skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India Launches ASTROSAT, Its First-Ever Astronomical Satellite, into Space
And for the last mile: Moving the downloaded goods from Fast Internet Place (as in the computer class of the school) to Slow Internet Place (home with V.34 only connection). And to send them via snail mail between swapper friends.
It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection! None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing, ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous generation.
I still have a good collection of Atari ST demos on floppies. Even managed to find a working floppy drive (had to try three different drives) for a PC to write some recent demoscene productions (2010-2015) on floppies.
This can already be achieved with Flic: http://flic.io Flic is a Bluetooth button which uses your smartphone to communicate with smart electronics. If you have Philips Hue or LIFX smart lights and a Logitech Harmony Hub (for IR), this would work straight out of the box! (Disclaimer: I am associated with Flic)
Every single person at my office regularly run into problems where they could save a bunch of time if they felt comfortable with automating things by writing a short script or two. The same is not true for electric wiring.

We shouldn't encourage everybody to become programmers, just like we shouldn't encourage everybody to become authors. We should encourage everybody to learn how to program, just like we encourage everybody to learn how to write well.
Why quotes on crisis? I'm not challenging it, because I also find it weird that overnight the phrase started popping up in the news daily. And what is the fear-mongering going on at Reddit?
Wow, looking neat.
Rich kids have to constantly compete with each other for status, this is very much like water polo. It's pretty nice and eye pleasing above the surface, but the stuff underwater, that's not so nice. Yet that's something you have to be adept at too to win.

So, in less metaphorical terms, rich kids learn soft power (social) skills. They are little politicians, backstabbing scummy princesses. This comes very hand for them later in life.
In effect bringing back the X terminal era...
I did Philosophy of Science as a 2nd and 3rd year option in the late 80s at Cambridge. I remember Redwood, but not Lipton. When did you do your thesis?
I think part of the problem is, when you're working on the data so closely you lose the outsider perspective and things which you think jump out and are relatively easily divulged actually require a deeper understanding only obtained from an in depth analysis. I guess it's a bit of a catch 22.
Elastic Progress Bar
Snowden claimed that the UK's surveillance operations were a lot more severe than the US, basically due to a much weaker oversight framework.

The US might have a secret court with secret judges but all it takes for surveillance to be signed off on in the UK is the signature of a minister in the currently governing party.
Yes, but this works with Markov chains, not RNNs
We're in the golden age of DIY home automation. Wifi-enabled microcontrollers like the particle photon are a game changer; it's never been easier to make a connected device yourself.

Using the Photon I've built a device that connects to my doorbell and sends a push notification to my mobile when someone rings. (Might be useful when you're in the back yard and don't want to miss the delivery guy)

Yes, most of the stuff is still gimmicky. But when you're tinkering, it's not necessary to turn everything into a product that will change the world or earn a billion dollars. We can just have a bit of fun, and enjoy the things we can do.

I think that hackerspaces might be todays equivalent to the homebrew computer clubs where enthusiasts dabbled with early home computers...
I don't miss floppies.
What we should be doing is terraforming Mars with life from Earth, not sterilizing everything we send there.
I'd love to use an Ubuntu phone, but the last couple of times I've tried, it was still pretty awful to use.
Currently, the only phone I could install it on is a Galaxy Nexus and it's not surprising that the OS would be slow there. However I've read that it's still stuttering on the Meizu MX4 (in this german review: http://www.golem.de/news/meizu-mx4-mit-ubuntu-im-test-knapp-... ).

Also, the lack of Ubuntu Convergence (the "killer feature"), is disappointing.
> If very bad things start happening, none of these organisations is going to universally side with a government that is doing those things.

If anything history has taught us that this isn't true. Oragnisations like the police and army of any dictatorhip get swept up in it and become part of it.
Generate your own unique working environment for productivite work
A floppy disk ejected from the drive and stored in a safe with a Marine with a rifle standing in front of it, is 1000x more secure than anything connected to the Internet. Maybe a million times more.
Canonical's speculative sales numbers may be further deducted by their Edge crowdfunding campaign that resulted 37K people participating forming only 40% (~13M $) of their target.
This also makes it so that, due to your PoV being validated for (what you think are) bigger numbers, you take on contrary PoVs (less represented in your network) with more confidence, thinking they are wrong and reinforcing your own view. Vicious circle.
I think American redditors just don't care much, and there has been a lot of racism in European parts of Reddit for some time.
They also pay incredibly well http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/netflix-inc/2015
What does it mean to understand language?
I believe exactly this to happen. Combine this with Confirmation bias[1] and Recency effect[2] and you have the typical echo chamber effect (be it Google showing fitting results, be it FB with the algorithm or be it the partisane media.
So your views will get bolstered. You will think you are talking within a big group of likeminded people, because differing strains of thoughts never reach you.

