, just that it was pretty solid, could have been famous Terman study [1] or something similar).

People who were admitted to elite universities but for whichever random reasons ended up not going there ended up being as successful as their cohort peers who did attend elite institutions. What mattered was "good enough for Ivy League" not Ivy League education itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Studies_of_Genius
I went to Bennington for two years, and while it has that reputation, and there are some rich kids running around (myself included), there are a surprising number of working and middle class kids going there, and then coming out of school with no prospects.

Anecdotally, there are a surprising number of waiters, baristas, and other people doing jobs that are in no way informed by their years of study.
The ratio of income inequality is immensely higher than the ratio of tuition cost, which is at least kind of interesting.

Also the education bubble is economically sustainable if and only if the population is selected to be elite ivies only. A nation where nobody makes over $10/hr unless they're in the ivy aristocracy (therefore attending for free with substantial scholarships and aid) doesn't mix well with $60K/yr tuition for a non-elite school.
Speed reading with the Kindle
Apple Watch as Fitness Tracker: How Does It Stack Up?
> I am not sure whether these are dark corners of Unicode or just complex language support.

Either, neither, both. Some are intrinsic to Unicode's purpose of encoding human text, others are accidents of Unicode history, yet others are design decisions which could have gone other ways (which may or may not have been better)

> Call me crazy, but if you are dealing with text, have some time set for research before you start your development.

The issues being most people will have a hard time justifying a year of linguistic and calligraphic study before the project gets to start (whether employed or independent) and most languages have "string"-manipulation facilities which are easy, obvious and wrong.
If you want a poorer VPN, you can use socat [1] or n2n[2], which both works great!

1: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat-tun.html

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N2n
This is where the definition of 'trolling', as understood in the traditional Usenet sense of the word, diverges from what the media has come to call trolling.

In The Times of Israel article, he was impersonating somebody in order to generate anger toward the supposed author. Trolling was originally understood to be more specific than simply doing things that the instigator find amusing at the expense of others.
Interesting article. I graduated from (and interned) at UCLA while the need-based financial aid initiative was rolling out[1]. Obviously, it's the primary factor in minimizing student debt (it's obvious to see that students with well-to-do families have more financial support than poor ones).

An issue I take is conflating public institutions with private ones. I remember UCLA & Berkeley admissions people always struggling to poach students that might attend Stanford/Caltech, but the issue is very complex. Huge endowments are just part of the story.

It makes sense that a wealthy private school (Harvard/Princeton/etc.) has more extra-academic connections that help students get better jobs. Smaller class sizes also make a difference. I just think the article tries to talk about too many things and doesn't end up doing any of them justice. The gender stuff shoehorned at the end is a prime example.

[1] http://www.ucla.edu/admission/affordability
So you're saying that a proper university fails some amount of students who understand the material in order to acquire prestige from the appearance of stringency? Or that a double-digit percentage of admitted students are, for some reason, incompetent?
Visualization for your Open Source project
It's been ready for prime time for the past 3 years.
Given that it is just an HTTP API, I'm not sure it would actually be that much faster to wrap a C++ API than just write a native lib. Plus unless the wrapper is written by Amazon as well, it's not really "official, full support."
In SF, Uber drivers are virtually indistinguishable from taxi drivers.
> it's sort of like paging, but structured explicitly and (usually) manually at build/link time.

And this is "a poor man's" overlay of the data buffer over the piece of the code, specified explicitly and manually at the time of writing the program (the "bigger" overlay mechanisms I know of are also specified at the time of writing the program, not at the time of build or link). As the "scratch" area was overlaid, nothing has to be loaded, that's the only difference to the typical overlay where more often some code would also be overwritten over some other code. The other difference to the "classical," "bigger" overlay is that this was done exactly once over the life of the program.