skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And there are more secure options: the package managers.

So sandstorms installation guide should in your opinion just say "wait a couple of years and maybe someone will have packaged it for your distro"? Yes, that sounds excellent way of getting users. And hey, the most secure way of installing software is not to!
This is a good point on a number of fronts. A key take away with this is that startups need to understand how to properly register their businesses to get maximum traction. SEO isn't everything. Things like Dunn & Bradstreet are often requirements to prove legitimacy, but overlooked simply because founders don't know what they don't know.
The CRC in TCP is not powerful enough, but CRCs can be adjusted to be arbitrarily powerful. The main advantage of CRCs is that they can be independently computed for multiple parts and combined when concatenating the parts.
Kill-switch to me sounds like something pressed in emergency. Use cases cited here should be called 'hardware switches'
n00b question: can someone give me a small summary of the main difference between Elixir and Node at a very general level, without getting into a spat about the merits of JavaScript or true functional languages. Looking more for pros/cons like, "Elixir works _X_ way, where Node lacks _Y_," or, "Elixir is great for _Y_, but if you really want to do _X_, stick with Node."
Atoms-thin flakes of phosphorus have a crucial property that graphene lacks
Why do sounds sound different?
The government is concerned with the shape of the society it represents as well as the end result. Accepting some inefficiency for social good is a feature, not a bug. Even when it makes you mad.

And, as described numerous times elsewhere in this thread, it's not that hard for small companies to get governmental work. But the process is different, for reasons that are not themselves unreasonable, and most don't really want to play with stuff like FAR. (Which is part of why many large governmental contracts require subcontracting to small companies--itself but the most efficient process, but a good one for growing those small companies.)
The CRC in TCP is weak. CRCs can be made arbitrarily powerful and still retain their key advantage: they can be computed independently and then combined when concatenating the parts. That key advantage, combined with a strong CRC, is what provides an elegant solution to the 2-pass problem.
It's called "Bait & Switch". Crystal dev - If you read this, you should be ashamed of yourself. Very convenient for you after you have my money.
My home security system has a "duress code" that will disable the alarm sound and silently alert the company. It's not the reverse of the normal one, it's a different one that can be set.
Some bookkepers for crime organizations have from time to time used their own notation to keep the books. Typically, they have not been sophisticated enough to hide malfeasance, in addition, the shadiness of it is often enough evidence of wrongdoing, or at least leads to forensic accounting which reveals tax evasion.
Also, lets not forget that this all really kicked off once we changed our style of governments feudalistic to capitalistic. It's not the last 100 years but rather the last 200 that made the difference the industrial revolution put into place the foundation for the advances of the 20th century. It's hard to get headwind on advancements when every few years all your stuff is being taken away due to the whims of the king/queen/new invaders etc..
So i guess maybe Apple didn't code their ios and ios apps using xcode, xcode-git, autolayout and coredata after all. Because their scale seems pretty big too.
Probably not. Erasing leaves marks.

The only marketable purpose for an instant erasure system like that is protection of information (personal or commercial). To build that, you'd make something that zeros all the files and deletes them, deletes and overwrites all the contacts, and such.

But the structures left after that don't look like a brand new device. They look like you had a bunch of things and then erased them. Cops won't know what you erased, but they'll know you handed them a phone that was recently erased.

Now maybe somebody will build an app tuned for obstruction of justice, so it tries to make the phone look brand new. And maybe you'll be very lucky and they'll get it working perfectly on your specific phone. But then you have to explain how you have a brand new phone that was actually purchased a year ago. And how it has no record of any of the calls that your phone carrier will have records of. The obvious conclusion is that you wiped it sometime after your last call and with special software that only appeals to people planning on hindering an investigation.

Is that enough to convict you for obstruction of justice? I have no idea; it probably depends on how much a prosecutor cares. But is it enough to convince cops you are vigorously hiding something? You bet.
Microsoft's record of back-stabbing is rather small and trivial compared to some other companies, such as IBM and Oracle, and is a long way in the past. The company has been under government attack since 1995 (when it signed Janet Reno's consent decree) and was under very close day-to-day judicial supervision for a decade after losing its anti-trust case (it paid many billions for its sins).

So, for the past 15 years or so, Microsoft's behavior has been far better than average for the software industry. For the past five years, it has been listed as one of the world's "most ethical" corporations.

Pretty much all the people who did bad things departed in a previous century, and the company culture is radically different today.
and your bombs don't burn innocents alive, men women and children? And don't say "oh the intent". The intent is there both sides, I believe the media sound bite is called "collateral damage", but the burning alive of innocents means the same

and your country has no trafficked women and girls forced to work as prostitutes.

and these people are most annoyed about what? Outside meddling in their countries. They are but pawns in geo-political manoeuvring that has been going for years.

