skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not off-base at all. The rubber chicken shame totem would demotivate any team whose members might be assigned high-risk work. Too much stick, not enough carrot.

Shaming displaces camaraderie.

Beheading the chicken was a bold statement.
I think it is an accurate assessment that many (potentially millions) people would lose their files in such an event. Many people use cloud storage (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive) without a native client. Even on mobile, it is common to delete photos from the device after they have been synced/uploaded.
You can’t have a library named using any Python reserved keyword. I mean, how would you import it?

import is

would be a syntax error, since “is” is the Python identity comparison operator.
Yes, a second cloud provider is a valid option, if you take a number of precautions (see elsewhere in this thread).
Here's another person who had a very cool implementation with the actual Amazon Dash button. They messed with it (software only) to track baby data!

You could use the same method to track many other things if you got creative.

https://medium.com/@edwardbenson/how-i-hacked-amazon-s-5-wif...
I never said io*stream support was universal, [0] I said that it provided a _consistent_ mechanism. :)

[0] I mean, it's obvious that anything that you don't get for free out of the box is bound to _not_ be universal. Edit: Actually, the thing you get out of the box when you present an instance of a non-trivial user-defined class to both printf and ostream is equally useless... unless you're debugging and are interested in the address of the instance of an object.
You can deal with timing attacks using Kemmerer's Shared Resource Matrix to find those and other covert channels. Then, you just look at the bandwidth of them along with design alternatives that don't leak timing. You can sometimes make the timing predictable or non-data-driven at interface level to nullify that. An example comes from military-grade stuff way back that transmitted in fixed-length, fixed-rate packets. Markus Ottela added that to Tinfoil Chat at my recommendation.

Far as correctness proofs, a combo of Ada 2012 with Design-by-Contract and SPARK is probably best at that. Far as app level, just program in a functional style with abstract state machines. Make it more concrete and detailed, replicating analysis or tests at each level. Eventually, you run the code checkers on the result and throw in some fuzz testing.

No easy route, though, that I'm aware. Highly assured software and system design is a painstaking process. Avoiding risky stuff, defining all success/fail traces, failing safe, and static analysis to preempt bugs are the strongest route. Plus source-to-object correspondence to be sure compiler didn't eliminate safety checks or introduce problems. Spark Pro supports that.
Circa 500 BC.
Someone made a programmable button and it looks extremely nice but its very pricy: https://flic.io/ Tempted to order some and have a play.
Not responsive or relevant to this situation, in two very important ways: first, this isn't just any email service, a threat which cost millions of dollars was made from this service. Second, and more crucially, the service was NOT shut down.
Microsoft's AI No Longer Listens to “Hey Cortana” on Android
trying to add some more context but I was limited to 80 characters.

These guys can explain it much better than me:

https://www.khronos.org/vulkan

my excited fanboyish rant:

It's an open source cross-platform performance oriented heterogeneous computing API that enables you to build fast low level code that does a good job of supporting massive GPU style concurrency as well as CPU style threads and switch between them at runtime.

With this API it will be easier to write fast parallel code that will make the most of whatever hardware is available while breaking down the barriers that arise when managing threads on both system and GPU memory.

In my opinion it is the foundation for the next generation of HPC. I am interested in this from a performance and from a language perspective. I'd like to see things like PyCuda and PyOpenCL for vulkan and hooks into other higher level languages like Go.

Maybe even whole new languages/runtimes built using the vulkan API as the foundation.

I know I sound a little crazy here but this is something I've been waiting for for many years. Ever since I ran into issues with cuda and opencl.
There's a pretty good writeup about this issue in the Stanford/Princeton Cryptocurrency Class:

https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B4-bDFu_72Beelkxd3VlbXoyd0E&...

Excerpt:
According to our estimates then, the whole Bitcoin network is consuming maybe 10% of a large power plant’s worth of electricity. Although this is not an insignificant amount of power, it's not yet a large amount of electricity compared to all the other things that people are using electricity for on the planet.

Any payment system requires energy and electricity. With traditional currency, lots of energy is consumed guarding and moving gold bullions around, running ATM machines, coin sorting machines, cash registers, and payment processing services, and transporting money in armored cars.

Some people say Bitcoin wastes energy because the energy expended computing SHA-256 hashes doesn’t serve any apparent purpose. But you could make this same argument for traditional currency as well — there’s a lot of energy being wasted and it doesn't serve any purpose besides maintaining the currency system. So, if we value Bitcoin as a useful currency system, then the energy required to support it is not really being wasted.

