skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Arguably, if you knew the exact system date and all other software installed, you could predict exactly how your program would behave.

First of all, there is a difference between what you can predict about the system and what you want the system to be. Since even on nondeterministic system you can build a deterministic one, it doesn't matter what you can or cannot predict about the underlying system. If you want a deterministic system, you can simply ignore the unpredictable parts by averaging over them.

Although, if you know the other software, you could predict the system. But normal application, unless it has root privileges or there are privilege escalation loopholes, cannot inspect the whole system and cannot see all the processes that go on. Therefore, deterministic modelling of the system from a perspective of one application is impossible.

But there is actually a simpler example. Just take an application using the pseudorandom number generator. You can't know if there are other processes using the generator too, so once you use pseudorandom generator, your application becomes non-deterministic. If on the other hand the application wants to be deterministic, all it has to do is not use system-wide generator of randomness, regardless of whether the generator is actually deterministic or not.

The point is, for free will to exist, it doesn't really matter if the universe is deterministic. Just as it doesn't matter in D&D game if the result is determined by dice rolls or a pseudo-random number generator with a known starting seed. People cannot calculate the latter in their heads, so the difference won't affect their reasoning (these things are conditionally dependent on the observed reality); that's all that matters.
As far as I can tell, hobby / free dynos are unaffected, but switching a production app to a different tier doesn't seem to help; the router issue persists.
OOP vs. FP – The Unofficial Guide to Rich Hickey's Brain (2012)
An article giving a very good overview of the arguments that Rich Hickey makes for FP vs OOP. The ensuing comments are very interesting and cogent too.

"...Rich Hickey's thoughts on programming. Rich Hickey has a clear, consistent way of viewing fundamental programming concepts that I think any programmer would benefit from. Every time I watch one of his talks, I feel like someone has gone in and organized my brain."
How do you mean? I've been pretty satisfied with the cycle lanes. The fact the construction closes key roads for long periods of times is frustrating, are you referring to that?
Up to this point, nothing in Aphyr's history has suggested he'd be a biased tester. When he tested Riak, he was invited to Ricon to give the results for the world to see live. Much of the Basho engineers at the time were personal friends of his. As you know if you read that analysis, Aphyr held back nothing.

Right now I'd trust Aphyr more than any other analyst, consultant, or full-time employee (with employment to lose) to give truly impartial judgement.
When and How to Hold Effective Meetings
This is actually a lot more managable with DNSSEC because it is designed around the idea of offline signing of records.
What do you mean with "degree of separation". Could you elaborate?
Good. I don't understand why companies need to be bribed to come to markets. Want to sell your goods, great, pay the same taxes every other company pays. This is nothing more than government subsidies for specific private companies.
Limitation is in "developers", that is WEB developers playing with embedded systems. There is nothing stopping you from deploying dedicated OpenGL application on RPi, but this is not the 2.0 way. Bros want nodejs and responsive UIs in javascript .... you end up with this:
https://youtu.be/tG70c3Zadek?t=10m49s

tldr: full minute to boot X and chromium just to implement simple 20 lines of python application.
Professors are "expected" to be published in these journals in large Universities. They basically will never advance their career without be published in a "major journal."
I had a friend who got a visit from the Secret Service a couple decades ago because of this. He's a friend, so I didn't press him on what happened, but this sort of thing isn't at all new.
I think this is happening, if slowly. The impact of open publications is generally known to be much higher. It's only a matter of time until this is accepted as fact by everyone, even the conservative older types who believe that anonymous peer review is a helpful institution.
do you want to make money, help the world or just code something hard? I think the first two (with emphasis on the second) are(should be) way more important to a coder.
Real-time real estate analysis for Manhattan and Brooklyn
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress.

Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.

But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.

They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.

The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
Trix – A rich text editor for everyday writing
You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.
I think you will find that it does extend well to other parts of your code. Code that is idempotent allows you to reason much more effectively about what it will do. It always does the same thing and does not introduce side effects. It also allows you to test it much more easily. In fact, doing computations is one of the places where being idempotent will really clean up your code.

