skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UI, immediacy, chaos/entropy, and compatibility/flexibility.

The UI of a modular is great. There is (generally, a few digital modules have menus/modes) only one function per knob/button/jack. Everything is pretty obvious as to its function. The workflow feels creative, in a way that programming CSound or MAX/MSP never did to me. I sit at a computer ~8+ hours a day coding as-is, do I really want to do that for my instrument? I generally just set ProTools to start recording, and then turn off my monitor and ignore the computer.

Immediacy of modular synths is amazing. The sound you have now is now, once you unpatch or turn knobs you aren't getting it back. Even if you take photos, you're unlikely to get it back again. That's part of the great part. It isn't a preset that you're using. You're using something that you put together. For live performance, this adds a really neat aspect of danger. Is there really much danger (aside from a system crash) of hitting 'play' in Ableton? No. But the modular can do all sorts of stupid things, which leads me to my next point.

The chaos and entropy in these systems is great. Sometimes you use patch cords that are too long and get some crosstalk/resistance that you weren't accounting for. Sometimes there's noise. Sometimes things skip and don't play in 4/4 as you were expecting (I had a weird clocking issue/ghost in the machine last week, that caused it to basically make its own drum fills... without any unit dedicated to that). For creativity, this is like a drug. The sound you're making will almost certainly not be the sound anyone else is using- period. That's pretty damn cool.

Flexibility/compatibility. Voltage is voltage. If you don't care about tracking pitches to a 12-tone scale, then there are practically no limits to what units will work together. A modular from the 70's can patch in with my current eurorack, and also my Minimoog Voyager- your software from 1970's probably doesn't work great with your iPad. My modular has stuff from around a dozen makers, and I have another dozen guitar pedals, mini synths, and such that also can deal with control voltage stuff. I can make little Arduino toys trivially that will work with it as well. I don't have to deal with different plugin formats, outdated systems (Protools TDM anyone?), inter-system issues, etc. It just works and that's pretty amazing.

Of course, I do have a computer hooked up to my recording gear, but it rarely gets used until I really have the idea ready to go. I'm thinking of getting an 8-track tape machine so I can remove the computer entirely.
Ask HN: How to monetize your ability to write secure code?
Hi HN, I've got a bit of a problem:

- I know how to write really secure code.
- I know how to identify security vulnerabilities in other
peoples' code.
- I don't know how to make a living doing this. (I'd like to.)

I've tried to break into "consulting" as per the advice patio11 gives people, but I'm fucking up badly and not getting a single lead. (I don't have an existing professional social network to fall back on either. Most of the people I know are poor college students and independent artists.)

I already publish plenty of stuff on OSS Sec, Full Disclosure, etc. and I'm active on Github helping to identify and close vulnerabilities in open source projects. (All of this is under a different identity than the one I'm currently using on HN, for reasons.)

Any ideas?
Thank you, Pierre.
I've joined to your channel in Slack.
In your paper, the experiments compare the generated code against code hand-written against the same API. Those experiments demonstrate that your optimizing compiler generates code that matches what experts can write - a very good and necessary comparison.

But I'm also curious about the parallelization costs, and other costs incurred by the programming model. The best way to explore those costs are to compare against an optimized sequential version that solves the same problem. Do you have any experiments which do that?
Create a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business
I've always thought if the DRM can be easily removed, then it's the same as not having DRM at all.

Every purchase I've made from Amazon has the DRM stripped and the files placed in a personal backup. On occasion, I'll send an ebook I purchased to a friend if they expressed an interest. It feels like ownership to me.

Even though in legal terms I have the right of resale of all my physical books, in practical terms there's almost no reason to bother. Outside of a few collectibles, it's not worth much. Therefore, lack of resale on the ebooks doesn't feel much more punishing than the practical lack of resale of the physical books.
Off topic, but I recently discovered the "anti-cheese" edits to the prequels, and they are a huge improvement to the originals, in my opinion. Among other changes, it removes almost all of the Jar Jar Binks scenes, and replaces all of the racially stereotyped alien accents with alien "languages" and subtitles. Of course, the edits make the movie a bit disjointed, but it was much easier to stomach than the originals. You can find them on youtube if you search "anti-cheese".
> I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?"

