skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Library records were not necessarily all that private.

When I was a kid/teen, each book in the county library had a card in a pocket glued or taped to the inside front cover of the book. Your library card had a metal plate on it embossed with your library card number. To check out a book you took it to the checkout counter, they took your library card and the card from the book, and used a machine that printed your library card number and the due date on that card from the book [1]. They kept that card, and put a card in the book that told you the due date.

When you returned the book, they would put that original card back in the pocket and return the book the the stacks.

Note that if you could obtain my library card number, then you could find out if I had checked out a particular book by simply finding that book on the shelves and looking at the checkout card to see if my library card number was printed on it. You could even tell when I checked it out because the due date would be listed. The card had enough room to store records from a couple dozen checkouts.

I think that this didn't bother people because it took some work to get the information. First, you need the target's library card number. One way you could get that would be to have someone watch me when I come out of the library and try to get a good enough look to identify a book I've checked out. Then wait until I return the book and it is back on the shelves, and you can get my number from the card.

Once you've got the card number, you now have to start looking in books for it. If you are trying to see if I'm reading books on a particular subject, you might reasonably look at all books on that subject, but if you are trying to get a general picture of all my reading that is going to be a big hassle.

A lot of things were like this--the data was not particularly protected or kept private, but because getting it required going to some particular place and trolling through printed records generally only people who had a really good reason to want it would go to the effort.

[1] Similar to the way credit cards worked back before electronic card readers.
Patent troll claims HTTPS websites infringe crypto patent
Yes, that is certainly a tension here. I think it's easier to think of the paper as two broadly different subparts.

The first part is: "regardless of what you think, if something you do rearranges power, then it will become political". This is more a statement of fact than anything else.

The second part is: "now that I hope to have convinced you that crypto is necessarily political, here's the moral stance I would prefer for you to follow."
The one thing Ballmer did right was double down when he saw a huge, once in a lifetime opportunity.

Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger say that without their top 20 performing stocks, they'd be also-rans. Which really goes to show that when you find a great opportunity in life, you should go at it as hard as you can.
Not necessarily so if you come from a strong Assembly language background. Most processors have a special instruction for incrementing a register that's shorter (and faster) than the more generic ADD instruction.

For instance, on a 64-bit x86 machine,

ADD RAX,1

is nine bytes long, while

INC RAX

is one byte. Maybe not as much a win these days, but back when memory was smaller and more expensive, it was worth it.
http://i.imgur.com/JkhcUtS.gif
:'( still I wait, likely without end
Bring up communes in America and everyone assumes you are crazy or in a cult.

It's not like I just think it would be optimal to share a kitchen or bulk meals and maybe actually talk to my neighbors.

Living in tiny isolated groups is the American dream.
Even in a double-blind review, it is possible to figure out whose paper you are reviewing if you are familiar with their work. The system can also be gamed through collusion or sucking up (approving a paper because they reference a paper of yours or of a colleague).
I use "?" constantly in coffee-script. And while I missed ++ for a while in Python, I don't use it in coffee even though it's available.
I'll take that bet. Even if they produced a working prototype of this tomorrow I doubt the government would be able to pass the necessarily legislation in three years.
Bold request.
> > altering yourself in a way that invites a communicable disease to take hold, optionally mutate, and begin infecting others.

> Again, this isn't something we consider morally wrong

"we" who? I suspect that it something quite a lot of people who consider to be morally wrong (whether they would consider it the kind of moral wrong that it would be desirable to formally sanction, as through legal prohibition on doing it or legal restriction on public interaction if you do it, is a separate consideration, but consider the issue of mandatory vaccination which involves legal restrictions if you fail to take active steps, involving treatment of your own body, to protect yourself and, through herd immunity, others from communicable disease -- its not implausible that many would consider active steps, even involving modifying your own body, that increase the risk of communicable disease sufficiently to not only be abstractly morally wrong, but the kind of moral wrong for which legal sanction is appropriate.)

> We generally consider an action's morality based on the intent. If your intent is to spread disease, it's wrong. If you had a different intent, but didn't realize the consequences you're not considered to be wrong.

In morality, as in law, while intent is usually important, actions taken without intent to cause harm but in which known risks of harms to others exist and are ignored, or even cases where risks of harm exist which would have been discovered with due care and are unknown to the actor due to their lack of concern, are often also considered wrong despite the absence of specific ill intent.
I didn't know we were making comparisons between Swift and C.

Most people would agree C lets the developer do a lot of terrible things (by design, since some of those terrible things are necessary for low level stuff, which C was targeted at).

Pointers are confusing for a lot of people. Which is why almost no modern language uses them. Comparing "++" with C pointers is not a valid argument.