It may seem like a new fangled idea, but actually it has been around for quite a long time. It's just that it didn't really get out of academia and the few shops doing functional programming until lately.
The question I've been posing, but can't seem to find an answer: is there any way around this? Are there brands we know don't have these? Do all types of printers have them, or just some? Do we have to go back to dot matrix printers? (Just kidding on the last one.)
Not sure what you're saying - should we wait until people start doing bad things that will obviously happen, and then scramble to control it after the fact?
noatime + logs into ramdisk with periodic flushes, or log into network share
"Coaster brake" is probably the more common term for this setup. It makes for a more complicated rear hub, but works better than calipers in rain and snow and gunk.
Please stop saying I've said things that I haven't. We can't have a conversation if you do that.

I didn't say you should be punished for doing your taxes badly.

Your parking example is terrible. If you get a parking fine then you must have ignored a sign or not seen it. It's entirely possible there was no sign and you legitimately didn't realised you parked somewhere you shouldn't. There are appeals processes for exactly this. There are rules and regulation on conditions required to fine someone for parking.

I don't understand how you can compare this to a drug problem.

Someone should get help for a drug problem because it is exactly that - a problem they need help with.
How to build business webiste with WordPress
My hobby app is down too.
Having a vibrating optic fibre in front of your eyes does not sound like 'something that you won't be shy to wear in public and that it will maintain "normal relationships with people."'
Can someone inject bytecode into webpy process via url lookup table or python JSON parser?

If so, this bug report would be a lot more serious. I think no-trivial CMS app server is writting in python.
I bought a couple of times a AlphaSSl from https://ssl2buy.com, where I got the email directly from AlphaSSL :)
They do (but this is different from a suicide break). I'd say most people use the pedal for breaking, the exception are mostly people who are a bit older and benefit a lot from gears, and somewhat wealthier people (as the pedal break bikes are usually a bit cheaper and often second hand), but even then I'd say I still see most people wearing suits who cycle, cycle on pedal break bikes.
BMW i8 in WebGL
You would think that at some point, the law books would have been digitized, so this could just be a database query.
probably just the last few nails in the coffin. They made a good product but the motorcycle industry is not that large and new players have a tough time getting their name out.

Figure the engineers leaving near the end merely saw the writing on the wall.
Peer Review = Flawed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy

How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?
It might actually be a good thing for the taxpayers of that country when looked at narrowly, which is often why these deals are done, but if every EU nation does it to their neighbour then overall it's a classic case of "race to the bottom" and taxpayers all across the EU will lose out.
Nobody Knows What the Hell They Are Doing
Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B
Mandated Third Party Static Analysis: Bad Public Policy, Bad Security (2014)
Last week linguists issued Elsevier an ultimatum, demanding fair open access for the journal Lingua [0,1]:

> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.

> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.

Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!

[0] https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/773059302822316

[1] http://www.lingoa.eu/about/aims/

[2] https://www.facebook.com/marc.vanoostendorp/posts/1020623886...
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands.

Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
Incentives are generally designed to attract inward investment and job creation, rather than to persuade companies to sell into the market (i.e. please set up your factory/European HQ here, regardless of where you're actually going to sell most of your goods)
Thanks.

Do you know where I can find some numbers on this? It's something I've always wondered. We're told by the media that 90% of heroin addicts are on the street stealing to maintain their habit - but I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of heroin addicts appear to have these "normal" lives.
Such tracking was famously used in the Alger Hiss case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss#Fake_typewriter_hyp...
Show HN: Goss – A serverspec-like tool written in go
Future Network Forum to Be Held in Nanjing in December 2015
But WhatsApp is the Internet Explorer of messaging apps, only by supporting the alternatives like Telegram we will have better messaging apps in the future.

Remember when IE had around 90% of market share 10 years ago? Well, the history repeats.
For example, it would be interesting to see if or how Linus Torvalds connected to Charles Babbage via the various relationships through the IT giants. If there are 4(as an example) people between them, their degree of separation is 4.

