skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great example of how the reversal test is fundamentally question-begging -- you propose an idealistic version of the future (ignoring the reality of drones falling out of the sky and injuring people, preventing firefighting efforts, and invading people's privacy by hovering outside their apartments with cameras), and assert that it's desirable. Of course it's desirable, you made it up to support your point!
If sudoku puzzles caused seizures by themselves then the title would be: _sudoku puzzles cause seizures_
Dunno why your post was tagged as [dead], I vouched for it to un-[dead] it. You make some reasonable points. Indeed the book isn't going to win the Man Booker Prize or a Nobel Prize for literature, but it's a fun fast read. At least that was the case for me and that was back when the story was available free on Weir's website and as a 99p download for the Kindle in early 2013.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130115160130/http://www.galact...

I was very pleased for Andy when he got picked up by a publisher, it's nice to see an amateur author get some recognition for their writing passion, and even more pleased when I found out Ridley Scott was going to make a movie.

I've read a lot of SciFi over the years (including many 600-1000 page tomes by popular authors where I wished I could get the time back) and whilst Andy Weir isn't quite in the same league as Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds (who incidentally have a a few duffers in print), there's space for The Martian, even if the character of Mark Watney is a wee bit two dimensional. Not everyone might like the diary/blog style of the writing, but I think it works fine, and is a good enough way of writing up Watney's challenges and solutions.

The Martian is an ok fun read and I don't think reviewers really need to come over all "literary critic" because it is what it is, a "Boy's Own" adventure on Mars solving problems with sticky tape, human poo, potatoes and other odds and ends.
StartSSL is the opposite of user friendly.
A new visa that will allow UK tech startups to hire entire teams
It's true. Most of history is probably useless, though. So, you need to know which parts to learn. Most people getting into network engineering don't have 5-10+ years to figure that out on top of work, family, fun, etc. So, the most relevant parts of history of a subfield should be accessible in a way that doesn't require that level of effort. That's like making people studying mathematics, mechanical engineering, etc look through every ancient manuscript and writing to unearth the best principles and techniques for their field day-to-day and project-to-project. Makes no sense.

And this is coming from a guy whose gone to the extreme of studying everything in several sub-fields of IT: over 12,000 academic or professional papers in my archive on top of the books, etc. Skimmed most, fully read some, and re-read a tiny few (gold mine). Took a long time to get to that tiny few. No justification for that except that generation made little to no attempt to get that stuff to me in an accessible way. And now my generation is repeating the mistake for the next.

Or do you really think it's optimal that every learner have to spend 3-5 years per sub-topic digging through the whole of knowledge on it just to find the few things that might pay off?
You know what would be nice? If there were a good place to learn which technologies were dead, dying, or had gone niche instead of becoming mainstream.

Your rant implies ATM is in one of those categories, but it's surprisingly hard to find places which actually say that instead of being all polite (or whatever concept is in play here) and pretending that it's just as mainstream as DOCSIS or Ethernet.

Maybe it's too much to ask for. Maybe there's always going to be too much bias and... I don't know... hurt feelings?... for something like that to exist. It certainly wouldn't be a nice thing to have if you were in the business of selling ATM "Solutions".
> Some paraglider friends of mine might like to see those adapted for ultralight use.

They might be better looking into FLARM, which is specifically designed for low-weight applications

https://flarm.com/

ADS-B is competent in its own space, but is really just a clever hack on top of all sorts of Big Aeroplane Regulations and it carries a lot of financial and weight penalties as a result.
I agree with you there. I think Brian probably would, too. His point was that many people let their pursuit of knowledge end there rather than use other resources available to learn what they needed to know. The lecturer becomes an excuse rather than an obstacle on the path to understanding.
They couldn't possibly issue EV certificates without charging. The verification requirements are too high. You need actual staff to verify.
Ask HN: Anyone interested in being on the “Hacker Lairs” webseries?
Greetings, hackers of Hacker News. I am not a coder myself but I have a number of friends that are, and inspired by them I have begun making a webseries called “Hacker Lairs” in which I visit the living spaces of fascinating people in the tech industry. I am very interested in the kinds of objects and environments that highly intelligent people surround themselves with, and I’d like to give a number of people a positive portrayal of themselves and their living space. I am just starting on this project, but here is EP01 https://youtu.be/JwsYb47DL1g and EP02 https://youtu.be/1A_ZzOuaV3w. The second episode got some attention from SFist recently: http://sfist.com/2015/10/16/tech_hostel_20mission.php The style has been described as similar to “MTV Cribs”, which was exactly my intention.

