skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two questions (not trying to be argumentative or snarky):

> we like using randomly generated identifiers.

Why? Why do your identifiers need to be cryptographically secure at all? Why do they even need to be random? Unless you're using them AS KEYS (your use of Math.random() suggests you aren't), "cryptographically secure" doesn't even have a valid context.

It seems like UNIQUE would suffice, which brings me to:

> Researching a good UUID library and maintaining a dependency is harder than vetting the 10 lines of code required to do it yourself

Well.....except that if you had done the former, you wouldn't have had to analyze collisions because, you know, they wouldn't have happened.

And if you're not using identifiers AS KEYS (which would be horrible practice anyway, since it's apparently output to the logs), why does the library need to be kept "up to date"? Seems as long as its generating unique id's, you're good to go.

Also, I don't understand, if you're using Node.JS and server side javascript, why couldn't you just build a dead simple add-on/module in C++ that makes a direct call to libuuid? (and by using a dylib, that would stay up to date as long as you patch your servers).

I mean the math was definitely an interesting read, but it seems like it was all for naught.

Again, I didn't want to come off as rude or anything, I just happen to agree with the top level comment.
> misses the days when the submissions were more focused on startups

What kind of stories about startups do you think aren't being represented here? Links would be super helpful.

There certainly hasn't been any policy change about what's on topic.
Is 4+ HDMI ports a must-have? If you can deal with 3 HDMI ports, you can get a 4k Seiki non-smart TV for cheap. I think the 40" was around $399. I'm not hip to all the 4k stuff yet, so I don't know how it would compare to a higher-end Sony or Samsung, but I think mine looks fantastic.
What are some examples of 'actionable' content?
I'm using Mint with Cinnamon on my main laptop. It works reasonably out of the box including rather great multimedia support.

I've used Debian for more than fifteen years and I wouldn't go back, at least on desktop. These new distros made me terribly lazy.
Jolla files for debt restructuring, lays off employee in December [pdf]
Beans and rice or potatoes with milk are both nutritionally complete diets. I've never lived off of rice and beans but I got an awful lot of my calories in university from mashed potatoes with milk and butter.

Frying mixed frozen vegetables in butter and dumping spices on top is very fast, ten minutes cooking max, and tastes pretty good.
My first job out of university I worked for a major telco. If I was tasked with changing a piece of code: I had to write an impact analysis document to be reviewed, followed up by a technical design, unit test documentation and then finally I meticulously made code changes. Easily - 3-4 levels of management "signalling" my work. Not sure it really matters in the long run - corporate structure is key...to a successful corporation.
the 'grid' changing bounds is the intended mode of existence

in regard to demon horde the paper(o) states 'channel size increases performance'

but this should be uncontroversial

more resources give better results

it will be an optimisation problem to determine necessary resource alocation for desired results

the shape of the simulation was stated(i) to be a simplified representation of the functionality

the paper discusses 'a movable membrane whose contents cannot diffuse out', the figure is an almost organic shape, much more adaptable than the rectangular simulation demonstration

(o) comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/12/1450.full.pdf+htmlb

(i) https://youtu.be/helScS3coAE?t=1504
That's emphatically wrong, and the most important thing to understand about HN. Any subject is on topic as long as it is intellectually interesting. As pg pointed out when he created this site, good hackers are interested in more than startups and computing. There's a reason why the site guidelines lead with that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is exactly the feeling I get from all of my family's stories. There was an immense amount of inefficiency and outright fabrication (no pun intended) at every level of management beginning with Stalin's five year plans that only got worse in the three decades after World War II. The momentum generated by the existential threat of a full invasion was heavily bolstered by the availability of natural resources and a cultural emphasis on universal education which resulted in a lot of cutting edge military technology and scientific progress but by the mid 1970s the machine was running on fumes.

By the time my grandparents left the aerospace industry (early 80s) it was a shell of its former self. Other than pioneering some stellar science using old but beefy rocket technology, it was incapable of developing anything groundbreaking new, especially given the gap in computer science and semiconductors that the Iron Curtain created in the 70s and 80s. The Buran project is a notable exception, but it was too little too late.
I think it's a very important question for every adult human, and each year answer can be different.

Few years ago for me it was mutexes, RAII and similar things. This year it's changing country of living.
Modern gpus (last 5 years) are optimized for GPGPU in addition to graphics. They also have preemptive multitasking on either a per batch or per workgroup basis.

Intel's latest gpu architecture has an embedded OS running on the gpu for scheduling command batches, I'm not sure what AMD and Nvidia do.

