skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is not putting money into his hobby.

If you buy $30k worth of golf clubs, you have $30k worth of golf clubs.

If you put $30k into a kickstarter project for some digital assets exclusively in a piece of software that isn't even written yet, you don't own that.

That's not putting $30k into a hobby, but giving $30k to someone without even a contractual obligation for delivery. It's exactly why the SEC won't let non-accredited investing into crowdfunded equity projects, but the reality is that people already think they're buying something without getting equity.
Why Governments Lie About Encryption Backdoors
> The most successful webpages are those where people are authors.

Exactly. But not because they enjoy tweaking some website settings or enjoy the control over the layout of a page. No, the reason is connection with other people. They write a blog so that they get feedback from people. They post pictures to Instagram and Facebook to get likes and show off.

Connecting the electric guitar and repairing things with screwdrivers is seen by most people as a chore. Sure, techie, geeky tinkerers enjoy messing around with things, the same ones who enjoy configuring linux, for example.

I just haven't seen a single use case that would make sense in an everyday setting. Having a knob that controls the lamp? Well, lamps already have that, without being radio controlled.

If a car dashboard is designed well, then there's no need to remap the buttons. Very few people like to customize their stuff that much. If there is a trend in software (and hardware) it's that they remove options. We have less features and customizations than 10 years ago. Developers realized that people just mess their settings up and they call support. Also, the more options there are, the more bugs there will be. So now instead of supporting a myriad of settings, they just go with a default and leave it at that. Why don't we have the option of vertical browser tab arrangement in Chrome? Well, because they decided it's too complex and unnecessary for most users.

People just want to get their things done. They want to get business things done with other business people and they want to have fun with their friends.

The success of the Internet is all about human communication, sharing experiences (mainly through photos), and gossip.
The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile.

Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon.

Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super high speed Internet - what that would do for the ability of Australians to live and work away from the cities and how good that would be for regional communities. Turnbull and Abbott tossed that out.

I'm cynical about Government support for technology because it usually is very indirect. More often than not any money is funnelled into an "ecosystem of helpers" rather than to the developers. So venture capitalists and incubators get the money which essentially is then substantially dedicated to paying for the salaries and offices of the incubators and venture capitalists rather than going to entrepreneurs. As the blog post points out - there are thousands of developers sitting in their kitchen coding - they do not want a desk and chair as provided by an incubator and - like Atlassian - they do not want to even talk to venture capitalists, let alone waste time and money trying to get funding from them - an extremely unlikely event because the VCs are so risk averse. If I built something that got traction - which is what the VC's want to see - and I really needed VC then I damn sure wouldn't go to Australian VCs for it - that's the path to failure - if you must have money and you have traction, go straight to Silicon Valley first.
What's "HSG"?
Cryptographic data has specific signatures. It really wouldn't be that hard to find. I bet there are off the shelf solutions already. As I remember it Heartbleed key finding used this.
This is actually what I liked, two different parallel stories intermingled and somehow blending together at some point. Great post!
These RFID Tags Allow Danish Cyclists to Turn Traffic Lights Green
How to Benefit from Tutorials
Cocaine aside, environmental lead via gasoline and paint weren't exactly helpful either.
ImGui: Bloat-Free Immediate Mode GUI for C++ with Minimal Dependencies
No you're correct, gzip -1 outperformed lz4 in my test in compression ratio. I don't know why I typed "30% compression" instead of "compression ratio of 30%." Sorry about that.
You base your argument on authority. If an actual health professional sells homeopathic remedies, then according to your argument, they are allowed to.

A product should be legal, if it really does what is it advertised to do. How is this validated? That is up to the lawmakers, as long as someone handles it, unlike now.
> we're getting pretty damn good at it

I'm not so sure. I play a video game, and invariably get bored to tears within 30 seconds or so.

It might have something to do with when I was a student, I had a job that involved play testing video games.

It's also true that my old game Empire was well known to be addictive. I'd play it myself, but would rarely get too far into a game before I'd go back to tweaking the AI, which was where the real fun was.
Owning a boat can be a real drag, though, once the novelty wears off.
I'd draw the line at the point where the user/consumer can't easily recognize advertisement as advertisement.

For example, paying people to write blog posts or to friend your client on social media without making the "I'm being paid to do it" part explicit should be illegal.

I know nothing about US law, but shouldn't that be some kind of fraud crime or "confidence trick crime" already?
We're starting with the assumption that learners will not be able to religiously follow a schedule. That means that whether you're cramming, checking in sporadically, or completing a daily queue - the algorithms should ideally adapt accordingly without making your "to do" list untenable. One component of this is determining whether your long-term retention is bounded to a specific timeframe (e.g. learn content X by future date Y) or unbounded (lifelong learning).

What we're borrowing is the concept of memory decay, but I don't think there are many similarities beyond that. Imagine learning spanish in college: you could set a goal for your final exam but also have a lifelong learning goal. Whether you're following your schedule or cramming, your answer events will communicate with the intersecting algorithms so that you're being optimized for several different use cases simultaneously. When we launch the "goal setting" feature, gjcourt may write a blog post about it and post it to HN...
I've been working on a similar concept after using Anki for a year.
http://www.looprecall.com/

I wanted to have a more modern UI and plan on adding the ability to share decks between users. I would welcome any feed back! :-)
SQLite's still too big of a pig, and still unreliable. But we can do LMDB in-kernel, and an LMDBfs is in the works. Based on BDBfs.

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/kbdbfs-msthesis/
Well, they are pretty open that they don't delete it anyway.

Keeping your "deleted" stuff hidden wouldn't hurt them.
I would say that there are a ton of people in the world that love to build things, because its how we came to that point where we are. This is the sole reason why the world around you exists.

Imagine building becomes so easy that it is more of an "amazing" experience for you then a "geeky" long lasting frustration.
I am not arguing for giving up the notion of personal responsibility, but

But you are.

When you get to micromanaging such trivialities, there's no limit what a planner's mentality will settle on next. A ban on restaurants that offer salty free lunches with every purchase of beer because they're relying on the customer to make up for it by ordering drinks.

It is absolutely not fraud. A happy hour was advertised, and the contract was heeded.

The property owner may deliberately arrange the environment so as to maximize an expected consumer end. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Supermarkets are architected to encourage higher shopping. Clothing retailers will arrange their luxurious brands to have a higher aesthetic appeal inside their stores.

Taking your logic of needing to regulate any "misleading action" to its conclusion will only entail the abolition of the market economy. There's no way around this. Anything and everything can be shoehorned under such flimsy logic.

(Moreover, expecting that consumers are morons who cannot regulate their own behavior will generally lead to policymakers drafting proposals that assume as such and end up fulfilling the prophecy on their own, since the resulting bureaucracy will be internalized by consumers in their expectations.)
There is at least an implied contract on Kickstarter. They say as much in their TOS:

https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4
As a programmer in my 50s I'm comfortable with my coding skills and am now interested in broader material so I filter HN by 'software' and that gives me just 20 hits a day which is feels manageable.
An easy problem to solve. LMDB never corrupts.
The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated
Are you really safer if you get other people to commit crimes for you? Seems like they'll pretty much always roll over on you unless you're part of an organization that can make them pay a price for doing so.
Researchers find a quicker way to teach a computer
then you didn't read the article closely. SQLite has plenty of crash vulnerabilities.
Why don't you just manipulate the physical objects with your hands? They're right in front of you. I think I am missing something.
That this person is putatively in the games industry does not bolster the point of the article, so I have to assume that used as a manipulative aid to help sell the idea therein. Mildly ironic, I suppose, but it's okay to manipulate when you are doing "the right thing" in some minds.
How does checksumming help if the data is in cache and waiting to be written ?
For ex:
I have 1MB of data, i write it but it stays in buffer cache after written and when you do checksum you are computing the checksum on buffer cache .

On Linux you have to drop_caches and then read get the checksum to be sure. Now per buffer or file drop_cache isnt available as per my knowledge . If you are doing a systemwide drop_caches you are invalidating the good and bad ones.

What if now if device is maintaing cache as well in addition to buffer cache?

Can someone clarify ?
Late 50's. Vinyl wasn't common until the 60's.
Correct, we want to be able to write in deterministic order. SCSI has supported this natively for decades. Unfortunately SATA doesn't, and the Linux kernel pretty much doesn't, because it can't rely on the storage devices to support it.
"It believes what it sets", about a sentient Linotype.

That's a very funny short story. A magic story, though, not AI.
> how would one even decide where the line between manipulative consumption and social signaling is?

The mean amount of money spent and time played per week per user would be a good place to start. If any user is spending more than $40 USD/week on a game or more than 20 hours/week playing a game, it's a problem.
That, and if the game closes up for whatever reason (no longer making money, whatever), all of your investment into it can quickly vanish into literally nothing.
Seems like a lot of people aren't really convinced of the value of this kind of tech (and maybe of IoT in general), and I'll admit that I'm a little skeptical of parts of it as well. I don't really see the value in linking devices to each other (eg I don't need my shower to automatically turn on after my alarm goes off), and I don't need to be able to read HN on my fridge, but I do think there's a lot of value in making the smart phone a remote control for the physical world. I think it'd be awesome if none of my devices (thermostat, TV, TV peripherals, lights, door lock, sound system, etc) needed their own physical interfaces but I could just control them all with my phone. My phone is already my remote control for a bunch of other things, like transportation (Uber), food (Seamless), money (Venmo), shipping stuff (Shyp), love (Tinder - just kidding?), etc, so why not have it control my physical devices too?
this is how I learned about the place too.
How the US Fuelled the Rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq
Thanks. I was not intending to sound overly snarky. I think perhaps only people outside a circle notice the assumptions made by people within it.

For example, it's usually easy to identify material written by people in the USA - they're more likely to assume their readers are within the USA. People in South America, Europe, and Asia seem to assume their readers could be anywhere.

Similarly with tech, though I think we all assume everyone knows what we're talking about, no matter where they are. : )

I had no idea what ScreenFlow is, other than a camelcased bonding of two common words. Yes, you may say, I could have looked at that link, find that it takes me to iTunes, and then intuit we're talking OSX ... but a) I was on mobile so it wasn't a simple hover, b) as you note it's an en passant reference in the second paragraph.

EDIT: Oh, and c) the page title is 'Tips for Screencasting'
I'm glad someone called out this "addicting" as a positive adjective nonsense. First of all, the word is "addictive". Second, how is this a positive for the user?

I got addicted to Clash of Clans after starting to play for market research. I spent $400. It didn't hurt me financially, but it was very interesting to observe myself engaging in classic addict behaviour.

"I can buy another gem pack because I'll just come in by transit tomorrow, so I won't have to pay for parking."

"If I bring my lunch tomorrow, then that will cancel this other item."

... of course, knowing that I wouldn't do any of these things...
I'm amazed you're the first (or highest rated) one to mention addictive drug control. It's a pretty clear analogy.

And I think the point is more directly made by the effect on the individual themselves. The reason unreasonably addictive drugs should be illegal isn't to save me the safety issues of addicts: it's the respect the addict's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - qualities which are substantially helped by not having your behavior driven by feeding your addiction.

Ironically, side note I researched before this comment: we've apparently only recently (mid-70s) returned to the early 1900s/pre-Prohibition levels of ethanol consumption per capita.
https://prohibition.osu.edu/brewing/consumption
From the linked page:

"Before explaining how that program is written, let’s first make a small detour, and introduce the REPL (Read Eval Print Loop) tool, that Elm — like many other functional languages — provides. The elm repl command starts it, like so:"
Try Hooked, by Nir Eyal
This guy really needs to learn more type/category theory, or Haskell, or something. OOP may have been hip and cool in 1995 when this was written but applying it to math is an even worse idea than for programming.
I wouldn't say reading a typical book is a waste of time, but as a rule of thumb that might be worth saying. Action (e.g. practice, doing, etc..) is the gold standard. When you do actions, you read scattered tutorials, explanations of exception stacks, and multiple API documentation. If your non actions exceed 50% of your actions, then you are probably reading into one ear straight out the other. A good computer science book reading can be a real asset to someone who's looking to improve their work.
True but I avoid rewriting titles of what I post, only when they are too long.
As to comparability of those books, well, I asked because theorem proving is the most general approach (vs abstract interpretation, data/control flow analysis, model checking and type systems). So I was wondering if Software Foundations referred to these, so it could be regarded as a intro book which could then be followed up by [1-3].

I think I disagree a bit wrt model checking, which is very useful in some specialized domains. I have had quite a lot of success with it when verifying complex real time systems, specified as timed automata. We then generated code from this specifications. It'd be challenging to use any other technique to achieve such an exhaustive verification.

Both [1-2] can be found online, and [2] is particularly enlightening! I followed a course by the authors, and implemented a big chunk of the book. It's really awesome to implement static analyzers by interpreting programs with a more abstract set of types.
There's a fair amount of movement behind doing this sort of thing with Wordpress/WP-API. There's even a conference[0]. The conference site itself is a pretty cool example of a site using WP-API (see the "View API Request" at the bottom).

I've used this pattern on a couple projects now and it's an enjoyable Devon experience. And the client gets the benefit of a nice admin interface.

[0] https://feelingrestful.com
South Korean mega-churches make mega-bucks.
Yes, and it's amazing how blind freemium game developers are to this. I'm a game developer, and I've done well off of freemium games, but no one wants to have this conversation.
It needs to become simpler. We've had a team of four doing drupal sites for over a year and we all still feel like n00bs. Very little idea of best practices. Mixing themes and modules together always produces something different, some new way of laying out pages or dealing with data.

I think some backwards compatibility breaks are needed in Drupal 9 to just simplify things.
This is an interesting observation and I'm looking forward to trying it. It probably fits in with another common (I would guess) experience, which is when you are so wet in the rain, that you cease trying to remain dry. That is often a freeing feeling and you can become truly joyful in the rain.

Sadly, this is yet another experience ruined by smartphones - you can't relax and enjoy being wet in the rain because you're so worried about your phone getting ruined!
It's mentioned in the article, but here's a direct link to the paper on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385

And direct link to the PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03385v1.pdf
Hacking Unity to Run Hidden Methods
This post was shared nearly half a million times in the U.K., but the story got hardly a mention in the U.S.

By my read, it is an exaggeration to say we had any involvement in "fuelling" ISIS. But it does show that when the government was calling it a JV team, they actually had pretty good intel that ISIS would be a problem.

This is the document referenced in the article:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-...
I agree. It starts with Star Citizen but then moves to "Free-to-Play" games and does a drive-by on sexism in advertising.

I think all of those are different things.

I don't see how people spending tons of money on a game that hasn't been released yet has anything to do with using sex to sell or with trying to get people to spend more money than they should. And it is very light on evidence. It mentions studies and a story that mentions something but doesn't give any evidence that this is a big problem.

Maybe I'm just cranky from grading too many papers but when I read something that makes lots of claims with no citations, I find it hard to believe.
The original article is bad. It can be summed up in a key phrase the author used 3 times: Governments need to "save us from ourselves". I'm sorry but that's not the role of government. "Protect us from each other" as well as "provide us necessary public services" is closer to the actual design of government.

I wish that instead of running around screaming "think of the children", the author actually respected his audience and their very real free will, rather than just wave his hands, claiming that free will does not exist, except when we use our political will to save people from themselves, or something.

I wish the author addressed people like your wife, who is dealing with an ethical dilemma at work. These are the people who have the choice to stay or to leave their jobs--an incredibly hard choice for someone who has a family to think about.

Let me offer my respect to your wife who is dealing with this issue first-hand. Whatever choice she makes, it will not be without much anxiety and it will not take a small amount of courage.

There are other jobs out there, and I'm thankful that I live in a country where I have the freedom to choose where to work. Such a freedom--the expansion of my free will to include the needs of my conscience--was enabled by the work of men who came before me, men who used their free wills to establish a system that protects this freedom. I am grateful for this system, and I reject any attempts to pervert this system towards poorly conceived ends in the name of "saving me from myself".
If a coder writes bad code, it doesn't mean the coder is a bad coder. However, if the code keeps writing bad code time after time without refusing to improve, then the code is a bad coder and needs to be fired.

If you will not do what's necessary to become competent, to be qualify for the job you're hired to do, then you need to be fired. No one in any kind of job is excused from this. Being competent and qualified is a requirement of any job.
http://steamtraen.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/a-cute-story-to-be-...
I really don't understand the NBN meme.

I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really?

Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP?

As someone who sorely wishes that a tech scene would actually take off here, issues that I believe dwarf the NBN are: small companies can't actually afford to fund hacking/R&D, risk aversion, a culture that is generally dismissive of [the] tech [scene], lack of encouragement in school education, and tax system (also the Australian Consumer Law) that will punish you for trying.

I worked from a co-working "hacker space" for a couple of years and, uh, well, there was not a lot of hacking going on. I've recently gotten into this for myself, and while mildly successful, all our customers are overseas shrug.

Edit: all good points made below. Quality of life will improve for us, still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though.
It was a pleasure meeting you at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. I was one of the judges for your demo!
As a non-Python user (well, I've dabbled)... Is the GIL an issue for concurrency as well as parallelism? I would've thought that for things like coroutines the GIL wouldn't be a problem, but I could be wrong.