skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They go beyond just naming those 3 groups:

> Additionally, there is a continuing threat from unaffiliated persons planning attacks inspired by major terrorist organizations but conducted on an individual basis.

May as well just say, "We've just discovered that people can do bad things, at any time and for any reason." Random individuals are a "continuing threat" that might resolve by February 2016 when this notice expires. Really looking forward to the apparent cure for human nature they've got in the works!
And it's a much higher number than 99%. This page[0] reports 68M exits in 2014... How many Americans have died travelling abroad due to terrorism in 2014? 5? 50? 500?

[0]: http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2014-O-001/index.html
"You shouldn't avoid travel" is not equivalent to "you shouldn't do anything differently because of them".

There are a number of specific actions recommended in the alert (all of which are of potential value for any travel, but are of elevated importance to not neglect with the elevated risk level, which while still quite low for any individual incident of travel, is higher than normal.)
Richard Dawkins: Did Ahmed intend to get arrested for his clock?
A notice that foreign travel is not safe will deter some people.

Which is silly when they're more likely to die in a crash on the way to the airport than during flight or while abroad. It's completely illogical and actually gives weight to the actions of terrorists.
Since the comments thus far are quite inflammatory -- which I find odd, considering this is a subject almost all of us most have thought about -- I'll throw in my $0.02.

I am an ex-finance guy (who has programmed computers forever) who recently quit "the business" and moved to SF to work at a startup. This gives me some perspective.

I can say a few things for sure. First, there are more tech-related opportunities here. You just can't deny it -- once you're in it, you see it. Everybody everywhere is talking about tech... all the time. It's like going to the bar outside Goldman. Everyone's talking about the stock/bond/FX/whatever market or the topic du jour.

Similarly, getting a true finance job outside the greater NY area would be extremely difficult. The main reason for this is because in places like California, you mostly find either a.) satellite offices of big firms, which are no good for a young person, or b.) hedge funds on the beach with two guys and a dog (no room for a young person). So I can say for NY, the point rings true.

In terms of tech in SF, being in the hub seems to matter -- if you're making some kind of career move. I can tell you for certain I've been getting more job hits (from tech firms) living out here. When I lived in NY, the only one who'd interview me was Google -- first at the NY office, then in Mountain View, for a position in San Bruno. It was very difficult to make the horizontal shift directly from Wall Street to tech -- for geographic and cultural reasons.

But the real "blame" I'd like to place is on automatic screening mechanisms. All too often I've been screened out of candidacy at smaller companies because it's just too much effort to fly out a candidate for an interview, put them up at a hotel with a car, all so you can (maybe) hire them and have to pay relocation. Not many companies are willing to do that... it's just life.

That said, people who are driven and committed will (I believe) have A+ careers (in a much more liberal sense of the term than used here) regardless of where they live. But, if a particular goal has your attention -- go where the fish are biting. There's nothing about that that doesn't make sense to me.

PS - on the flip-side, I once worked for a big bank headquartered in L.A. I elected not to move there for exactly these reasons -- I don't want to be an actor, so I stayed in NY. But when I wanted to horizontal into true-pure-tech, I did make a point to get myself to SF, whatever it took.
>trying to make MIPS happen for a while, presumably as a hedge against ARM.

I thought it was because Imagination bought MIPS, no?
> Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.

The cloud is great for distributed systems, and for these the "kernel on a kernel" cost becomes insignificant with the additional power allowed by the horizontal scalability of letting multiple computers talk over a network (not to mention network latency).

I'd be willing to bet that running on absolute bare metal is a sort of niche market in cloud computing that Amazon considers too small to get into.
Blockchain-powered Encryption for the Masses
I love that there's a travel alert for the planet, but not for American cities.

Lived in Boston for the last four years, was there during the Marathon Bombing. I'm now traveling within Europe, and am pretty 100% confident it's safer somewhere like Poland or Croatia than any first tier American city.

But, really, who cares? Change of dying while commuting is catastrophic compared to a terrorist attack.

The Parisians had the right idea - day after the attacks, everyone fills up the cafes.

Which is the opposite of what we did in Boston - cower at home, while a couple kids with IEDs shut down an entire state.

Terrorists only win when the people they attack are chickenshit.

Each time the West gets hit, it gets a little harder to worry about the next one. Just like you might get into a car accident driving to work, some Islamist whackjob might blow himself up at a concert, market, or restaurant.