Even so, I would never argue to remove pointers from C, since you can optionally not use them. If you don't need that language construct in your program, don't use it. But leave it for others who do want/need it.
About 25 years ago I did QA on the spreadsheet module of now-defunct office software maker Enable. On a lark, each of us on the spreadsheet testing team implemented a different casino game using spreadsheet macros. This was the old macro system similar to Lotus 1-2-3, with "/" invoking the menu and then using letters representing the hotkeys for each menu command, etc.

I took on blackjack, and built a whole Vegas-style game including insurance, doubling down, a configurable number of decks, etc. I was pretty proud of that, what with the self-imposed constraints. But that seems to be small beans compared to this project.

The number of bugs that we uncovered during this effort was pretty substantial. For example, we discovered that the PRNG implementation was a lot more P than it was R. We found that when the guy who'd written the craps game set it up to play automatically overnight, based on some simple heuristics. When we came back the next morning, his robo-player was rich, and we all know that's not supposed to happen in a casino. We re-ran the same test the next night, with the same result. It turned out that a quirk had rolls of 11 coming up more often than they should, which is a real problem for craps.

Anyway, trying to implement something non-trivial with self-imposed constraints sure isn't the most efficient way to accomplish the task, but it's a great way to stretch your understanding of a platform.
It is an American dream, maybe, but not the only one. It's certainly not the one prominent among my friends and family, who are steadily clustering ever closer together. Cohousing is popular.

I didn't buy a house because I wanted a place to myself; I bought a house because I wanted to have enough space to have people over for dinner and throw parties. A house big enough for that is too big for just me, so I share it with friends. Much better than all of us living separately in apartments, or (ugh!) in entire separate houses.
Fascinating, thanks for the detail!
Probably the worst thing I've ever seen followed by "no offense".
My understanding is that beyond the examples you talk about that go is being used extensively in google as a backend glue language for automation and services.

https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
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We'll have you programming in CoffeeScript/JavaScript on our Angular web apps. And maybe some dabbling in Python on our Flask backend.

If this sounds interesting, send a resume to careers@propellr.com.

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Love that podcast. I'll check it out later today, thanks.

About core.typed, just be aware that it comes with its own set of issues[0]. I've been down that road and it wasn't great.

[0] http://blog.circleci.com/why-were-no-longer-using-core-typed...
It's interesting to compare Swift 2 -> 3 to the Python 2 -> 3 upgrade experience. Apple will simply break whatever they need to break to get the improvements they decide would be valuable, move on, and anyone who doesn't follow is likely to be left in the dust.

Frankly, I welcome it after years of feeling like the only Python 3 user on Earth.

For the next few years, I expect Apple will wield a great deal more power over the Swift user community than the Benevolent Dictator For Life has wielded over his supposed minions. I hope we'll get a better language this way, and that these changes won't simply break third-party products to make changes that mostly benefit Apple.

Rich, powerful giant gives power to fork to the little people. Will it be like C#? Like Java? Eventually like Python? Should be interesting....
Oh. You really are clueless, then. I'm sorry I've wasted my time on this.
librarians are very vocal about privacy and freedom of expression issues. This does not surprise me at all.
It persuades people that are told that Tibet should get the old Dalai Lama as dictator system back.

China is criticized as an oppressive regime in tibet by people that at the same time cater to a wannabe dictator.
Automata Memory Processor Pointer to Future System Challenges
Deal. I'll setup a LongBet and post the info in this comment.
Hitler was a genius at politics and charisma. No one raises to power like without some sort of gift. He was also crazy and evil, but no one said all genius is used for good causes.
It could be FORTH.
> Justifying a tyrannical government by virtue of the previous government having been a tyranny too doesn't persuade anyone.

It doesn't persuade you. Those of us who've been watching various forms of autocracy spring up and get overthrown throughout history appreciate progress where we can get it.

The situation in Tibet has a historical precedent. Hebrews living under Roman rule in the kingdom of Judea. Both were theocratic countries whose populations were really, really invested in traditional rule. Both had constant foreign interference from bigger and more powerful states. One had their entire population massacred and their places of worship burned to the ground.

The Romans were pragmatic and tolerated the eccentricities of the Judeans for hundreds of years, happy to take tribute and let them live the way they want to live. But the Judeans wanted more, and declared independence from Rome.

It's tough as an imperial administrator to know where to draw the line. By historical standards, the CCP is remarkably patient with its wayward sons.
> If you leave them in they're one more special case that everyone has to memorize before they can maintain someone else's code

It's literally no different than having to remember what "+=" does... which is what's being proposed as the alternative.