That said, we can ask if there’s a way to do better ...
I think of it more as a demonstration of a general principle. There's no reason why we shouldn't abandon flat text files. Some huge fraction of development shops aren't really coding in flat text files anymore -- the IDE being completely essential to the shop's process at this point. Many IDEs have to basically parse the source to develop live objects to have their full capability, anyhow. Environments like Smalltalk have been operating without source files for decades now. Instead of source files as we know them, you basically have textual transaction logs for changing the source code database. This even makes the system more powerful, flexible, and robust thank traditional text files.
Point of order: gratuitous use of the word "nigger" is not a joke. Jokes are funny, or at least attempt to be funny. This doesn't qualify. This is something other than a joke.
My problems with the flic is that it's pricy, I don't know how open it is, and I don't know whether it requires a bluetooth connection with a nearby phone.
So the next question to ask is "why are the jobs here?". Parallel to that its worth wondering why Britains second largest city Birmingham is not also an attractive center; in fact when was the last time you heard of Birmingham?
BEAST INDICATOR FOR TRADING FOR FREE
Perhaps they should name this alliance G.O.L.D.
And rightly so. Either taken to the extreme leads to terrible situations. But balance the best parts of both socialism and capitalism, and you get something really nice. That's pretty much what the Nordic countries are doing, and it seems to be working very well.
My default method is "shuffle by album"; it boggles my mind that so few music players support it.

Back when I used iTunes, I used "party shuffle" mode configured to enqueue an album at a time, which worked pretty well. Now that I use Linux, Quod Libet has a plugin that makes it automatically switch to a randomly-selected album when the current one is finished playing, which is close enough. Most of the other music players I've looked at just don't understand the concept at all.
Module (and its dynamical scoping cousin Block) can be clunky to use because you have to declare the local variables you wish to use up-front. Other than that it's not 'weird'.

I write a lot of Mathematica code for my job. To make life easier I've built in a macro system that makes day-to-day programming a whole lot more pleasant. It will be available in Mathematica 10.4 in the GeneralUtilities package that ships with Mathematica.

One of the built-in macros is a construct that automatically localizes any variables that occur as the L-value of an assignment:

Needs["GeneralUtilities`"]
foo[x_, y_] := Scope[
z = x * y;
PrimeQ[z + 1]
]

This gets rewritten at definition time to be:

foo[x_, y_] := Block[{z},
z = x * y;
PrimeQ[z + 1]
]

It's a small thing, but it adds up, especially for large functions, and indeed its silly this isn't a core feature of the language.

There are a couple other nice features of Scope, too, like the ability to use a single quote ' anywhere in the body of your function to Echo the value there to the current notebook without actually changing the behavior of the code -- essentially a very lightweight form of 'debugging print'. That also makes a huge difference.

And it has some more powerful variants, like "z '= 2 * 3" will echo a line that explicitly says "z = 6", rather than just "6".

Likewise '' means EchoHold, which prints the expression before being evaluated AND afterwards, so you'll see "z = 2 * 3 = 6" in the above case.

Lastly ''' means Tap, which is a higher-order form of EchoHold which instruments a function to echo its input and output (again without changing behavior). So Fold[Plus''', Range[10]] prints out all the intermediate steps in the fold.

There's a variety of features that add a very lightweight syntax for monadic and exception-based error handling, but that's not quite stable enough to advertise yet.

Same goes for debugging: there's some really powerful stack browsing, history capture and replay features, but again not quite stable enough to advertise for this version.
And I'm completely in favor of personal preference. What rubs many urban dwellers is the gigantic subsidies heaped upon suburbs. I don't care where people live, as long as I don't have to pay for it.
That wasn't from CBS, it was from a local TV station, which is quite different.
I'm very interested to know what point you believe you are making here. I ask because it is fairly clear you aren't addressing the topic of the thread and I wonder if you believe you are.
> Miscommunication occurs in most pure english interactions

Citation needed.

[Edit: On reflection, this statement is probably true, if you define "miscommunication" to be "the message sent is not exactly the same as the message received". But I think that is an unreasonable definition.

I think it is more reasonable to define "miscommunication" as "the message sent is not substantially the same as the message received". If you claim that, I'd like to see your citations.]
I would highly recommend spending a few hours at the Exploratorium. I think it can instigate the imagination and trigger reflection at any age.
That's another cool solution, but it's more hackish (since you're doing it at the network level). Too bad the Dash button isn't more hackable, it's a very nice device.
Better UX is definitely part of making the world a better place. Maybe the free software people should invest in UX as well.
>The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you've already given up even the slightest hope of freedom.

True, mostly thanks to shitty companies like Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, etc.

>You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter.

I do.

>In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds.

We don't live in an ideal world and never will.

>The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.