When the risk is going outside and doing things that involve other people, there's no different action to take as an individual. It becomes background risk.
Wow, I was completely unaware that consumer products like TV upscalars were utilizing neural networks. I assume that the upscalar uses the result of a prior training session and doesn't need periodic retraining.
Hmm... I have uMatrix installed and it just loads the whole page.
HN prefers original sources. This is in the site guidelines. Wasn't that article just a summary of content from the talk?
Layer 7 Denial of Service – R.U.D.Y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunnyvale,_California
The elevated-above-normal-levels threat from the named groups and individuals inspired by them is expected to be a temporary situation.

That doesn't mean that bad people doing bad things is a problem that is expected to be resolved.
How I became a CEO
The only reason it happened was because we were in a race with the Russians.

> By the time the SEI reached Congress, its price tag—conservatively ballparked at an eye-popping $450 billion—alarmed key members of Congress, who spiked the initiative altogether.

If China were preparing for a Mars mission, you bet the anti-NASA Republicans would suddenly do a 180.

(I don't know where I stand on a manned Mars mission, but I do know it shouldn't be determined by kindergarten politics.)
On the other hand, if Daesh does kill a lot of Americans overseas anytime soon, it becomes a Republican stalking horse alongside Benghazi. I think it's less fear-mongering than election-season politics.
> are the (targets for) rates that regular banks pay

...surely, though, this means that it's only relevant if a broad number of banks decide to adopt the 'official' interest rate.

Unless there's some legal penalty to doing so, I don't understand why the swiss banks are simply refusing to adopt the -ve rate.
you
please enter digital
certificate of virginity of grandmother
, or some such nonsense.

How did they get this kind of spam into arxiv.org?
What about non-addictive, extremely safe drugs (whose LD-50 is many times the active dose)?
> "U.S. citizens everywhere should scuttle like rats through alleys and sewers."

But sewers are where the Surgeon General tells me I'm at increased risk of contracting communicable diseases. And alleys are where the FBI tells me I'm more likely to be mugged or raped. Whatever are we to do?
> Meanwhile, any American traveler is more at risk of being ran over by a bus on their way to the airport

Yes, but the risk of getting run over by a bus at the airport isn't changed from its normal level right now, so there is no reason for alert for that.
Math? 3.75 years?
An excellent example of emerging Neo-Feudalism! Workers (Programmers, IT, Accountants - any white collar worker) will be housed in the same location as the Owner of the business. It is strikingly similar to Medieval times where Apprentices used to work for employers - usually the Owner. Zoning laws will be changed to suit the businesses. It won't be an issue as long as the businesses are making enough profit to keep people employed and can generate taxes.
But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.
Yes but listing those three groups together is just completely strange. Two of them are working against each other and a US general has explicitly floated the idea of arming some of those groups to attack the others.

The idea that these three groups are somehow more of a threat between today and February across the entirety of the world than they are at other times is just patently absurd.
Secretary of Defense Enlists Silicon Valley to Transform the Military
Thanks for your work on Apache. Do you recommend any published benchmarks of modern Apache vs. modern Nginx?
Any links to TV upscaler chips using NN algorithms? I couldn't find any.

Also, my impression was that FPGAs are much slower than GPUs for neural nets. Unless you're talking about really high end chips like Stratix 10 from Altera, which cost over $30k. Power consumption is a different matter though.
AWS Device Farm adds support for web apps – Test against real devices
I'm skeptical that home 3D printing is going to have much impact on manufacturing consumer goods. We've had inexpensive laser printers for a couple of decades now, yet there's not many people printing out books at home.

The printers would have to be very user friendly and very fast to compete with the convenience of buying finished goods.
So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?
Robbed by homeless heroin addict after she spent the night at my apt| Judalane
Surveyor Digitization Project Hints at Long-Lost Lunar Treasures
Huge fan of this architecture, and have implemented several successful systems using ideas from this and Robert Martin's Clean Architecture. A subscription service, a payment processing service, and simple service that allowed soundcloud users to trade follows for free downloads. In the beginning it starts out feeling over-engineered, but the flexibility gained in the medium to long term quickly makes up for this.
They indeed are shipping with really good libraries these days but no matter how good they are, there is some level of doubt that they fail to alleviate and they get deployed behind nginx or apache httpd anyway.
I'm not really sure I'm convinced by the results. I'm not a researcher on infant laugh but in my son's case I think it's mostly due to him trying to mimic the expression his parents have.
If you smile an infant smile if you make a sad face he'll be sad. At least that's my it from my experience
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614573
In summary: License your software AGPL, require payment for MIT license.