This explains Go. :-)
How are you making money? Are there ads in the app?
Right. C++ does not allow null references. I've seen this before from the "I can use null references because I know what I'm doing." crowd. It's really a problem of C++, though, that it's possible to create null references. References were an afterthought in C++ (Strostup admits "this" should have been a reference) and it shows. The abstraction is leaky.

Rust is stricter about references not being null, as in you get a compile time error if you try.
A good David Foster Wallace starting point is "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again".

I'd tentatively recommend against starting with Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a project of a read.
> IIRC the Go compiler will generate the itables that it can determine are needed at compile time, but because you can dynamically request an interface conformance for a type there is also a runtime fallback.

That would make more sense. But http://research.swtch.com/interfaces claims it's all runtime-based (though that document may well be out of date).
Maybe that's what it is now, but there was a window of time when Microsoft offered it as a free download off MSDN to anyone who wants it. That's when I got my copy.
Both the free software and open source definition require that you can create derivative work and share them. That freedom depends on the restraint of the author to use copyright law to persecute them under copyright law, or digital restrictions through DRM.
> Everyone talks about it, but no one ever 'understands' it.

There are people who understand it to varying degrees. Some who completely understand it and some who don't understand it at all.

So no, it's not a buzzword, it's just a concept.

PS. Dropbox's API requires a lot of hardcoding because of that very switch. Hardcoding that HATEOAS lets you avoid.
> Those exhausts are already illegal

In most places they're not. The sound limit is quite high.
I have read both and, at the time, it put me in a position of valuing great fantastical deeds done by the folks portrayed, the absolutist nature of objectivism to value the individual over all else really left a bad taste with me.

I don't think the mindset finds the book, although it would certainly help in finding the recommendation.
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Within the business environment there is an unwritten rule that applies surprisingly often: Coming into work early tends to mean you are enthusiastic and a go-getter. Staying late means you are inefficient and have poor planning.
Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.

I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.

This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that prestige and your self esteem away with it.
> And REST as Dr. Fielding says it is is not as practical to implement as it should be.

REST is literally a backwards description of the web and browsers as we know it, so yeah, what are you talking about?
Cydia remove iOS 9.2 on your idevices
Why would speaking a human language without nuance, without any possibility of misinterpretation, be a step forward?

It's spelled ReST.

Does that better convey what it means in that string of characters? Maybe for some values of human. But words are for humans, and humans are not immutable, so our words shouldn't be.
Who calls night owls lazy?

1) invent a grievance

2) fiercely argue against it
What genre do you produce? Mind sharing some works?
Ya, but you don't need high level AI to expose religion. A little first grade logic would do if people chose to use it in that manner. The fact that they often don't indicates AI won't change anything in this area either.
This article has a lot of good information, but its weirdly sensationalistic tone detracts from it. I appreciate learning more about 3D Xpoint and Nantero, but SSDs are not a "transitional technology" in any real sense of the word, and they won't be displaced by anything in 2016, if nothing else because it takes multiple years from volume capability to stand up a product pipeline on a new memory technology, and more years to convince the enterprise market to start deploying it. The most solid point the article makes is that the workload-specific performance of SSD-based storage is still being explored, and we need better tools for it.
Well a good way to troll. You send an image to someone in the email and then change the image once the person forwards this email to others.
The question is poorly formed. How do you measure smartness? And who is doing the measuring.

A programming language can provide a framework for problem solving, and such a framework can make the task of solving a class of problems easier. Because problems can be solved with less work, it makes you feel smarter. Having the right abstractions makes problem solving simpler.
It's pretty well defined that's how we get blog posts like this one.