We all live in glass houses and none of us should throw stones
This is amazing. In 1989. And here we are in 2015, looking at data by feverishly flipping arrows in collapsable trees in eclipse. I just don't get it.

I am somewhat in love with homoiconicity; perhaps no other revelation in CS mattered more to me than that discovery when learning scheme. Here's the one sticking point that I couldn't figure out: how to live without closures. Building up a quoted hunk of code and injecting the right values in the right places just seems so much less clear. Thoughts?

Maybe it's just a matter of having the right helper functions, like something that does printf-style substitution for quoted programs?

And I'll need another hour to go through all those other links above, but I'm excited about it! More later.
I haven't done much with it yet but I was under the impression that speed and performance were a big advantage.
Elixir helps manage complexity by encouraging the structuring of code in terms of series of transformations on data. This makes code simpler, more readable, easier to read, reason about and maintain. It also helps avoid whole classes of complex bugs and problems that inevitable creep into large codebases of Java, Python or Ruby code.
I'm glad the feature exists. I removed the Facebook app from my Android phone and am happy to just receive web notifications now.
The UN have unveiled 17 new Global Goals
Of course, but the article being discussed is about curl|bash so I felt that comment was relevant :)
IMHO the main reasons compared to, say Ruby, would be: native support for concurrency, Erlang VM, fault tolerance and speed. However, I'm also disappointed that there's no type checking. EDIT: Although I don't agree with the comment below, I'm removing comment about Golang because it's unnecessary in the discussion about Elixir.
Which you might not have the password for. You could've recently changed it and forgotten it (I've had to reset phones of friends and family who have done this). Or you never locked it but someone else did. Or a number of other situations where the password, like the body, might not exist.
So what differentiates it from Clojure or Racket then (which are ostensibly more interested in transformations on data)?
And that's a shame. Battery management should be on the hardware level. I can't find any information whether detection of AC-charger presence is on the hardware level or not, which I also think should be on hardware level to stop charging once the battery is full and fully draw current from the charger. That will not waste the battery's cycle life. Both of these speak for the overall quality of the manufacturers' products.
"the government is completely incompetent and relies on the huge defense contractors for guidance"

This is the catch 22 of any business. If you don't know something, either you hire people with that knowledge or you contract it out. If you can't properly supervise the work/project/acquisition because you don't have enough depth of knowledge, then it's very hard to get a good solution. In the end, the government is at the mercy of private industry because the government can't be the best at everything.
Honest question, and not meant to be inflammatory at all. I'm asking because I'm starting a project where an actor model may be a good fit.

Why would one choose erlang/elixir over akka[0]? Akka seems to implement a lot of common patterns for you. It has actor persistance, cross-node failover, advanced mailbox and routing logic, and is basically a superset of OTP.

The JVM is generally more efficient, has better tooling (ide support), has better libraries, and so on.

The only point I can give to erlang is the pre-emptive scheduling, which is useful for consistently low latency.

[0] http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.0-RC3/java.html
A direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v=fYJneaa2O8I
The single largest weight in SBIR award evaluation is previous success in commercializing SBIR funded technology. It's a blatantly ridiculous catch-22.
Exactly! We've been building huge things out of stone, just because, for at least five thousand years.
Just think. If he were alive today, he'd probably be leading the cast of clowns running for the GOP presidential nomination.
But, was initially confusing because I couldn't find their app in the app store, where I was expecting it.

In my experience this is a huge problem. Along with the process of adding to home screen - people just don't get it. Once they have it installed they're very happy, but getting them to that point is difficult.
There are many places in your stack where data corruption can and will occur. You are correct that TLS provides payload integrity on a per-packet basis - but it doesn't protect you against silent truncation (to fight this, always declare and check content-length, or use chunked encoding). I have seen corruption occur in NIC buffers, ECC'd main memory, Xen MMU'd memory pages (yes, Xen was responsible), and multiple places in HTTP server and client stacks. None of those failures manifested until hundreds of terabytes of data had successfully gone through the system.

If you're handling data on behalf of others, it's paramount that you checksum data end-to-end. Amazon S3 allows you to do this by sending the MD5 or SHA along with the data. Google GCE allows you to do this with CRCs (which, despite what others in this thread say, are more appropriate for the task than crypto hashes, as long as you use enough bits).
Is it Toll-Free Bridging?
Still, laws must be written before they can be enforced. Some adjustment should be expected. I've occasionally wondered if it would be possible to have a "Deletionist Party" who's sole political aim is simplification of the legal code.
> That will not work on all Linux distros

The result of the work to create packages using the major packaging formats will produce a series of packages that combined, will arguably work better, on more distros than your home-grown installer.