Why isn't this more common?
It's not possible to justify the very high price we pay for human safety within the space program based on value to the mission. If it were only a matter of the mission, we would accept tremendously more risk. Human lives are only valued at a but under $10 million, so even for a 10-person mission to Mars the value of the humans is < 1% of the cost of the mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...

Because of the diminishing returns to safety spending, it's generally better from an economics perspective to accept an order-unity chance of failure and just send multiple missions. But obviously, this is not how we design human space travel.
Browser Plug-In Punches an Unfixable Hole in China’s Great Firewall
I think the main point is that its very convenient to the IDE/developer, not for the performance. You know what things are before runtime. You can explore and have discoverable APIs much easier.

Most dynamic languages I've used in my career (javascript, python, php) have either metadata to typehint, a hinted superset of the language or new language support for typing.
Also absurdly flammable -- the Hindenburg was flying on hydrogen. I certainly wouldn't want to be in a hydrogen-filled airship floating above a forest fire!

(Helium would work better, but I think it gets pretty expensive.)
> This is my bet: the age of dynamic languages is over.

I doubt it.

Yes, all the points the author makes are valid benefits of static typing. But the benefits of dynamic languages still exist. There are reasons people like both types of languages.

However, I think a more relevant point was made in the article: that statically-typed languages are looking more and more dynamic. And we can add to that that we see signs of dynamic languages adding more 'static' features, like optional types. Those are signs of convergence, of both major classes of languages learning from each other and improving.

But I still don't think we'll end up in the middle with "static, but feels totally dynamic". We'll still have both types of languages around.
How human mathematicians decide that a problem is "important" is not as arbitrary as people seem to think. The work mathematicians choose to do can be heavily influenced by fashion, but in general, a problem is important if its solution would give insight into many other important, unsolved problems. Given this definition, it wouldn't be difficult to get the computer's definition of an interesting problem to align with ours.
Seems like an interesting approach. However the 21x speedup seems a little underwhelming considering the speed of the Zynq's programmble logic fabric and how parallizable NNs are. They're quoting a 21x speedup over the ARM processor on the Zynq 7020, which is on par with what powers the RaspberryPi 2.
My guess is they didn't pipeline their design enough or appropriately causing one of the datapaths to significantly limit their throughput.
> ...surely, though, this means that it's only relevant if a broad number of banks decide to adopt the 'official' interest rate.

Central banks are often either governed in substantial part by member banks who are also the largest banks in the economy (as is the case with the US Federal Reserve) and/or have influence that can be used to align practical interbank lending rates with the target rates (if they didn't, rate setting would be immaterial), such as the ability to issue banknotes and lend them themselves at the target rate.
Unless “the machine is taken over” means firmware-level compromise (e.g. disk controller, NIC controller, …), in which case the next customer allocated to that machine can be compromised despite full disk erase between customers.
Ask HN: If Evernote goes out of business, what happens to all our notes?
Could the Future of Farming Come from Thinking Inside the Box?
On a lot of pages it actually doesn't.
I'll agree with this attack vector, although it'd be trivial to have your PXE boot routine between customers re-apply known good firmware to the NIC and disk controller and verify with checksums (unless there's a 0-day out there for the NIC controller, in which case you're owned regardless).
No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.
Because it will deter a disproportionate number of people. This isn't a binary situation. Proportionality matters.

If the World Health Organization issued a world-wide alert that going outside in the month of May 2016 will have an increased risk of death from bees, you might be annoyed to have to dig through obscure, possibly unpublished analyses to find that the increased risk was +0.001% due to projected shifts in the bee population relative to 2015.

That straw-man example of announcing nearly nothing would probably be in practice more statistically relevant to people's lives than this one. Yet, here we are discussing how "foreign travel is not safe" with no information we can use to determine how much anyone should actually care.
Ask HN: IPO as a seed round?
Recently, I've been looking through IPO filings for fun and noticed that it appears that some companies are filing an IPO before they have even transacted any business. For example Pulte Acquisition Corp (http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/pulte-acquisition-corp-979789-79840?tab=financials), and MessageBGone Inc. (http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/messagebgone-inc-979595-79821) don't have actual products but are still filing?

It was my understanding that normally a company will at least reach a certain valuation so they can, at a very minimum, sustain the fees associated with being listed.
There is one possible flaw in this - if you have to struggle to pay the rent, you may not be able to focus on the creative work that would lead to a truly magnificent career.