I still wouldn't write a general purpose OS for it.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/140815102328-cost-...
Ask HN: Hosted ChatOps Service
So I had an idea in mind to start a hosted ChatOps Service including Hubot, ErrBot and Lita. Will you guys consider it useful? if yes, what are you guys expecting? or why would you not consider such service? What challenge will I face?
Cheers
No personal attacks, please.
Ha! That link got a great laugh out of me.
If you need good quality random IDs cheaply, you can do the following:

1. Generate a pool of 2048 bytes or so of entropy at startup using window.crypto.getRandomValues or crypto.pseudoRandomBytes. To this, append Date.now() and Math.random().toString() just in case your crypto method fails badly. Then call SHA256 on this to get your starting entropy distilled into 32 bytes. If some of the 2048 bytes of entropy are not high quality, it won't matter as much since you compress it into 32 bytes (i.e. it's worse if you just ask for 32 bytes from getRandomValues).

2. Initialize a counter to 0.

3. Each time you need an ID, increment the counter (handle wrap-around if necessary), and take a SHA256 hash of (counter, 32 bytes entropy hash obtained in 1. above, Date.now(), Math.random().toString()). Then truncate and encode this using whatever character set as needed.

This way you don't drain out your cryptographic entropy pool every time you generate an ID. You also don't leak any details as to your system time, startup time, or your current position in Math.random() (which would allow someone to predict the next Math.random() result) since the final ID is hashed.
Oh dear US citiziens...as a European reading things like this is hilarious. Here it doesn't matter what High School you attend, you go to any university you want because basically everyone is free and with no need to apply. Nobody ever asked me about my HS Diploma or my university grades. In the end the only thing that matters is what you can do/know (global truth).
For someone who prizes convenience over maximizing health, just take a multivitamin. Assuming you're a healthy weight, you'll get 70% of the health benefit of all these cooking instructions everyone is so eager to provide, but with 0.1% of the effort.
The two greatest unsolved FBI cases of all time are D.B. Cooper and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. They're still trying to dig him up in Michigan and elsewhere. I was by the Machus Red Fox building in the past two weeks with my Dad who had his own run in with Jimmy over 75 years ago.

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/...
This. Multi-billion/million dollar corporations don't "move fast and break things". They have an extremely solid managerial and organizational structure which keeps things afloat. OP is either disgruntled or unaware of how large companies work.
That is normal of course, and the published error rates are over large amounts of RAM I think.
> Netflix the app on the TV needed ... agree to all ToS

Was the Netflix app one of the advertised featured?

Was this ToS presented[1] to you before you purchased it?

If they advertised a feature but failed to deliver it in the product you paid for, then I think you deserve your money back. They failed to deliver a merchantable good, as required[2] by UCC § 2-314(2)(f).

[1] "It was posted on our website" doesn't count, unless that was the place you purchased the TV. Requiring consumers to search every manufacturer's website before purchasing anything is insane.

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-314
You seem to be getting a lot of flack from people with 20-20 hindsight. For what it's worth, I have made the exact same assumptions you have when generating internal unique IDs in a distributed system purely for tracking purposes. The only difference was that mine was in Python and I got lucky that its random implementation uses a mersenne twister.
The perfect TV
Having played all parts of the Deus Ex series: DX 1 is stellar, one of the top 10 PC/video games. Speaking about interior design, DX1 is outstanding for its time (Unreal 1 engine). One could use, move and destroy objects in the room. DX2 had a similar good interior design and a even more realisitic physics engine (fire could spread across the room, not seen again until Far Cry 2 many years later). The music of DX1 is great, every single piece. Though DX2 suffered from being developed for XBox1, a console which lacked memory and was quite slow in comparision to a PC at that time. So DX2 levels were very tiny (only 1-3 rooms per level) and a fraction of the level size of DX1 which spans up to 1 square mile. DX2 was also dumped down for consoles (1 ammo type for all weapons - seriously wtf!). DX 3 (aka Human Revolution) had beautiful cloth designs and interesting art design, but used an outdated game engine. DX3 had a very static game world, move or destroying interior object wasn't possible. The story was less complex and less grand than DX1&2, the levels were comparable almost small to DX2 and far smaller than DX1 that came out like 7 years before. DX3 had one of the most stupid interior archtectual designs, like accessable ventilation pipes had been added at a very late state in the development for more stealth gameplay. The ventilation pipes were placed at the illogical places and gone through many feets of concrete space just for the sake of offering stealth gameplay. People who like DX3 more thanDX1 often never played DX1 at release date and/or haven't completed both games. Sure today, all Deus Ex parts look very outdated from a graphical point of view. So I tend to say DX1 was superb, DX2 & DX3 development was misguided and the result just good or very good, but not one of the best games ever. The release date of DX4 (due Dec 2015) has just been pushed back another 8 months due to subpar quality from the publisher - weeks just before the Gold master. Nowadays the Dishonored and Watch_Dogs series seem to be the logic successor of Deus Ex. If only Warren Spector would come back and be the lead of a new Deus Ex like game.
The point of unlimited is that it's not limited by HR, its negotiated with your manager. 4 to 6 weeks is common. More, it depends on your circumstances.
From what I saw in other articles, the NSA started collecting the data from overseas so it can pretend it's doing nothing illegal - or something.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9768778/nsa-web-surveilla...
Nice looking site, but I think you're going around your marketing all wrong.