> That is writing a specific installer

What makes you think creating e.g. a debian package equates to "writing a specific installer". The whole point of packages is that you don't "write an installer" you provide an existing installer (the package manager/package installer) with information about what to install where.
> It also helps avoid whole classes of complex bugs

Whole "classes" indeed.

Especially for Ruby devs who are fed up dealing with concurrency and performance problems in Rails, Elixir is very attractive and will make you code in a different way.
The Yelpification of business software
I'm not calling you out, but in general when I hear people compare Go to languages with more "intense" typing (including Erlang, though possibly not Elixir) I find it funny. Go has a very crude type system and can be more easily compared to C (in terms of types) than anything else I think.

If you ever try to do anything as interesting with types as you could in a dynamic language, you'd immediately start transporting interface{}s (essentially void*) all over the place and lose all static typing [0] (and context[1]).

[0] - https://github.com/eatonphil/gimpy/blob/master/net/http/http...

[1] - https://github.com/eatonphil/gimpy
Does this mean these cars will be recalled or will the environmental laws be weakened to make them road legal?
With the perpetual license, this isn't really that different than the old model for people buying one year at a time. For me, it addresses the main issues I had with the previous plan (IDE no longer working after you stop payment or without Internet connection), albeit with some of the most complex license terms I've ran across.
I've coded in Python and Go (which has compile time type safety and does inference to avoid verbosity) code professionally, and am loving Elixir. I build distributed systems and I while I love Python, I don't think it is the right language for that. Frankly, I prefer nodeJS's single thread to Python's GIL because you are under no illusions wrt concurrency. Go is better but I don't understand why channel communication across machines doesn't exist (I think it was there as an experimental feature early on but maybe I am mistaken). I'm very impressed by the capabilities of the Beam VM and hope that Elixir will let me build better distributed systems (despite the lack of type safety).

I'm trying to convince people at work to use Elixir but people seem to have language fatigue. The lack of a major company/product using Elixir is making me worried as well. But hey .. someone had to be first, right? :)
i took the exit pictured here out of curiosity once.. drove 10 miles into the desert to the remains of the retreat. walked inside a small library or welcome center and found a warm cup of coffee but no person to accompany it.

then, walking around the grounds outside in the sun (it was summer), i started to have a panic attack. i climbed in my car to leave but my car wouldn't start. -eventually it did. strange place
It draws less than my old desktop with a Nehalem I7 and a Ti. And it's only on when I use it. =)

Helps that I got it for free when a startup went down, too.
Not sure if you are trolling or not, but here goes.

I would choose Elixir over Ruby or Python if my service needed to high reliability or if it touched the network in any significant way. Ruby and Python suck at concurrency and are "fragile" when serving lots of connections. Clojure or Scala (seriously, no one is building a product in Racket...) would be appealing but the JVM brings its own set of headaches and even with bolt-on large-scale concurrency support the JVM languages are not significantly better at these problems.

Broadly recognized syntax? Elixir is much easier for people to read than either Clojure or Scala and is close enough to Ruby that Elixir is drawing over a lot of developers from that group.

I use Elixir because it is fun, it scales well and has high performance for the problems I am throwing at it, and it helps me develop solid and reliable solutions.
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom"

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4078-the-saddest-aspect-of-l...
How do most people manage their devices(iPhone / MacBook / etc.) if leaving them plugged in all the time is detrimental to the battery? I could kill all the apps on my phone and put it in flight mode when I go to sleep, but I may not get the chance to charge it to full if I have to leave the house immediately upon waking up. Should I let my battery drain all the way?
Its just strange that Apple has not presented any actual numbers on this. Usually you'd expect them to talk about how XYZ is 90% faster, and 100x awesome and what not. It makes me think that they have something else in mind.
Could you explain what FarmLogs does to someone that a) grew up on a deciduous fruit farm with some cattle, b) studied electronic engineering with computer science, c) works in embedded systems and d) doesn't come from the US?
fpm would solve their "packages are hard" problem.
Additionally, when the upgrade path is "curl|bash" that is poorly thought out.If "curl|bash" installed the package repository, and then used the local package system to install, then that would be better.
Yes, certifying against every possible negative that some arbitrary entity had the wherewithal to lobby for is silly.

You make laws and prosecute the offenders, you don't make everyone you do business with pay money to prove that they don't engage in every possible negative activity.
Per-actor GC is pretty important, as it allows Erlang to guarantee soft real-time / low latencies. This is simply impossible in the JVM unless you go with Azul's GC, which then sacrifices throughput.
I have a good friend who has run his own 2-5 person shop for years and lately he says that they're often excluded by decree because the contracts stipulate some sort of minimum size of business that is acceptable.