This doesn't work, especially in software for engineering where there are often sole, hegemonic powers and established monopolies and where the cost to enter the market as a new competitor is non-trivial. We're not talking a desktop manager or a text editor here, we're talking millions of dollars of R&D for things like CFD suites. Open alternatives exist (like, say, OpenFOAM) but they often lack accreditation/certification/rigorous testing and when you're dealing with people's lives the choice is often proscribed entirely.

>The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.

There's a financial incentive to creating walled gardens and proprietary software that you can charge for.

>yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.

When the choice is between "being able to function at my job, at all" and "use free software", well, the choice is clear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774152
> Your comment falsely assumes I don't know Buddhism.

It's simple to find out that the author of the book is a Buddhist monk. Of course your time is too precious for that so you'd rather blurt out the first thing that comes to mind and see if anyone takes the bait.

> Buddhist 'ontology' doesn't form a legitimate basis for talking about meditation in a scientific/ technical manner, or even in a philosophically coherent manner. It simply doesn't.

The Buddha was hardly a philosopher. I don't know what you wish to get out of treatments on meditation, but I guess if you seek it for the mental masturbation aspect it might leave you unfulfilled.

As long as such talk about the meditation practice itself in a technical -- words and terms that at least try to precisely describe such subjective experiences as meditation brings -- that's good enough for me. I don't require such an old tradition to first be scrutinised by 1,000 scientists before I try it myself. I think I can risk sitting on a cushion.

> I get that in the West it's primarily a utility for making people feel happy and centered, which is overall a good thing, but it's a little hypocritical of HN to dismiss someone like Eckhart Tolle or Chopra while enthusiastically 'analyzing' our cognitive reality from the standpoint of Western Buddhism... they aren't at different levels.

Yes, exactly. We're the uniform "HN" blob which have now revealed our hypocrisy by not condemning such "mystical" words like "mindful" and "concentration". And we're all supposed to hate people like Tolle and Chopra. Sorry bro, I guess I didn't get that memo.

You've perfectly revealed our blind spot by pointing out how the author talks about words like "concentration" and "mindfulness" as if he... was at liberty to use such words in his own, precise way. That he uses "mindfulness" in a specific way, when he wrote a book called "Mindfulness in Plain English". The sheer nerve. Thankfully you aren't tricked by such mumbo jumbo. I'll inform the HN hivemind of this collective transgression immediately.

I don't really know anything about Chopra. All I know about Eckhart Tolle is that he is very concerned with The Now.
Ask HN: How long it took you to master a foreign language and how do you do it?
As a german I can tell from experience that in Germany it is much more accepted — and quite often even sympathized with — not to have a facebook account than for example in Spain or Brazil. And it makes me proud, if I’m allowed to add that.
Techie to Launch YELP Killer Stay Tuned
I found this interesting because the Moto-X feature of a custom "moto features" phrase also interferes with the "Ok Google" stuff, and it has the high probability of causing your phone to be unusable until a reboot if you don't actually ask it to do anything.

I'm curious what the root of this problem is though. My experience with this feature has been marginal at best, trying very distinct activation phrases and still having it randomly activate when in the car or in the presence of even low level ambient noise.
We have demonstrated in a previous study that a high degree of worry in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) correlates positively with intelligence and that a low degree of worry in healthy subjects correlates positively with intelligence.

Much simpler alternate hypothesis: Generalized Anxiety Disorder is more accurately diagnosed in intelligent people.

(As for the study, the small sample size etc makes it an object lesson into how to create a study that won't replicate. Why is this on HN?)
Exactly. Freak occurrences never disprove the rule. Most were simple, too, to the point that it's easier to get right. Large one's like OpenBSD had plenty of bugs during the development process. Many problems in small and large are prevented with a language that doesn't introduce them.

Rest has to be caught with other methods. A good language can still help, though, if it's easier to analyze.
The original idea behind the FSFs idea of open source was an ecosystem where every new development resulted in more open and free code.

So let's put it this way: The FSF didn't pivot when they had a chance to capture a larger market!
Holding the government to such optimistic standards is blatantly a straw man. We both know how little gets done unless money is involved, and unfortunately for us all, the animal agriculture business has incredible political power.

I challenge your assertion you avoid antibiotic animal products altogether - an impractical and unverifiable way to discourage the use of antibiotics. If you are serious, consider how purchasing meat, etc. directly leads to "deforestation ... lack of fresh water" without bias. Shaming isn't necessary, just educate yourself and others.
Powerful JavaScript State Machine in 37 Lines
Apple raises concerns over UK's draft surveillance bill
What I meant about facebook's advocacy is that they have published lots of high profile blogs and whatnot about applications of jemalloc which have contributed greatly to its renown relative to tcmalloc, and I think it's fair to say that jemalloc versions 2, 3, and 4 have been largely underwritten by the Big Thumb.