You want to generate revenue through the press, no you don't you want to get people to sign-up for your site.

Let's take a look at how you do that. Do you currently have a few customers? Are those customers successfully selling through your product? Great, does somebody have a really unique business? Can you help THEM get press, and increase their business? Can you get mentions along with driving people to your customers sites?

You have to think ahead. Getting press, and growing a business isn't done after the fact. It isn't something that happens after you've built your product.

So, xmas is coming up, probably a big time for some of your customers (assuming you have customers). How can you help them sell more over xmas. After xmas, you've got an opportunity to hit up media. You can show how some special customer (they need to have a story about why they are special) killed it this holiday, and how you helped them do that, and how it benefits the readers. If THEY can start their own business using your product, look at the change it can make in their lives.

That's how PR works. Find an angle that you can sell to the media about why they should write about you, and it is almost never about you, you're just a guy trying to start a business who hasn't yet succeeded. So make it about the reader, what does the reader want to know, does the reader want to know about you? Probably not, you have to make it about what the reader wants which will lead them to want to know about you.

But also consider this. You're in a market with HUGE competitors. Shopify, BigCommerce and lots of others. What makes you special. I didn't get it from your website. Try to find your niche.

You've got lots of work to do. Congrats on getting this far.
That's the entire point - large organizations are inherently broke. Read the article.
I can agree with you about Word and Excel.

I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both.

You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI?

XP was crap and we should all be glad it's dead.
The NSA has already said that:

1) all encrypted data is considered "foreign" and therefore all is collected (as if they couldn't see that metadata for that encrypted content...). So if you use Gmail or Facebook you're a foreigner.

2) if there's a >51% chance (flipping a coin) in their algorithm that the target is a foreigner (based on metadata, presumably) then the data will be collected.

3) EFF and others (I think Ron Wyden, too, who is in the Intelligence Committee) have said that the NSA is doing "backdoor searches" on Americans by interpreting the law as "if you communicate to a foreigner they can collect yours, too" - So if you have foreigner Friends on your Facebook or Twitter and you "like" or talk to them, your data will likely be collected.

4) When asked whether it collects the data on members of Congress, I don't remember the exact reply but it was something along the lines of "probably, since we collect it on everyone".

Knowing this (and there are other such answers from them), you have to be very naive to believe the NSA is only collecting the data at most on a small percentage of Americans.
I remember circa 1999 having a database server which had a stuck bit in memory. The bit happened to be placed in the page cache, so it subtly corrupted disk writes resulting in the database throwing checksum errors. It took an insane amount of time to even diagnose where the problem could be. We of course thought it was the disks themselves and tried many variations of disks and external RAID cards. Finally, one run of memtest86 found the real problem, and I threw away the memory and motherboard and replaced it with one capable of ECC RAM.

I forget now why we even thought to build a server without ECC RAM, but I sure learned my lesson after that.
Maybe because it was an older model? That case isn't common.
I also miss a usecase. And speaking of the homepage: This looks untransparent and unfriendly.

I think the laravel homepage is extremly well made.
Clean and very good documentation which you can use all the time without getting angry.
http://laravel.com/docs/5.1
In contrast to some here, I think this is a strikingly different, minimal, lovely design!

Admittedly, the sub-pages should be spruced up with more color and better layout (they're just too minimalist to convey important concepts about the language). I think these should be more in line with other language showcase websites.

As for the 'too much clicking' criticisms: no, it's no great hardship to hit that 'About' menu item!
Some teens can't tell the difference between Google ads and search results
"It's not difficult to imagine.."

Certainly. The question is, is there any actual evidence?

Quoting http://russianforces.org/podvig/2013/03/did_star_wars_help_e... , which examines the topic:

> As could be expected, the data on the Soviet strategic programs in the 1980s clearly show that the U.S. policies and actions and its strategic buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative program in particular, had a significant impact on the choices made by the Soviet leadership at that time. However, the nature of this influence, its mechanisms and the effect of the U.S. actions strongly indicates that these actions did not help bring the end of the Cold War.