Do you have any suggestions I might pass on?
BlackBerry finally confirms its 'Priv' Android flagship slider handset
"should"... doesn't buy you much. It's a shame there's no standard driver for this, however, since these Li-ion batteries are all pretty much the same in terms of charge management. It's a safe bet almost all users would be better off with a batter that defaulted to around 70% charge unless explicitly (and temporarily) told to prepare for a long trip.
Translation: at some point after putting one hack on top of another at high speed, we will clean up the mess and do it properly.
The concurrency model. I recommend Rich Hickey's talk "the language of the system" (ironic, I know). In erlang/elixir you use the same kinds of abstractions to design your fine-grained logic and you coarse services. This makes for a very unique approach to scaling.
You're not thinking future-proof enough! Each shelf needs to have NFC coils embedded throughout. With just outlets, you'll run out as soon as you have an Eggminder, a Milkminder, and a Sixpackminder
Recent HN thread on a NY Times article talking about the same work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233874

That thread also contains an excellent description of the last parsec problem by HN poster antognini.
Drones vs. driverless cars: A tale of two robotics policies
depends on the type of issue these updates fix. Some Via Nano CPUs came with microcode that hung the CPU on power state transitions.

If you don't intend to run the CPU at 100% all the time, you want to install those updates.

Similar issues (usually more subtle) exist for other CPUs
If you search HN or Google for Erlang vs Node there's a long history of this debate. Here's a brief summary:

- Erlang/Elixir (from now on I will just say Elixir) have parallelism out of the box. Node.js is a single threaded event loop so you only get CPU parallelism by forking.

- Elixir is also massively concurrent and has non blocking IO but instead of using callbacks/promises you just write your code sequentially and the BEAM (Elixir's VM) takes care of scheduling for you.

- In benchmarks, Elixir maintains a very consistent 99th percentile whereas Node's 99th percentile latency drastically gets worse as the active number of connections increase.
The federal government is not a for-profit corporation intent on profit. Consider it more as a social service mission driven non-profit. Federal contracting is mission-driven by specific regulation, whether it be defense or health or transportation or whatever. The US govt. is not about end results, it's about process which hopefully leads to end results. The US, as a people, through the voice of the elected federal government, has determined that taxpayer dollars should not fund tropical hardwoods but should fund the growth of minority-owned businesses. Agree or disagree on the goals, that is the mission of those tax dollars.

As a contractor seeking to spend those tax dollars, you are effectively signing up to help execute on the US population's stated goals as a people, not achieve the best business result for a government agency. Until you understand this, government contracting is not for you.

As for disruptive start-ups, in my 15 years working on state and federal contracts, every single agency that has requested "innovation", "disruptive change", "modern technologies" in fact means "please do this 95% of the way we did it last time, but add some shiny magic so we can feel good about progress".

As with any customer, your goal should be to give the customer what they want, while educating them about what they need. At the end of the day, you need to make your customer happy, and for a federal agency that often means don't fail, don't get their name in the paper. Which generally comes from doing it in a predictable fashion with incremental change.
Court orders are oversight. Police are by law limited on their own. To go further, they have to convince a judge.

The oversight on the judge? Higher-level judges. If you are arrested after a warrant that is later found to be invalid, the evidence collected based on the warrant is thrown out. This can go all the way to the supreme court. As it did in Franks v Delaware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_v._Delaware
Most of the world. You just need to be prepared to lose quite often. As long as you don't react to losing by grabbing a gun, you're still playing.
There's a ton of startups that get U.S. government contracts. It's not hard and in fact the government specifically sets aside something like 30% of contract awards to small businesses and other disadvantaged businesses. There's an entire industry of forming startups that only chase after small business set asides, then sub in a major government contractor to perform the work -- acting as a pass through. Startups that are very good at this end up "owning" lots of large contracts and then end up being acquired as a division of a larger defense contractor so they can squeeze the last few percent out of the contracts the startup holds.

Rinse, recycle and repeat. There's lots of very wealthy Beltway residents who's career is just spinning up businesses to do this. It's a kind of a parallel system to what goes on in the Valley.
Any lawyers (or wanna be lawyers) want to chime in -- is your thumbprint protected in the same way? I can see how the 5th amendment prevents them from compelling you to reveal your passcode, but does it prevent them from grabbing your thumb and using TouchID to unlock your phone? (That, or, just using a thumbprint provided during booking or whatnot...)
On the other hand, if you can be compelled to divulge the passphrase to any encrypted container, what happens if you forget it? What happens if you happen to have a block of random-looking data? It might be an encrypted container -- or it might be something entirely different.

If I were to go through my old hard drives, USBsticks and whatnot, I'm reasonably sure I'd stumble on to random blocks of data and/or encrypted archives with passwords long since forgotten. If I could be punished for not producing matching passphrases, those could become a huge liability, very quickly.