I am an experienced, working tv editor in Los Angeles and as such I am able to provide a degree of production value not often found in web content. It’s also worth mentioning that as I develop a viewership, my plan is to move to a bitcoin micropayment distribution model, although for now most of my views are from YouTube. I am a crew of 1 and for the moment there are no real earnings to speak of.

If being on this webseries is something that interests you, please feel free to contact me via either the contact form on my site here http://www.suchwow.tv/contact or via my Twitter handle @suchwowtv. Currently I am limited to locations in the greater metro areas of either Los Angeles or San Francisco.
What is the rationale for treating wildcard certificates differently? That is, why can't Let's Encrypt issue them?
Would love to see this ported for Geany.
I could have worded that better, it's not what's stated to you, it's what people say when they talk about not hiring someone to other people they know, such as those talking about it on this board now. It's a nice little lie people tell to avoid admitting discrimination of some sort.
You run into a bootstrapping problem: The information you find first determines which information you see as credible later, so you might end up having to unlearn a lot of bullshit before you actually get up to speed.

A good teacher will, if nothing else, get you over that hump and pointed in the right direction with the right instincts about who to listen to and which information is both correct and up-to-date.
My point is that the current and proposed rules are centered around preserving general aviation. Nobody is seriously proposing restricting general aviation to the benefit of drones, despite the fact that it would almost certainly be better for the vast majority of people.

Because of CYA syndrome, it's generally easier to pass new laws that to repeal them. If drones actually start causing the problems you suggest, it makes sense to restrict them in specific ways. But preventative legislation kills countless beneficial uses.
Nick, (this is a reply to your post at the same nesting depth, as we're at the max here)

We're pretty much on the same page on this whole thread, but consider the idea that perhaps the fact that it took so many years and thousands of papers wasn't because the previous generation didn't organize them well, but was simply due the the sheer volume of information. That time wasn't wasted sifting through irrelevant stuff - you're now an expert.

On the contrary, I think the writers and organizers of all that material did a great job; both of us owe nearly everything we know to them.
I think they're just going for a minimum viable product, and I'm sure it's on the roadmap. :-)
Jepsen is now a full-time gig
I haven't heard anything about soldiers quartering in the homes of private Americans without their consent.
I really don't see even the remotest of relevance of said test to the situation at hand. Airplanes do exist, they carry millions of people a day, and governments must issue and enforce regulations to ensure their safety. It doesn't seem like a stretch of the imagination to envision a drone flown by someone without training flown into a jet engine or the blades of a helicopter because they weren't required to be aware of FAA airspace restrictions. Aircraft are already heavily regulated, so I don't even see your point.
I am a programmer - junior as CS in college - I know html and css very well due to my job (in additon to C# and other knowledge) - but I have little to no idea on how to create my own "website"
Let's Encrypt isn't the first to offer free TLS certificates.

I've attempted to maintain a list of all the providers that do (in one way or another), and it's currently 4:

* CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl

* StartSSL https://startssl.com

* WoSign https://buy.wosign.com/free

* Let's Encrypt https://letsencrypt.org

For people reading this comment dozens of months in the future, a maintained list will be kept at https://paragonie.com/white-paper/2015-secure-php-data-encry...
For knowledge and facts, I mostly agree. I would add that doing your own research is what you do while attempting method 3 and get stuck. But I think the article, and my original point, was about subject area wisdom. The larger lessons behind past failures, and the stuff that can save you unnecessary detours. There is much value in digging into a problem for a long time; you really do own it. But some things are just a waste of time to learn that way, and are better primed with the guidance of someone who can present that collective wisdom to you in a way in which you understand.
That's not really a crazy statement at all.

Marijuana is, in practice, legal in America.

Yes, this person is misinformed as to the number of ridiculous petty drug charges in America. Still not crazy.

And while I wouldn't say caffeine has "vitamin like" health benefits, since you know, the research on vitamins shows their health benefits are questionable, I would say the body of research on caffeine's health benefits is enormous.
This was a performance decision. Cross-signing the root instead of the intermediate would mean that web servers would have to include both the root and the intermediate in the chain they serve, rather than just the intermediate. That would add a full packet to each handshake.
OK, now explain ATM-to-the-desktop. Not what, but why: I know what ATM is, I just don't understand why I'd want an internal networking protocol designed to mix voice and data transmissions using short cells running right to my desktop.

If we're going to do the 1980s Telco solution, isn't ISDN the service I'd get to my desktop?
A major Chinese state-owned steel trader may be about to default on its debts
The best way to motivate an emulator developer is to make something and then boast about how it doesn't run in an emulator :)
Yay!