> Reading is more important than writing

I would agree, but "x++" is not difficult to read. It's more concise than having to read "x += 1". Or worse, beginners will think it's clever to define constants for this so now you'll get "x += INCREMENT_VALUE", making you have to go lookup whatever "INCREMENT_VALUE" is, etc...
You sir, are a genius.
According to the Stephan Brumme website you linked to, the slice-by-8 lookup table is 8K and the slice-by-16 table is 16K, so your combo version of crc32 needs 24K of L1 cache to run at full speed. Modern server class CPUs typically have 32K of L1 dcache so that doesn't leave much room for the rest of your work. Maybe that's reasonable (I don't really know what Cyrus does), but I thought it was worth thinking about.
It's evidence to show people (family, doctors, etc... and yourself). It's harder evidence than flaky human memory or "impressions" of how I slept, in any event. You can literally see how crappy your sleep is, on a chart. It's rather eye-opening, and if you have a wife or girlfriend who wonders why you're a space cadet today who can't get anything done, you can always point to the "4 hours of good shuteye" chart from last night (if it exists) lol
"NVIDIA Auditorium"? It's bad enough in sports, is there no place sacred enough for no corporate sponsorship?
I don't see it either, probably because after creating it, they eventually passed stewardship over to the Apache Foundation. I'm not sure how much they still use it, even.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra#History
Tbh, I've only lived in places with every bedroom rented to a different tenant after I moved out from home.

Communal living is very good but I'd much prefer the "American" version where its essentially 3-5 roommates I can trust than a much larger version like in the article.
Sorry, I'm not really going to bet a thousand dollars on an internet comment. I have bills to pay. That's not say I don't believe what I said, just that I don't have $1000 to throw around to back it up.
Being a Resident at the Recurse Center
Air gaps never exist (2011)
I've always felt like Python and Ruby chose to drop these to discourage you from writing traditional loops, as they have their own enumerators to accomplish the same thing. And, as the author mentioned, so does Swift. Obviously you still have to do a '+=' occasionally, but I don't find myself doing that often.
i would suspect most people skilled in a trade would earn more than the typical non STEM college graduate.
> a reply button shows up where it ought to be

there's a time delay to help prevent comments like

> Because it's hard to talk to a bloviator without stopping to point out the stupidities.
Couple things:

Transportation is going to change regardless. Electric self-driving cars are going to be manufactured by several companies, perhaps operated by those same companies (or leased to others).

Why would Google provide its tech to Uber when Google already has access to the market through Google Maps? Why would Tesla provide its self-driving cars to Uber when it could build them and sell ridesharing directly (which Elon has specifically indicated he wants to do by his response to said questions during investor calls).

Uber is just an app, no more, no less. The Gorillas are the tech companies doing the real work.
This would work if compilers were written in simple languages, and if target languages themselves were simple. In other words, in a parallel universe.
Very interesting. I have supposed this since using PDP-11 assembler and reading Dennis' compiler in the late 70's.

There were machines with auto increment modes long before the PDP-11 though, e.g. "http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/GE-635.html#Indirect Then Tally (IT) Modification"
I use a bastardized DE1 layout, as provided by linux.

So I have æ, but not å.

Actually, I’m gonna switch to DE3.

Still doesn’t solve these special characters.
The ability to culture organisms is the single most important roadblock to understanding. Even if a new culturing technique only enables you to grow .00001 % of the bacterial species out there that is still a 100 fold increase in the number that we can now study at scale. DNA sequencing has made it possible to identify new species by looking at their 16s ribosomal RNA, but if you are looking for small molecules and proteins you have to be able to amplify the whole organism, not just its nucleic acids.

Huge deal, expect much more to come from microbiologists using this culturing technique.
In a high-level language, this is the job of the compiler, though. If the compiler isn't generating those instructions for cases where the increment can be proven to be 1, I would consider it a bug.
Do you mean something like "compound assignment operators"? Apparently you can define custom operators like:

func += (inout left: Vector2D, right: Vector2D) {
left = left + right
}

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...
This is absolutely a case of earning a badge of having contributed to this complex famous project, but it is also a way to on-board and empower people. Recruiter should always look deeply and not taking "contribution" at face value.
My scratchbook. :-)

I keep meaning to write it up.

Mathematically it is similar http://www.evanmiller.org/sequential-ab-testing.html but with the difference that Evan produced a stopping rule that is a 95% confidence interval, while mine is stopping at 95% confidence that you won't come to a different conclusion by the end of the test. Otherwise the idea of the analysis is the same.

(Note, under the null hypothesis reaching sqrt(N) then crossing 0 is exactly as hard as reading 2 sqrt(N) as can be seen by taking any possible sequence that does one, and swapping the values after first reaching sqrt(N) to get a sequence that does the other.)
10 Former Viral Sensations on Life After Internet Fame
Hitler was an awful human being. But he was a genius orator. Jesse Owens was a physical genius, though we'd perhaps more easily say that someone performing a more complex skill was a genius, such as Steve Nash etc. In any case, I think it's interesting and useful to think there are many kinds of genius.
> Ride-hailing services are a saturated market with major network effects

Not so much. Drivers frequently run Uber and Lyft simultaneously. There is no "stickiness".