And if you combine this with a debate like in Germany, where FB is being asked to proactively delete/censor* more stuff, this might become a bigger problem.

* Not that I like the stuff to be censored particularly - definitively on the contrary. Just pointing out the effect.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect#Recency...
Thinking in immutability
The worrying part is "x265 is still too slow to be useful in most practical scenarios" and "if your CPU usage target for x264 is anything faster than veryslow, you basically want to keep using x264, since at that same CPU usage target, x265 will give worse quality for the same bitrate than x264."

That can mean that there's a real danger that we'll get a lot of worse content in the future, as those who encode may go to use a bigger-number codec because it's assumed to be better (hey, it's newer!) Most of people never encode with different codecs every material just to compare the actual quality.
The official Meteor tutorial on React is pretty neat too: https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/react/creating-an-app
Any SMM manager worth her salt knows it, as it is one of the principles of the profession.

Rule number 2: persuading major influencers is hard. You should target their connections instead who are not that popular (close friends, family members etc.) Once you persuade them, they can influence your primary targets, who will spread the message to their numerous following.

Rule #3 (advanced): always draw a map of key connections (as counted in the number of interactions) in the network you are working in. This will help immensely in designing your influence strategy.

Here. With some practice, you can now beat the SMM game.
Summer Summary: Top 5 Most Read Articles
> Norwegian doctors get one 3.5″ floppy in the mail from the government [..] every month. For a long time this applied to all of them, but for about the last decade a secure electronic option has been available. Problem is, a lot of doctors love their MSDOS-based electronic journals and haven’t switched yet.

> The government seems to finally close down floppy distribution at the beginning of 2016, forcing any remaining doctors over to newer electronic patient journals. Sadly, the chosen strategy is just to offer paper printouts instead, requiring error-prone rekeying at the doctor’s office.

It seems like these guys have a potential business in selling a device/appliance to bridge the "secure electronic option" to floppy gap (without relying on paper): Basically make doctors do this work themselves. A laptop (running locked down Linux for security reasons) and a USB floppy drive. You can easily charge 10x hardware cost, so no need to skimp, and you can support by exchanging the entire setup via post.
My Year of Everything
Compared to Earth, we know very little about Mars. Purposefully contaminating our craft (or worse, starting any sort of terraforming operations now) before we fully understand the planet would make efforts destined for failure at best, and produce unforeseen consequences for the planet at worst.

We've attempted similar things here on Earth in the past without fully understanding the consequences, with the ecological disasters to show for it.

Better for us to more fully understand that planet first.
The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as long as they are still credible threats otherwise.

Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you might increase the chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.
Is there a statistically significant improvement in academic achievement across the schools from using this software?
Selling everything to start again
I'm not by any stretch a "serious powerlifter" but I am powerlifting 3x a week with a buddy (who is a serious powerlifter) and our workouts go anywhere from 60-90 minutes and we _speed_ through them.

When we're serious about recovery between sets, at the weights we're lifting 2 hours is very reasonable and other folks working out with us are taking that long...now add in warm-up stretches or some cardio and you hit 2hrs easily.

NB: As far as what our workout is, the programming is in the vein of Starting Strength or Texas Method.

We're both over 30 (buddy close to 40) and we don't supplement. The trick is that we don't do anything else to work out so that we're mostly/fully recovered. Just lift 3x/week and bust ass when we do it. The only cardio I get is from walking long distances around NYC. Added over 100lbs to my squat and deadlift in the last 6 weeks (5RM).

Edit: That said, I wouldn't recommend it if the goal is solely weight loss. Pure strength training is better for recomp/gains, but I have lost 10lbs over the course of this and am in significantly better shape.
Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.
I doubt a better understanding can happen without sending humans, and there's no way to put humans about Mars without also releasing Earth life. Do you oppose a manned mission to Mars?

Besides, there's still zero evidence of life on Mars. There's no ecology to disrupt.
I remember the various floppies (5.25", 3.5") to be the most unreliable piece of technology I have ever worked with (almost on par with Datassette tapes). Read errors were commonplace.
Amazing work ! May I ask where do you get the data source ?
Could you make a simulated floppy disk which worked in existing physical drives, but contained flash (and thus lots of more storage, potentially more reliable, etc.)?