The bay area,does have a huge tech industry, and Ms. Laakerman has accurately described how the scale of tech in the bay area may allow greater specialization and the career boost it can provide.

However, I think this may miss the kind of creative rndeavor software can be. Software allows you to pay the bills and live in SF, sort of, but are you the same kind of programmer you'd be if you didn't have to make choices based on making rent?

Lower rent doesn't just mean you have the option of working less, hanging out with friends, spending time with family (though that is a fine way to spend it). It can also allow you to work just as hard but differently, on a path you can choose, before people with money even understand what it is let alone if they should fund it (and when they to the might fight it rather then fund it).

I really do think that for some people, staying away from the sky high cost of living may be essential to creating the half formed idea that turns into something incredible.
Whatever evernote decides.
Thank you for the explanation. It does look very tinfoil hat for the outsider with no knowledge of what it is.
I should probably weigh out how much that actually costs in time and money, because there are additionally concerns of book binding and paper as it scales if you want to have equivalent quality to a bought book.
Elastic IPs?
I'm facing the same problem - need to measure performance for each member of my team and indeed no easy solution here.

Currently I'm measuring:

- How many tickets have been closed by each developer (we use mantis)

- What is the (average, average of 5 best, average of 5 worst) time for solving tickets

- For each average from above I obtain number of lines changed and also calculate average (mantis connected with git)

So for given period of time I know:

- how many tickets were closed by each dev

- in average - best time, worst time and usual time for solving tickets

- in average - amount of lines of code for worst time tickets, best time tickets and usual time tickets

I then look if lines representing average score are closer to lower or upper averages.

However all above is just to provide some orientation, my team is still small enough so I know each developer myself and also I'm involved in solving most issues so I base on that knowledge.
jeffbarr from Amazon in another thread:

> Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

So it's more aimed at working with/around archaic licensing schemes, rather than technical advantages.
On HN we penalize such articles, plus users flag them heavily.
Most of the time that IS what you want in general in node, as if you start running anything with even moderate CPU time (let alone a call to an external service) you block the event loop and chug the system. The big performance gain you get with node in the form of max simultaneous connections per clock you get from not blocking. Most (95%+) of packages I've seen use callbacks, and maybe ~10% expose promise interfaces even if they use them internally.
Thank you for the Alliant recommendation. I story my money at CapitalOne360, and although I still like it, I worry what will happen to it after the acquisition. I think I'll switch to Alliant.
Does growing food on the moon actually help? Unless you can mine the nutrients for the food, you still need to bring up all of the mass that would go into the food, at which point you might as well just bring up already processed food (which would also be denser in value/weight). The main benefit of growing food in space is that it lets you recycle nutrients. (I am including the atmospheric gasses as nutrients in this).
Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...
Amazon offers billing by the hour for those, meaning they probably move between customers a lot more than traditional dedicated servers. A bare-metal user can do lot of bad things unless you trust your hardware manufacturing 100 %, e.g. by messing with the firmware.
(I am Belgian and speak dutch)

Oh, I'm not saying everything is above board. That I agree with. However, I do have several wealthy friends who have, unreasonably, been harassed by the fiscal administration on certain matters. A lot of it is fishing to see if they can find something that sticks.

From what I saw in the media (we obviously don't know the exact details):

1. He invested in a company, many years ago.

2. He sold his shares, with a capital gain, which generally is tax free in Belgium

3. Some civil servant decided he wanted to interpret the law differently (and tax him), and he tried to make it stick. As far as I know, he failed.

The problem with Belgian tax law is that it's full of "maybe's", "ifs", and obscure undefined terms. That creates ambiguity in different matters and different cases. Like everything in Belgium.. :)
Does Stripe profit from chargebacks?
I'm pretty sure heatstroke is more dangerous than terrorism too.
def some_function(some_obj):
...

How does any IDE or editor know what some_function would be passed without a severe amount of inspection?

I might be wrong on my definitions, but almost by definition, there's just not enough information before runtime in dynamic systems to infer enough to do any real refactoring or smart completion.

I use PyCharm everyday, and I like it, but it's refactor menu is limited, can fail, and pales in comparison to my uses of java w/ IntelliJ or even a well hinted php app w/ PHPstorm.
It looks like you are in violent agreement
> Sadly, it's been abused and walked over from every corner.

To be fair, Belgium has done its share of abusing (in which 10 million Africans were murdered and many more enslaved under Belgian imperialism): http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html
The Man Who Shaped Tomorrow