Honestly, it is amazing to me that someone like Google or Amazon did not do this as free service a long time ago. But having an independent entity like this do it is far better.
>I'm surprised the OpenBSD team is accepting the commits

What commits? From the comments you will learn there were no commits and this is a classic embrace and extend. They are hijacking OpenSSL name, and rewriting it to use Microsoft crypto and APIs.
The Wire (season 2) gives an excellent insight into how docks are run (Baltimore). There's even a scene where some Dutch company wants to bring Rotterdam's automation to Baltimore.
A young audio engineer might know every possible fact about how Bluray, DVD, and CD formats work. Probably even cassette tapes and Long Play records (aka LPs). But I'm sure it's completely respectable for you to roll your eyes when an audio engineer gives you a blank stare when you bring up wow and flutter caused by a flattened pinch roller in an 8-track tape.

What would be the software equivalent? Insulting someone who starting developing on PHP 5 not knowing about the short_tags() global function which only existed in PHP 3? Someone proficient in Visual Basic .NET but doesn't know anything about VB 1-6? There is no reason to know how to develop in an ancient version of a language if every job you have had thus far has used exclusively modern versions.

Merely having been alive during the decade in which an obsolete technology was first introduced or was still popular means nothing. It may even have some relevance today when discussing the then-and-now similarities or differences, but frankly someone born decades after its obsolescence just will not care. There is already more knowledge than is possible to absorb about current technology. There is simply not enough time in a single lifetime to care about what came 20-40 years before. Perhaps if we ever push life expectancy to 1000 years, we'll spend the first 100 years of our lives reviewing every relevant detail of the past.
As far as I know heroin is prescribable like those other drugs, and no one is arguing that it shouldn't be.
Am I missing where I can signup? Love to try them.
> Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all kinds of interesting stuff.

https://www.google.com/script/start
This is exactly the same in India as well. We have Ola Cabs here which is an Uber clone and it is a billion dollar company. Likewise, we have flipkart which is an amazon clone and is another multibillion dollar company. We have plenty of clones doing phenomenally well.

The question is this. Why would you ( or should you? ) try and innovate when there are clearly billion dollar problems waiting to be solved (cloned?) right in-front of your eyes in broad daylight. And yes, the impact will be mostly be limited to India but India is a huge market.
The general availability period hasn't begun yet, but you can still sign up for the beta program here -- https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15Ucm4A20y2rf9gySCTXD6yoLG6T...
I think Evernote might be able to do the trick.

You can put the notes under a notebook, and then there's an "Expanded cards view" which comes sort of close to a real calendar.

Example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k2skt4exf5eg66e/Screenshot%202015-...
Intel coincidentally officially launched the first Skylake Xeon's today: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88210/Intel-Xeon-Proces...

Interestingly, despite being Skylake server chips, it looks like none of them support AVX-512. Do you happen to know which models actually will have support?

Or for that matter, what are all the differences between the "server" E3v5 Xeons and the "consumer" Skylake chips? Support for ECC RAM is the only one I see at a glance: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-In...
StorkJS – Simple key-value storage in your browser
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15Ucm4A20y2rf9gySCTXD6yoLG6T...
For a personal blog, just go to wordpress.com and sign up. You can buy the domain through them, it will host on their servers, they give you dozens of themes to choose from, you can publish via a WYSIWYG editor, and it'll give you traffic analytics as well. Also can setup static pages for them - most small businesses you see on the web are actually Wordpress sites.
Thanks for the info, I hadn't heard of it and it looks pretty interesting. I would note though, in case you missed it, that ADS-B transponder I linked is only 100 grams, vs 250+ for the powercore unit.

I'm not sure about all the associated regulations, but my point was there's not any technological holdouts preventing the integration of medium to large UAVs into the existing infrastructure.
TokuDB is built for a single-process model with threads for connections. This is incompatible with PostgreSQL's multi-process model, and patching TokuDB to support such a model would be a large effort. Not impossible, but a lot of work.
What is a definition? The assertion that it is possible to build a planet sized laser that could cool something to absolute zero?
Diffie-Hellman-Primes
>You do realize that boards of companies are not involved at all in the day to day operations of companies?

Pretty much everyone thinks this board is weird. There have been multiple articles written on how odd it is, and most companies tend to have multiple domain experts on the board. You won't find many companies outside of the defense industry with 7/11 board members who are retired political and military leaders.

For an example of a normal board of directors just look at a competing company's board--quest diagnostics--and notice the number of MDs, PhDs, financial experts, and CEOs of other companies, and the lack of former cabinet secretaries, senators, and retired generals. http://ir.questdiagnostics.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=82068&p=irol-...

>And you definitely can start taking upper level chemical engineering classes.

You can't walk into Stanford and start taking junior and senior level chemical engineering classes as a freshmen, you would have a complete lack of prerequisite knowledge.

>It's very common in college to ask to pass out of a requirement by taking the final.