> It just seems like it makes more business sense for Tesla to sell/license as many self-driving cars as they can to any and all services that want them, and concentrate on their core business, rather than branch out into an entirely new market and write a whole new app from scratch and market it.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But apparently that's the direction Elon is going: http://www.techinsider.io/elon-musk-hints-tesla-may-enter-ri...

> write a whole new app from scratch and market it.

I think its humorous this is thought of as expensive. How much does it cost to build an iOS/Android app and run the infrastructure to match riders to drivers? $3-5/million/year? Tesla has hundreds of millions of dollars of credit available to it. And you know, the cars receiving software updates constantly.
Blogging and Open Source – Publishing Your Byproducts
http://money.howstuffworks.com/second-career-ideas/10-reason...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/03/08/the-pr...

I think this is the actual study?

http://www.nerisearch.com/neri-newsletter-career-development...

Basically, a skilled employee gets the most out of a job in the first 3 years. And the new company gets the most out of the employee in the first 3 years (or so). After that, in order to restart the learning experience for both parties, a "change of venue" is necessary.
> I'll take that bet.

Your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673357

Wha?
Can you use this on a shared host and avoid the certificate installation fee?
Fast and Flexible Multivariate Time Series Subsequence Search [pdf]
Fuzzing Math – Miscalculations in OpenSSL's BN_mod_exp
When it was a maintained project is was more stable for me than Flash on Linux. I used to have major problems using Flash on Linux.
It's not serious; it's a humour piece. People are taking it far too seriously in this thread.
The dedoublifier, part two
I've written up some details on the BN_mod_exp issue that I found with american fuzzy lop:
https://blog.fuzzing-project.org/31-Fuzzing-Math-miscalculat...
HN thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673407
This operator was popularized by C, so comparisons with C make sense. Of course you wouldn't remove pointers from C, the language would barely work if you did.

Confusing C-isms like pointers are what Swift is trying to get away from. This is another case of that.

"We're making a new language, it isn't C, but will share some characteristics. Which should those be?" is the question being asked here.
Nowadays, a compiler that doesn't optimize a "+1" is a bad compiler.
Hosted bare metal emerges as alternative to IaaS cloud
Agreed. I worked on the FRBNY research floor, this model has real mindshare with policy makers, porting it is a huge investment in the language. They may be training scads of RAs in writing and using Julia, many of them will go off and do PhDs later.
I'd like to see you lead a whole nation to believe your batshit crazy ideas. It takes a little bit of genius to do that.
Similarly, I don't think the primary purpose/raison d'etre of the Apple Watch is to tell time. It certainly isn't what you're paying $300+ for.
NSA OS X hardening tips (2005) [pdf]
How do you decide whether the new certificate is genuine, other than it being issued by a valid CA?
Memory loss: China's high stakes gamble in the tech industry's bloodiest segment
I see this a lot. You could argue RMS fits this category. I don't think he's stupid, but somewhat strange for someone who could've been a first rate Physics or Computer Science researcher.

A few weeks ago someone commented how some academic was disappointed that Gates had become an entrepreneur, calling it a "waste". It is interesting to think about what him, Ballmer, or Stallman would've done in academia.
What can the best hackers do that most people are unaware of?
Here's a small utility for checking if a web server offers HTTP/2:
https://github.com/xyproto/http2check
"I bet you $1000" is, 98% of the time, not an actual offer to bet a thousand dollars with a person. The numbers are even higher when said person is a stranger you are talking to on an internet message board.

You are lucky to be able to consider such a thing seriously!
Why Do We Have “Sister Cities”?
Cheers, very interesting. I know some of the early people in the Chinese music scene but have never spent much time in Beijing and had not read of such an early foreign involvement. If you visit Yunnan hit me up.
Yes, of course, I use constants in all cases.

Why is adding 1 to something special, compared to adding 2 to something? The #1 use case, by far, is C-style for loops, which aren't used in idiomatic Swift code.
Care to provide citations for the claims that fatty red meat is at all healthy (last I checked, saturated and trans fat cause cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis - just to name a few problems), or that whole wheats contain antinutrients, or are somehow unhealthy?
To me, ++ is the one obvious way to increment. I use for loops constantly and think of incrementation as a different thing from addition.
Are you implying that "law enforcement officials" have moral standing, especially in the US? Torture, racism, fraud, corruption, brutality, are what springs to mind, along with a total lack of will to reform. To hell with that.