It is similar to the Erdös number.
This is my first go program, wanted to learn the language. Any feedback on code and/or tool would be greatly appreciated.

The tool is intended to be a simple take on server validation. The idea is to be able to quickly define a system manifest and validate a system against it.

Differences from serverspec:

* 10-30x faster depending on test suite (tests are run in parallel)

* Can derive server state and generate a manifest from a running server

* goss is meant to be simple, albeit less flexible

* Uses JSON instead of DSL

* Manifests are static - no variables, conditionals, etc. If you need this, you should dynamically generate the JSON
manifest.

* Being in Go, it's a self contained binary, no need for ruby

* Supports a much smaller set of OSes/test types

For more complicated workflows, the tool can be chained with other commands, ex:

curl http://url/to/static/or/dynamic/goss.json | goss validate
That's actually what I love about React apart form using hierarchal components as building blocks.

I set the state, and the lib handles the rendering for me. Makes things much easier and is also superior for building UI than e.g UIKit.
"classified"? Why not just use the wikipedia pictures for these people?
The Things Network: global, crowd sourced, open decentralized IoT network
I'm not a working scientist, so I can't speak to whether or not this is a sufficient platform to bypass journals, but I thought I'd put in a plug for the Center for Open Science. [0]

I'm not affiliated, just a fan of their work.

[0] http://cos.io
FWIW our service is back up, and I'm hearing others are coming online as well.
The Queensland Health payroll failure is now estimated to be $AU1.2b all up, with nothing to show for it.
I think there is a joke that everyone commits three felons a day. So ignorance might be a valid excuse or there is just too many laws to even think of enforcing them.
I have no problem if an area is trying to land a major contributor to the area in jobs and future revenues. Giving tax breaks to get such tend to pay back in that you get support businesses cropping up to support the original beneficiary.

These deals however just don't appear to provide any benefit to the areas affected, only to the companies. Is there a big pool of political contributions in countries like these? Do they have the equivalent of PACs and such?
> Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees.

The market price is

- say 30 $, if you want to get a legal copy

- about 0 $, if you can accept the moral and legal dilemma

Let the market decide...

---

Seriously, because of the copyright laws the market is strongly skewed. I really can't understand how one can believe in free markets and copyright at the same time.
Yahoo will now Google your search queries
EFF might care less than most other authors about this otherwise-shady behavior. After all the message is still getting out.
Western Digital Announces Acquisition of SanDisk
Testing Prototypes of Startups
Wood Pellets: The European Accounting Error That's Warming the Planet
Thoughts from Inside the Box
Eventually animals will adapt and tune them out, likely to occur with the ones which tend to assemble in large groups. The very large animals may not even notice or ever be concerned. The danger them becomes poachers who use them to scout areas out or worse arm their drones
This pattern of the virtual DOM has some parallels with functional programming. At first look, using functional programming it looks like you're sacrificing the performance that you gain from mutations -- which to some extent is true. But when you look deeper, you'll find that the data structures for functional programming languages have been adapted to work in a very performant way with functional programming patterns.

In the same way, when you look closer at the virtual DOM model, you'll find that you can optimize the usage very well. For example, when you use React with immutable data structures (e.g., Immutable JS), deep equality comparisons can be done very quickly to reduce renders to the minimum subtree required, and to issue the renders for a given change in a batch operation.

With React, you often end up with even faster code than using manual DOM manipulations. Of course, your performance will vary depending on how you implement your code. Depending on which model you're using, and how you program, you may end up with a faster or slower product with either methodology.

But at the end of the day, the performance gain from running code using state mutations just doesn't seem worth the effort of having a significantly harder time reasoning about the code, and having to deal with the challenges of scaling a project where the complexity grows much faster with each line of logic.