And the other side of what I was trying to say is that for Google it's largely an issue of personality. tcmalloc is Google's malloc. JE works for Facebook. If JE worked at Google I'm sure Google would just use jemalloc.
I've pretty much assumed all large news corps are the same. Pointless to even read them anymore - finding reliable news is getting harder.
> To my knowledge, there is no known system in mainstream use that reliably enforces that check-at-every-stage policy.

I got the impression the author is talking about Haskell. In pure code, Haskell can behave exactly that way, and the checks don't even bother that much, they are easy to deal with.

Problem is, not even Haskell is purely that way. IO operations just throw exceptions just like in any other language.
> Calling a signup 'evil' is a bit over the top.

On HackerNews, the word "evil" might as well mean "kind of annoying." Use Mailinator or a similar throwaway email service if you don't want to sign up.
This is nice! I've been working on something similar. It's not quite as polished yet, but hopefully I'll find some time here soon.

https://github.com/timothymdavis/taciturn
Python is not licensed under the GPL, and it is not clear to me that they care about this sort of thing.

As for Mono, I was there at the conception of the project, and can thereby tell you off the top of my head that if you go to the History section of the documentation they have an archived copy of the premise, and it is dropping with "free as in freedom" language.

http://www.mono-project.com/archived/mailpostlongreply/

(More "current", "Free Software" also listed as a "Feature Highlight" in the about page.)

http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/
I've been working at it for 20+ years. I did it by moving to the US at 9 years old.
I can't help to hear the voice of the Admiral Ackbar now in my head: "It's a Trump!!, it's a Trump!!". Are Mon Calamari guys officially banned to enter USA yet?
You are an adult. If you miss the message for the messenger you've got no one to blame but yourself.
I'll just answer by emphasizing two words in the comment you replied to.

a threat which cost millions of dollars was made from this service.

...anonymous mail service...

the service was NOT shut down.

...wait as they get shutdown (+6 points)/subpoenaed (+3)/ddosed (+1) ...
I considered making a variant of Go or Pascal that enforced Ada's safety properties for common operations by default without anything else in it. Turn it off on a per-module basis still with type or interface checks. Result might get a bit more uptake.
SpaceX launch webcast: Orbcomm-2 Mission [video]
Fair enough, that is pretty impressive. That's how I want to be. I hate being restricted to the language I know. It's nice to be able to pick up whatever framework/language that would be best for the job at hand. For me, idk what it is, but I also hit metal blocks when learning because I don't know how everything connects in the bigger picture just yet. Learning other languages, even if it's only knowing the basics and syntax, tends to help me it greatly with understand and making everything click. Usually when that happens I see a huge busy of understanding as well until my next road block which will usually last a while again. I can definitely see myself being in your position in the future (only started programming a year ago).

Curious, do you have a background in something else besides/before programming?
Actually, after thinking about it, I'd use a GET and I'd structure it something like

http://smartplug?state=on
http://smartplug?state=off

Then to get the state of the plug:

http://smartplug?state

In jQuery this would be a easy call

$.ajax('http://smartplug?state=on')

Of course you'd have to code the plug server to add the appropriate CORS headers but that's true no matter how you structure the API.

You could either replace 'smartplug' with the local ip of the device or alias it in `/etc/hosts`. All pretty standard stuff these days. If you wanted to expose it to the outside world (which actually should be hard to do) you would use DHCP reservation based on it's MAC address and a DynDNS service.

The part that stymies me (and which no-one seems interested in addressing!) is what hardware to get.
Indeed, it's not so much that americans are too lazy to walk, but they've been conditioned to not walk.

When I was a child, I road a big yellow school bus to my elementary school, at the time it seemed very far away, when my parents had to go to the school for any reason, they drove their car.

But now, looking at a map, I see that it was literally only a half mile from my house, but I never walked because it meant walking along some streets with heavy car traffic and no sidewalks, just an ungraded shoulder with no curb or other separation from the roadway.

It wasn't until I moved to San Francisco that I realized that walking (or biking) is a far nicer way to get around.
North Korea’s Abduction Project
It says "CBS News" at the front of the headline. If they aren't inclined to make the distinction, I don't see why they deserve the benefit of the doubt from me.
Assortments for females Attire
If your _average_ driving speed from home to work is 60MPH you don't even live in the suburbs. You live in the country. For me, 1800 square miles of country through which one can drive at 60MPH (implying that it's totally depopulated) would not compare favorably with the amenities within half an hour of the East Village.