It is not very common, in fact it's pretty rare these days to find a department that will allow this.

Even if they did allow this, there are stacks of prerequisite chemistry, math, physics, and general engineering classes before a student can even touch classes in the chemical engineering department (other than special classes like freshmen seminars).
So you're learning OCaml
How are your git skills? I really really like GitHub Pages - https://pages.github.com/
It has been fixed in unstable / canary. The selection is now inside an overflow menu.

Which brings me to another tip: in a multi-head setup, having devtools in an undocked window in a separate screen is very nice.
Teen Who Hacked CIA Director’s Email Tells How He Did It
Drones are already doing/have already done the things dogecoinbase listed in his parenthetical. He's not fear-mongering some possible future state, but referencing issues that have already happened with drones.
> Also I think drones are super cool and access to them should be easy. But not free.

Why not free? Surely their use should be regulated on the basis of scope and competency rather than cost.

Use of drones in personal airspace ( a few metres above one's land ) within the boundaries of one's property should not be the concern of the Government. This would be the equivalent of driving an unlicensed car on one's property.

However if one wished to operate more freely in Class G airspace then I can understand operator and drone registration being necessary. But this should not be based on cost as the gate, but demonstrated competency.
>Stories like these make me shudder thinking about the times I may have, at some point, included a document with personal information in an email, such as to a prospective landlord for verification.

I always insist on encryption for these sorts of things. I'm fairly certain that for everyone I've asked about an encrypted channel to deliver data, I've always been the first person to even ask. This includes hospitals, agencies who do background checks, etc. It's incredibly disturbing that no one else is insisting that their sensitive documents not just sit unencrypted in all these random in and out boxes.
> People have personal drones to follow them on bike rides or runs, carrying supplies and lighting the way at night.

Have you heard of these recent groundbreaking inventions called the "backpack" and the "headlamp"? I gather they last a lot longer before needing a recharge, can carry a lot more weight, and that they work much better when there are obstacles such as trees around.
They provide docker packaging. So it's just as dep-free as Go.

Not to mention python is on pretty much every platform in existence by default.

If you're expecting this as a global binary like you would in go there's no reason you can't just "pip install letsencrypt"...
Is there some web interface to sign my certificate, similar to startssl? I don't really want to run new program in my server just to generate certificate.
I still blink but I do it at a slower rate and I deliberately slow the blinks.

I suppose it's more art than science to not appear to be staring but to be blinking less often.
This is the critical insight. TokuDB uses a write-ahead log which is synced according to the configuration, and can be made as immediate as full fsync on commit. This provides the strongest durability available on a single machine.

Where TokuDB gets its speed boost is by delaying the random reads associated with updating the indexing structure (the Fractal Tree). The buffers are written to disk on checkpoint, but because they're buffers, the potentially random writes are localized to a smaller number of nodes high in the tree, which minimizes the number of disk seeks required. Since sequential I/O is cheaper than random, the sequential writes to the write-ahead log are very fast, so even in very strict durability configurations, TokuDB can easily outperform databases which use random writes to update the indexing structures, such as the B-trees used by InnoDB and most other RDBMSes.

More details here: https://www.percona.com/blog/2011/09/22/write-optimization-m...
Serious question, to what degree is one defined as being independent? When you have "platinum" sponsors like akamai and cisco, and can take donations through paypal?
...what? It's there on the repo. It's not upstreamed yet, no.

I think this is a fantastic step forward. If you've never been subjected to WinRM you may not understand why this is such a big deal.
Haven't heard anyone recommend CPanel in a decade. It exists in a bit of an uncanny valley now. If you're not a programmer, it's much easier to setup a site on Wordpress, Weebly, SquareSpace, Google Sites, or any number of other hosted WYSIWYG editors. If you are a programmer, you probably want a PaaS like Heroku, GitHub Pages, or Google AppEngine.
That's surprisingly fewer domains than I expected. No wonder I never received any replies for my application to their beta program.
The Problem with Tying Health Care to Trade
It's not like it ain't broken already.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/bogus-ssl-certificat...
Cracking is kind of similar in that it delays the "sorting work" done in the indexing structure. However, cracking is fairly heuristic and therefore hard to analyze without an intimate understanding of the workload. Fractal Trees do pretty much the same thing under all workloads (modulo optimizations for things like sequential and Zipfian workloads), so they're easier to analyze and prove bounds for.

An interesting new development is http://getkudu.io/ which applies some ideas common with Fractal Trees and other write-optimized data structures (like LSM-trees) to column stores.

At Tokutek, we had some designs for how to implement column store-like data models on Fractal Trees (we called them "matrix stores" because they had some of the benefits of both row stores and column stores), but we didn't get around to implementing them.