I know there are floppy DRIVE emulators like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator but I want to emulate the DISK.

There are also of course software solutions to this in a lot of cases, too, especially if you can virtualize, but sometimes hardware is needed.
Came here to say this. "Modern" C++ with move semantics may still be fairly verbose in some cases, but claiming that you need to manually care about memory management (i.e. call new/delete/malloc/free) is a bit weird. It becomes especially weird when the post somehow implies that “paying client[s]” have arbitrary amounts of CPU time and memory available and that you can hence squander their resources as you please.

Having said that, I can easily agree with the remainder of the post that the existing languages/ecosystems aren’t alternatives, and that statement does not change if you correct Scala’s “great performance” to “mediocre performance”.
You will most likely find a shift in the hive mind, but presumably only because Reddit grew from a smaller community with relatively dominant progressive and atheist/agnostic values into something much more mainstream. Reddit 2006 would not reflect mainstream US values and opinions, Reddit 2015 would be much closer. So I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions from the hive mind shift.
I'm personally interested in Rust for a couple reasons.

As an SRE/SysAdmin I struggle to believe that C or C++ can be written safely. It is very common that I see software being emergency patched because of memory unsafety from very experienced engineers in ubiquitous software.

Why would I need the performance/efficiency of C in the first place? Well, I regularly write software that runs on thousands to tens of thousands of machines in production. This software runs below the service. I feel a certain sense of pride in minimizing my observer effect on the system. With Rust, compared to Python, I can write software that has more functionality with a fraction of the memory and CPU utilization.

Another thing that has become more appealing to me is the strong static type system. Not having a formal background in CS I fell in love with Python for how it enabled me to move quickly, and Python is still my go-to language for most things, but after years of supporting large production sites plus running my own code in production I'm a bit tired of runtime exceptions. We have great exception logging and there are entire classes of bugs we'd just never see with Rust's type system and error handling.

Essentially, Rust gives me new super powers and the borrow checker is my sidekick making sure I don't shoot myself in the foot.
If someone writes a nice summary of what is missing/failing in each one of those typed languages, would be very fruitful. At the end why don't we see a flood of people quitting C/C++ or dynamic languages to jump to those challengers?
Blindsight: Some people who have lost their vision find a “second sight”
India != Silicon Valley. Not even close.
A couple years ago I saw a lecture by Luis von Ahn of Doulingo. He started the project not interested in education rather crowd sourcing but after a year he had 23 employees working on the education part and 2 working on the crowd sourcing of translations.

He hired a couple esteemed leaders in acadamia on the subject of foreign language learning from prestigious universities as consultants. The question they asked the consultants was which part of speech should be taught to students learning a foreign language first? Do students learn faster if they learn verbs first or if they learn nouns? And, nobody could answer that so he got rid of the consultants and he and his engineers started to A/B different students using all the data they were gleaning. He says they answered those questions in a matter of weeks.
Nero MediaHome 4 Serial Number Plus Crack Free Download
Automatic charts and insights in Google Sheets
One Code, One Project – Mobile Native Apps (iOS and Android)
There were Zip, there were Jaz, there were LS120, there were various MO formats.

Thinking about it i wonder if what killed it was not just the CD-R, but also that it went from primary storage (early PC etc) to transitory storage (sneakernet etc) as HDDs took over.
>However I've read that it's still stuttering on the Meizu MX4

I can confirm this. I do feel it got better with the last update, but it is still noticeably laggy in situations where it has little reason to be. It doesn't help the primary screen, or hub, or scope (whatever it might be known as) has a tendency to refresh itself frequently, and draws its various components in a very unpolished manner.

With that said, it isn't all bad - I've been really impressed with the podcatcher "Podbird". If every Ubuntu touch application was as well done as this, I could probably start recommending it to people I know. Here's a recent video of the desktop build, which is largely identical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLSqz7skYvw
If I recall correctly it wasn't the storage bit that was usually the problem.

It was the "A:\ is not accessible" message you received when you put it back in.
Why C# Is Not My Favorite Programming Language
My goal is to make fictionhub a perfect place for writers to post and discuss fiction.

It is like a blogging platform with discovery system and community features of reddit.