> The new evidence on the Soviet response to SDI largely corroborates the prevailing view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program does not present a danger to its security, for it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures. The evidence also helps answer some important questions about the concerns that the Soviet Union had about the U.S. program, the reasoning behind the choices that the Soviet leadership made, and the process that led to those choices.

> ...

> The issue of the Soviet own program that was produced in response to SDI brings a question of whether the burden that it imposed on the Soviet economy was a factor in the decision of the Soviet leadership to initiate reforms or even in accelerating the demise of the Soviet Union. The answer to this question is most certainly negative. While the package of anti-SDI programs was supposed to be a massive effort, comparable in scale to its U.S. counterpart, very few of these projects were actually new. The most expensive programs, such as the Moscow missile defense system or the "Energiya-Buran" heavy launcher, or the second-tier programs like the "Skif" space-based laser, existed long before SDI. When they became part of the "D-20" or "SK-1000" programs, they did not require any additional commitment of resources. Most of the projects included in the package never went beyond paper research and those that did were among the least expensive ones. Overall, while the military spending was certainly putting a heavy burden on the Soviet economy, there is no evidence that SDI or the Soviet response to it increased that burden in any substantial way.[89] Documents show that the issues of effectiveness of the military programs or shifting resources to the civilian sector had not became prominent in the internal discussions until about 1988, when the key decisions about SDI and the response programs had already been made.[90]
TAs can't possibly be wealthy? That's news.
I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time.

As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
MishGuru pivoted from 3D printed horseshoes to a platform that manages Snapchats
Really hoping to find out it's all implemented on top of Kafka.
The comments on that article are awful. Spare yourselves and don't read them!
"Using node IDs and timestamps is just an additional safety factor. Statistically it's not necessary if you have a good generator."

Sorry, that's just not sensible. You always want to add node IDs and timestamps (provided you hash the final output so as not to leak details about your system) in case your generator fails. Why would you not want another layer of safety? It also helps protect against the case where an attacker might gain something by being able to predict the next ID in the sequence.
Both. There are max 50 weeks of EI paid - biological mothers get 15 weeks of pay, then the remaining 35 weeks of the pay in the first parental year is shared between parents (even for adoptions).

So, Mom & Dad could both take 15 weeks off (15 x 2), and Mom or Dad takes the remaining 20 off. There are many combinations.

Of course, EI only pays $50k a year max, so many employers will offer benefits packages that match 75-80% of your salary for up to 16 weeks (maternal and/or paternal leave).
but the previous website[0] was also minimal and yet (IMVHO) a lot more effective (and a lot easier to read)[1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20151103063328/http://iolanguage...

[1] EDIT: I am slightly astygmatic, so for me thin white lines on black BG are basically just horizontal fuzzyness. To be constructive: white on black is generally less readable, but it can be somewhat compensated by adding more leading and thicker lines, so i.e. in /about adding this to .text

font-size: 16px;
font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: .015rem;

makes it a lot easier to read.
Another Yahoo Executive Is Departing
Can I invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines here?

I don't believe "a guy who is sick and doesn't mention that he eats only white bread and American cheese" is a sign of a scurvy epidemic. In fact, I actively disbelieve it.
I would argue against this article's assertion about the "real" use of Instagram. As a college student, my interpretation (and AFAIK my fellow students') is that the real use of Instagram IS this small personal community, not unlike Facebook. And indeed, this seems to be more intuitive, as pointed out in some of the other comments here.
Things have surely changes in 30 years, because effective missile defense is a reality these days.

That said SDI wasn't a failure, the "Star Wars" part of it kinda was, but sensor, targeting solutions, ABM (heck one of the original SDI systems - ERIS is quite functional to this day) technologies serve as the base for the US's current missile defense shield and they do work.

SDI also lead to quite a few significant developments in both chemical and more importantly solid state laser.

Hubble also owes a large debt to SDI, there have been several experiments regarding bouncing ground based lasers of mirrors in space in which they've actually launched mirrors and bounced a laser over 1 or more of them.
Both the mirror manufacturing technology and more importantly the ground breaking tracking and stabilization technology which allowed them to bounce of a laser of a freaking tiny mirror in space were used in the HST.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425253
Like WinFS. Vaporware means a lot of PR for a product that was never shipped in the end.

Microsoft's strategy since it's early days is based on vaporware, even Windows 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
Brussels on Highest Terror Alert
I think GP's point was _why_ they were building what they were building. Gate's was just doing work in his field, whereas Zuckerberg was working towards his ideology. Gate's didn't have the strong sentiment towards his business that Zuckerberg did/does.
Hey, does anyone tried to Google for CSPRNG? What Google return for wikipedia's article title is totally off:

https://www.google.com/search?q=CSPRNG
Random are numbers - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator