skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If everything is really well orchestrated logistically, your Segway solution could attach (piggyback) to a bigger autonomous vehicle for a certain duration for greater efficiency, higher speed and bigger radius. Of course, the fuel costs will have to be split, but that is just a matter of making smart accounting software.
How bad are things?
Internet Outages Across the US?
Seems like every major ISP is having problems right now. Anyone have information about this?

http://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity/map/

http://downdetector.com/status/att/map/

http://downdetector.com/status/charter-communications/map/
The problem with that bit from the Economist is that it no data were presented to back it up. When it comes to these topics, there's pretty sloppy journalism all around, including the original NY Times article.

The Atlantic article just quotes the IZA article, which is about wealth transfer in Sweden, not income. Wealth is heavily affected by spending habits; income less so. And t Telegraph and NY Times articles don't offer anything concrete on the subject.

The Pew source does address the subject. The key part is:

> Approximately half of parental income advantages are passed on to children. The IGE [intergenerational elasticity], when averaged across all levels of parental income, is estimated at 0.52 for men and 0.47 for women.

(That means that if someone earns $40k above average, their children can be expected to earn $20k above average.)

In comparison, IGE in UK is 0.5, France is 0.41, and Denmark is 0.15. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Intergen...

IGE studies are somewhat scarce, but that's no excuse for the original NY Times making a bunch of unsubstantiated implications.
Exactly, e.g. Estonia has ID cards with smart card functionality.

https://e-estonia.com/component/electronic-id-card/
This is a great excerpt:

--------------------------

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.” The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it. And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a member of Group X who attempted suicide.
No, I think it has more to do with the way that executables on Windows are 'tagged' as having been downloaded from the internet. When a user opens one of them (such as an installer) they get a prompt if they want to run this code from the internet. Generally, this is considered a good thing.

Browsers, in a stroke of unassailable logic, have decided that the existence of this new security feature should mean they should now start silently downloading executables from websites. After all, what good does it do to have two pop-up warnings that users simply click through?

This is just my impression, I could be wrong about all this.
It's already a big heavy mass of concrete and steel, and was reinforced after the last earthquake, it's hard to imagine reinforcing it more.

We could rebuild and reinforce it on Mars for what the SR99 tunnel debacle is eventually going to cost us, in both direct and long-term economic impact.

I'm only being slightly hyperbolic here. By way of example, the Big Dig cost about 40% more than NASA's annual budget... and as I pointed out earlier, the Big Dig was an improvement project. The SR99 tunnel is not.
Yes, but preferably with the AI of this new solution :)
The omission is inconsequential. One does not require intellectual property rights to abuse "a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free and transferable licence (with right to sub-license) to, including without limitation, use, display and transmit the content and source code."

A service allowing consumers to "find and fix known vulnerabilities in Node.js dependencies" certainly does not require a transferable license (especially one with the right to sub-license). A transferable license allows the licensee to freely assign the license to any other party without the licensor's consent. The wording includes the right to sub-license, allowing the same license to be granted to another third-party -- again, without the need to obtain the licensor's consent due to its inclusion as part of the transferable license statement.
Yes this is true. Perhaps I should better express it as a hand engineered feature pipeline, ie the way people these days will POS tag, then lemmatize, then do something with WordNet, then maybe some Semantic Frame thing and finally have an application they can benchmark. Writing that pipeline is manual, and it has hand engineered features in it too, though some may be trained.
Well Chrome all day long tells me "foo.exe might be an unusual download" and with every version they make it harder to bypass that (also sites with misconfigured HTTPS, broken cipher suites and other crap which is perfectly fine in a internal environment).

But then it allows silent DLL dropping... jeez.
in terms of returns for investors/founders/early employees, yes they are, and twitter is undoubtedly in terms of reach/impact one of the most important tech companies in the last decade, whether they actually sustain moving forward is another question
It's not Microsoft's or the UAC's fault. It's Nullsoft's fault.

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) loads and executes the DLL without any verification.

Also, you're not hijacking DLLs -- you're using a DLL to hijack NSIS (which runs with administrative privileges).
Anyone whose rights could conceivably be violated under some law has standing to challenge it.

"You have to bring the case" what's the alternative, that someone sues for every new law even if nobody thinks it's unconstitutional? Who exactly do we get to argue for outcomes nobody believes or wants? (Yes, lawyers will argue for things they don't believe, but somebody wants that outcome).

So if everyone likes a law, the best thing should be not to have a lawsuit. If someone doesn't like a law, then they can go ahead and sue.

Or do you want all laws to be delayed until pending lawsuits finish? But if a court agrees that you're very likely to prevail, they can issue an injunction to prevent the law from going into effect. Most laws have a waiting period before becoming law anyway.

Could you be very specific in which particular aspect of modern American jurisprudence you would abolish, what your justification for that is, and what you'd replace it with?
A regressing future, you mean?
I like that idea -- for less time-sensetive deliveries you could have a "mothership" truck loaded with mini-vehicles drive to a neighborhood center and then release them. However, for things like food delivery where you want to deliver in under an hour, it will be better to just use mini-vehicles.
The constant issue of computer security is perhaps that software can only inspect actions, not intent.

And any action taken can be either legitimate or nefarious, given the context of intent.
Any citation? Since I'm not in Germany the anecdote is lost on me.
Does anybody know why Chrome and Edge would silently unilaterally download binary code like that?
It just means the important votes aren't the referendums; the important votes are the elections.
You realize that several courts have disagreed with your blanket finding of "obviously unconstitutional"?

And the legal issue there is mostly whether the law actually authorizes the NSA to do what they do, not Constitutional issues (with exception).

Which specific practices have courts not found to be constitutional, yet wasn't stopped because of "jurisdiction and standing"?
It's good but does not provide tab-completion on bash yet.
"The third and last process control system call used by the Shell is

processid, status = wait()

This primitive causes its caller to suspend execution until one
of its children has completed execution. Then wait returns the
processid of the terminated process and a status value indicating
how the process died. (Processes which are never waited for die
unnoticed and presumably unmourned)."

A lost opportunity to give C multiple return values.
Then you've got a shitty boss or client if they're forcing this completely unknown and unsupported language on you.
Don’t miss these top articles, tools, resources from 2015 #4
All 25 days of AdventOfCode in F#
If you can, I'd love to see those benchmarks not just on SunOS 4.1 or Solaris, but on something like NetBSD 7.0 using a recent GCC or clang. It might make for a good comparison since the hardware is close to what the benchmark was originally run on.

And if you're in the Bay Area and looking for a home for that system… I looked into getting one as I was writing, and while Weird Stuff and MemoryX have OK prices on CPU boards and memory, I was seeing prices of about $300 for a working SS20!
A Canvas Made of Pixels
Well now the argument can be made while the program is down. Why have the program if it's not doing it's thing?
And I have a strong belief that creators should be compensated for their hard work. Tell you what: let's compromise. Creators get a right, let's call it "copyright" or something, whereby for a limited amount of time they get to control how to distribute their work. In order to maximize profits they will rationally not charge too much. After enough time has passed, this right expires and their work goes into the public domain. Sounds good?
Newbie to hardware development here. Could you explain what "bare metal" is? Is that programmer + stand-alone chip?
It is the NSIS fault for auto-loading existing dll in the same working directory if presents.

Well, I'd say it's Windows fault for having LoadLibrary do so by default. Unsafe actions should have to be manually enabled, not manually disabled!
OK, but at that point it's equally possible that it stands for "catharsis" and represents a file, previously being kept inwardly on disk, being released to standard output. The command doesn't predate UNIX, so it's a very narrow window of time for Ritchie to have gotten it wrong. And I have not seen any claims from the 1970s or 1980s that the command stands for "catenate".
Have you seen what huffing glue does to people? They go completely crazy. Maybe we should ban glue too.

You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s? There were a lot of functioning heroin addicts back then who could hold down a job and live a normal life. Nobody talks about that though.

Somehow they didn't trigger the collapse of civilization.
The existing legal frameworks are enough to deal with abuse of those substances, we don't need to ban the substances themselves just because of the potential for abuse.

This is the same idiotic argument that opponents of marijuana legalization present. They assume vast numbers of the population will start fiending on those substances and it's only THE LAW that keeps them in check. This has been proven false time and time again, in Europe and in the US states that legalized, but don't let that stop you making the same fallacious points.
Lee's mailing a bootable USB with Tails on it to Greenwald seems super risky. I get that Greenwald isn't a tech savant, but instructing him to make his own bootable drive after verifying checksums of the OS image would probably have been a much better look, no?
If the police catch you outside of an electronics store with a broken back door in the middle of the night walking away with a big screen TV do you think they should have to convict you of a crime before they take the TV from you?

And if you say "no" to that then where exactly do you draw the line in between law enforcement taking obviously stolen property and law enforcement taking personal property?

I don't ask this question rhetorically, I ask it because I'm honestly not sure.
"1989 Embarcadero collapse"? Didn't happen. One double deck in the East Bay collapsed because of bad design at the joint between the upper columns and the lower columns.
You can probably see exactly that kind of benchmark in BYTE issues from 1994-1997 at archive.org, I think they did a couple benchmark roundups of PC UNIX back then.
I don't think it's helpful to be hyperbolic. It only took a couple of minutes to look up some real numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen... "The project is estimated to cost US$4.25 billion, with $2.8 billion coming from the state and federal governments"

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/bert... "overall costs for repair, including excavation of the giant repair-access vault, are expected to exceed $143 million."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140422-mars-... "The expert panel puts the total cost of a 20-year program culminating in a manned mission to Mars in the range of $80 to $100 billion."
Inspiration Corner: World Top 5 Female CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies
The West trumps North Korea on many levels here.

We have mass surveillance of virtually all private and public digital communications.

Backdoored hardware (UEFI, SMM, et al.) and software.

Fingerprinting of multimedia through DRM.

Fingerprinting embedded as "a feature" in the MS Word.

Fingerprinting embedded in printers and copy machines.

Operating systems (OSX and Windows) calling back to the HQ all the time.

Data stored and processed in the cloud for the government to check.

Gag orders to keep the people from speaking out.

Secret courts for those who do speak out.

Torture prisons in Europe for those who might do something against the government.
Xcode is extremely slow even for operations that perform no IO at all, like code completion, or printing a variable in the debugger. (Seriously, I've had it take ten seconds to perform 'print foo', and not as a one-off thing either.)
Why is being a hipster seen as wanting to "oppose trends"?

I would think all of thing things we associate with being a hipster. Those things are what attract these people and we later just called them hipsters to categorize.

Hipsters aren't non conformists. They are conformists. The whole culture is the act in conforming to be like other hipsters.
https://gemnasium.com/
Erlang/OTP is based on the idea of location transparency to the core, I would recommend you have a look at it.

If the Erlang syntax is too weird, Elixir allows you to use ruby-like syntax on the Erlang VM. It also comes with an absolutely amazingly powerful lisp-like macro system.
MiniProg is pleased to announce that loading times have been reduced from 3 seconds to 10 seconds.
Yes, I think they should have to charge you with a crime. If they're sure enough that you took it, they should be able to get a conviction. If they're not, they shouldn't take it.
Isn't this a service that's been around for many years?
I've been using Terraform for over a year, maintaining a standard 3 AZ load balanced production cluster.

HCL has improved dramatically, and now that template strings are a thing, most of my variable interpolation issues are solved. However you still can't specify lists as input variables so you frequently have to resort to joining and splitting strings. It's hackish and worse, changing one value in the list will invalidate all other resources that use the variable.

Race conditions and dependency cycles are still a problem. Particularly with auto scaling groups and launch configurations -- I have to migrate them in two steps (create then destroy) to avoid a conflict. Same with EBS volumes, I ended up scripting my instance to attach the volume by itself, otherwise there's ordering issues when destroying and replacing.

There's also missing features, such as the ability to create elasticache redis clusters and cloudformation resources.

I'm still glad that I went with Terraform though. It takes a good amount of time to get around the limitations and bugs, which can be really frustrating, but when it works, it works beautifully.
afaik we can specify absolute path in LoadLibrary function. If it isn't, yes, LoadLibrary will use cwd relative by default -- which is dangerous for non-installed program. This is okay for installed program since you need additional privilege to alter Program Files directory.
How about maintaining software patents (which have merits) but making it so the only way to acquire a patent is to acquire the company that owns it?

This would completely kill the patent troll business while adding value to startups that file innovative patents.
To add to that much of the property in
criminal cases isn't claimed to begin with.
When they bust a drug stash no one in their right mind would claim ownership on neither the drugs nor the money seized.

That money will get into evidence and will normally be returned the the federal reserve, the program allowed the DOJ to appropriate a portion of that money and distribute it to local law enforcement agencies to increase their funding.

Money and other assets will still be seized and they will still not be returned to the criminals they were seized form even if they do not go to trial this might seem unfair but those assets are unclaimed if they claim them they need to prove ownership and that will get them into a sea of trouble.

Where will this money go now, well most likely back to the fed or will be kept on the DOJ books, I really don't understand why people have trouble with this policy or why they hail the halt to it as some great achievement to civil rights.
How can NSIS verify the DLL? How can an installer from, say, 2012 know if the copy of shfolder.dll in Windows 10 is valid?

And worse - in some cases, NSIS wasn't even directly loading the DLLs, Windows was doing it behind its back (eg. NSIS called a Win32 function called OleInitialize, which loaded UXTheme.dll by itself).
I have the feeling it might take another generation of Indians growing up in a global economy for them to realize the advantages of an uncorrupt and morally just society.

Theres still so much backwards cultural stigma thats prevalent in India that I think its just going to take a lot of time for Indians to realize what needs to be done.
If you find this interesting, take a look at FRACTRAN[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN
If I had unlimited power, I'd have builds recompiling constantly, AI running and storing and analyzing results.

It would be awesome!
This was lifted from Numberphile. That's the place to go for cool videos like this.
I think you're right, though I find FF's interface for that particularly inelegant.

In the case of Safari, I'm not sure what downloading a DLL would hurt on a Mac anyway, and an actual executable file would be quarantined.
Rather than enforce a right, why not just support the creators that you love? Here's how I see it:

1. Abolish copyright law

2. Creators suffer and can't survive

3. People that have money and love the work of these creators see their suffering and give them support

This way creators can still be supported and people without money can enjoy all of the beauty of creation.
If you don't want the NSA to invade your privacy, it's easy. Just don't use the internet or email.

That isn't a real solution, just like "opt out of google" or "opt out of facebook" isn't a real solution. When a corporation has a monopoly it's as powerful as a government in that area but with zero accountability or transparency.

The concern here is power. The people in government choosing how to use their power are elected or responsible to someone elected. On the other hand the power structure of a corporation is a dictatorship. Pretending you can theoretically choose to not participate in society and avoid corporate control so their power isn't real power is naive.
How Reddit made my simple puzzle game an indie developer success
> Bah, the patent system as a whole is broken anyway. There are very few patents whose absence would have slowed down innovation. On the contrary, the presence of patents tend to slow down innovation.

There is very little evidence of that.

Also, for using a system that's allegedly broken, the US is the country that has been the most innovative in terms of software for decades in a row now.
Extremely short argument: I have read Against Intellectual Monopoly, and found the arguments compelling (I trust there were no major factual inaccuracy).

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Other interesting specialised watch is µWatch:

http://www.calcwatch.com
All that doesn't count because the government doesn't physically attack your house with with black helicopters if you make a freedom blog (that nobody reads).

Often I feel that we in the west have our own "whatabout-ism" when it comes to these issues. To those, I want to ask, if you wanted to enact fascistic surveillance and control over western society, how would you go about it differently from what we have today?

Would you really want to bring attention to yourself by being loud and violent, like we seem to expect "real" evil governments are? Or would you just do it secretly, mix it up with other issues like child pornography, terrorism and piracy, and just paint the alarmists as overreacting?
Yup. And I remember very clearly that day when it was going to be my career or my family, and I chose my family. I did so because more and more people I knew were getting more and more stressed at how pissed off their spouse was or that they never saw their kids. A number of them got divorced and could only see their children on every other weekend.

It will be interesting when he is 60 if he feels like he made the right choices.
I'd like to know! I was wondering this myself...
I've been downvoted, probably for not giving enough information.

A lot of the time the WAPs only have 16-32mb of RAM and some kind of hardcoded limit to the number of DHCP leases they can give out (if they don't just exhaust the range instead)

Your local Starbucks probably has half decent Cisco gear, but the independent coffee shop around the corner bought the cheapest WAP in the last Black Friday sale. The firmware hasn't really been touched since 2008 and is running a buggy version of dnsmasq, miniupnpd and an out-of-tree Ralink driver on top of kernel 2.6.

If you think I'm lying, have a look at the firmware of any non-802.11AC DLink or Netgear router. Both companies are getting better but they're at the mercy of the SoC manufacturer (Broadcom, Ralink etc).

802.11AC routers seem to be getting better, mainly due to the bandwidth requirements finally getting beyond 200-400mHz MIPS chipsets. Although [1] might be taking it a little too far.

[1]: http://www.dlink.com.au/home-solutions/taipan-ac3200-ultra-w...
Branding (and Re-Branding) for Authors
The story of onestop.mid (2013)
Aleatoric processes are more interesting than the results, in my opinion. Too easy and too disconnected from the human to resonate (beyond the isolated snippets that get trotted out, like photos of parking meters that look like faces). And that disconnection is why software like this doesn't interest me. If you know what you want to write you don't need this. If you don't know, there are better, richer, more fulfilling ways to come up with ideas than randomly permuting text.
Never played this on my Linux desktop, though on my Nokia N900 this was the only game that I had installed. Great times, will play it again now it has been released again!
Facebook acquires Snapchat by force after IPO
They seem interesting. Question: how does one write code using these (or any other language really) so that it can run in a user's browser?
That was for google.com, but it turns out that it works for blogger as well! Interesting, thank you.