It is also open source:

https://github.com/raymestalez/fictionhub

You are welcome to join and upload your stories, and to ask me any questions =)
An earlier discussion citing the same paper
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200
The Human Brain Project does not actually try to create a realistic human brain, instead it tries to randomly generate neurons and synapses whose statistical distribution matches those of the different kinds of neurons observed in the human brain. While this is utterly useless for things like intelligence or learning (both of which are wildly unrealistic given the simulation speed of the software system), for things like autism, parkinson which go along with abnormally distributed brain patterns it could still be very useful. I think beyond the fact that Markram probably oversold the project, the project also suffers from a clash of cultures. In fields physics and other branches of natural science it has long been a given to do simulations instead of experiments once one was reasonably sure how things worked. In the case of the Human Brain Project if the software is architected in the right way additional insights in how synapses and neurons worked and how they are connected could be incorporated over time. Obviously you wouldn't understand conciousness or learning this way, at least not right away, but solely relying on experiments, won't get you there either, since they can only deal with dozens of neurons and not much more.
What's the problem with the traffic being driven away from the web site? As long as it would be coming through their API (think of centralized API for local food joints), and they get their cut it's all good.

But I see valid reasons for not providing APIs like that. Imagine someone creates a gadget like that and there's a bug, instead of 1 pizza it orders 10 of them. A delivery guy comes with 10, and no one is willing to pay for that many. It wouldn't take long to infuriate enough food joints.

Well, yeah, you could pay with credit card when placing an order... But I never do that, I just avoid using my card on web if I can easily do it :)
"More diverse" is, I believe, the term you're looking for.

On reddit circa 2006, everybody had the same views on everything from politics to movies to cats to spiders.

Eventually it acquired a more diverse cross-section of the population. Of course, they've been doing their best over the past few months to crack down on the expression of views they don't like, so I'm not sure what the demographic looks like nowadays and how many people have fled to less censorship-happy pastures.

It's also possible that young people are becoming more conservative overall. Conservatism is looking a lot better ever since the idiocy of the Bush administration got replaced by the idiocy of the Obama administration.
"All blacks are racist too"
oh stop it. It was told by progresives over and over again that blacks can not be racist! Remember - racism is power + prejudice! (Same with sexism).
Do you have any more lies/mental gymnastics?
I hope that important systems have multiple copies in multiple sites... I fear they don't.
From a military point of view, the huge advantage of floppy disks is that they're dumb storage. The modern replacements such as USB storage or SD cards are microprocessor-based systems. How are you going to verify that the SD cards you're buying don't have malicious firmware?
Encoding speed is a real concern for some applications.

Think about Chromoting (Chrome Remote Desktop). They send VP9 video. If they cannot encode it at 60Hz (15ms per frame), it will look choppy.

(I quickly looked into it yesterday: https://twitter.com/espadrine/status/648158704420941825)
It's almost certainly doable, although detecting the head position is going to be a hassle. But you can't increase the capacity much, because you're limited to N sectors and M tracks.
OCaml "writing a first-rate concurrency-friendly runtime would require massive investment". Except it's already being done in OCaml 4.03 [1]. I still don't think this is actually a problem, since in many cases (NUMA, distributed systems) it's better to use other approaches. If the article is serious about safety, then it wouldn't encourage people to use threads with shared memory.

[1] https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-05/msg00034....
Which is neatly surmised in epigram 102.: One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means. -- Alan Perlis, ``Epigrams in Programming''

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
10 bitcoins on "Only if it is good for me".
Went there to check out the ads, stayed for days looking at the food. Help! I'm buying new barbecue gear in late September!
CVE Request: TrueCrypt 7.1a and VeraCrypt 1.14 Local Elevation of Privilege
I can remember filling page upon page of paper completing worked examples by hand on the CS course I did - oddly enough these labourious exercises actually made me really interested in λ-calculus and the related SK combinators.

I think it actually takes some effort with these things to realise that they really are that simple and yet so powerful.
Yeah, but you can have a huge library of virtual floppies and load those based on external selector or something else.
Nice, seems like a cool startup.
I wonder whether they transformed top secret networks into intentionally slow networks now for large scale leaks to take years or tens of years :)
I've been running the Ubuntu Aquaris E5 since it launched. The main reason I want to stick with it through the difficult early time (browser crashes continuously), is that I want a proper Linux environment on which to develop applications for phones/tablets. I hate having to be forced into Java on Android, and IOS is too locked down and you can't use custom hardware. I hope they stick with it (the main phone guy recently left Canonical) but I can only agree that it is now becoming extremely urgent for Canonical to ship convergence, as without it, this OS is a poor cousin to the competition, even if the user interface is quite clean and fresh by comparison to the gaudy design of Android and IOS. It definitely has potential as much more of an open, blank slate for developers than the others, but the key word is "potential". It's not there yet.
The backtrack on the original recording is really distracting, anyone got a source without this?