And my feeling is that due to the time invested in managing a more complex project that deals with mutations, the "performance per engineering hour" gained for projects using a virtual DOM is more favorable for many projects.
A Google engineer’s home in a truck at company headquarters
Starbucks has a roastery in The Netherlands, so that means jobs at least.
'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn also tells the actual story of Galileo, as well as a few others, quite well.
I really don't get or condone the use of the term "poach" here. Company A has great employees, can't pay them according to their value. Company B comes along and does pay them that, they leave. How is this not the best possible outcome ? Company A was not competitive and disappears, employees are better paid, Company B gets some great employees. Or are engineers considered property now ?

> Apple never tried to acquire Mission Motors, Kaufman said.

Well why would they ? There's no need to pay off the investors and executives when you just want to hire some engineers, unless said executives did their job well enough that said engineers don't want to leave.

When Musk was talking about engineers Apple was "poaching", it did not reflect very well on him either in my opinion.
Serious Xen security advisories for October
We run some servers at Gandi and we got notice today[1]. Anyone with more details about the unreleased advisories[2]?

1. http://status.gandi.net/timeline/events/226
2. http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa
A couple of questions:

>Do not use Backbone models

I use Backbone models for ajax since it makes decisions such as PUT vs POST and model.save() looks cleaner than $.ajax. Also, Backbone collections provide a declarative way to handle sorting and duplicate models. But these models are internal to the Store and not exposed to the views. I'm still a React newbie. Is this a valid reason to continue using Backbone?

2. It seems as though Khan Academy do not use React for SVG elements in their interactive exercises. For example, https://www.khanacademy.org/math/geometry/transformations/hs... Do you plan to migrate SVG to React?
This reminded me of Richard Dreyfuss' dramatic readings of the iTunes EULA: [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu0lqUlHEko
No body will stop using it, I can guarantee that.
PVS-Studio Team. Analyzing Wine: One Year Later
Why on earth would you build anything remotely critical on a closed, proprietary, for-profit service such as WhatsApp? That's not even to mention that this sounds like a humongous kludge! A bit like proudly proclaiming that your Facebook-over-DNS-via-carrier-pidgeon is your super cool way of remoting to your server... If and when whatever API provider decides that you're not abiding by their EULA you're hosed.

That's aside from `diggan's point, which i agree with: if you need to babysit your server to such a degree, something is wrong.
The Collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbor
Fatih Fare İlaçlama Telefonu,Fare İlaçlama,Fatih İlaçlama
I went and chatted with some people at Mission Motors ~18 months ago. They had recently split off Mission Motorcycles to do the motorcycle thing independently. Mission Motors seemed mostly focussed on electrifying construction and farm equipment by then.
Specially when companies play the game "trick the government", like e.g. Nokia.

They moved their plant from Germany to Romania, got the "Company of the Year" award from the Romanian government and about two years later moved the factory again to an Asian country.

In the process they got two angry governments and now they are as they are.
Show HN: Verb – Open-source, cross-platform NURBS
5 startups hiring this week
A Day on the Lake
Friends with Real Benefits – Why you (and others) need your dark side
The answer isn't to let cyclists run stop signs, because the problem is that there are too many stop signs in the US.

Don't put a four-way stop on every corner and this won't be a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign#Placement_and_standa...
Western Digital to acquire Sandisk for $19B
The article notes that there are a few sunscreens that don't have the ingredient, so awareness and consumer demand can have a huge impact.
I think the main problem with your argument is that you assume that the world looks like a shallow tree. For UIs this may be, to a great extent, true. But for non-frontend code, the world looks more like a deep DAG (directed acyclic graph).

Also, suppose I have a list of thousands of elements. Now suppose one element is added to the list. React will still perform a comparison operation on all of those thousands of elements.
23andMe's genetic health tests are back on the market
In this case I would agree with you, since this company and its product wasn't competition for Apple. They simply hired some people and a company failed because those people left.

But when done to a direct competitor, the intention isn't always just to get a good employee and pay him what he deserves, it's also to weaken the other company or to acquire important knowledge/knowhow. In that case, poaching doesn't sound that bad.