It's literally a backwards explanation of the web and browsers.
I use a simplified version of scrum for personal planning, with one day "sprints". Works pretty well.
Bravo to point out the obvious.

Politics, moral only exist because there a large quantity of human.
If they have a video with a license plate record of them running away from police, then why don't they revoke the plate and impound the vehicle at the registered address?
I think if you're going to raise that particular argument responsibly, you're obligated to cite some women authors you read this year that you think we should read.
In general I agree, however in specific the tools you refer to are not well exposed to the general public. The more tasks I can do with confidence and without a lawyer, the better.

It's a bit like wordpress. Making a decent website really doesn't take a programmer today. But for a long time the frameworks (like django) were making site builders lives easy without making the projects near-free for end users.

The first high quality lawyer replacement service I've used is clerky. I expect more and more startups in that space.
I agree with you that the TSA is a joke, but as someone who worked as a TSA agent before, I never stole anything, nor to the best of my knowledge did anyone I worked with steal anything. Stealing, in fact, would be kind of difficult, even in the baggage rooms. I think "a major source of income for TSA employees" is a pretty gross exaggeration of the truth. For the most part, TSA employees are just a bunch of regular people trying to make a living, just like everyone else.
Criminals, for the most part, are dumb. The Marshalls still got a 50%-ish response rate, and cut their capture-cost down to 10%. Not bad for a first-time novel approach.
Tensorflow: Google's Deep Learning Tool
This is one of the most important points in the comments here.

In LA opening a restaurant with only 50k is irresponsible mathematically. I say this having taken restaurant management courses with the goal of one day opening one myself.

It is true that restaurants are one of the most difficult businesses to start. It takes time to find your groove, and 50k no matter what neighborhood your in is not a lot of time. Most people in this situation would start with a food truck or save more.
It's conceivable that a mutation in the gene for the red or green light-sensing protein gets a mutation that just shifts its sensitive wavelength closer to the other. So "partial" r/g colorblindness could occur if there was still some separation between those wavelengths, but not as much as is typical.
Are you referring to the essay, or the essay collection? Also, isn't he more well known for fiction (e.g. IJ) than non-fiction?

I'm also wondering where to start, having never read his books before but having heard a lot about them.
Hi Sean--I sent you an email related to this issue. Thanks for being so open to feedback! It's one of my favorite qualities for someone to have!

Thanks for getting Taylor Swift stuck in my head for the next hour, by the way! Not the worst problem to have in my book, though! ;)
Surely the compiler could see that you've written some code (ie. not a macro expansion or whatever) and that the code is unreachable, and print some sort of dead code warning? That would have helped the poster, assuming he turns on and reads warnings.
Very interesting!

I am currently building an RSS aggregator, too. Mine is little more complex, though - I wanna be able to rate items as interesting or boring and use some kind of filter (currently, a simple Bayesian classifier, I intend to replace or at least enhance with something more sophisticated over the holidays) to weed out news that I am not interested in.

The biggest problem is that web design is not my strong suite (to put it mildly), so the thing looks pretty ugly. Classification does not work very well, yet, but I am not sure if this is because the classifier sucks in general or if my training set is too small at the moment (I've only been using the thing for a couple of days now).

Anyway, it is quite interesting to see another approach to the problem.
Consistent white noise absolutely works.
I took http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html very much to heart. I'm always surprised that people attach their True Name to controversial viewpoints, not knowing which ones will become career-ending thoughtcrimes. Look what happened to Eich for siding with a majority.

Even on a more mundane level, what happens to you when the industry embraces yet another terrible idea and finds a sourced comment from you criticizing it?
If you don't mind clarifying, what is a PoC? Haven't heard the term.
'The Prize' is phenomenal. I took an econ class on the petroleum industry and the prof used it instead of a text book.
PBS turn into into a really good multi-part documentary.
Another one:

The second result in a query for "Rogan Josh" is "Jeremy Clarkson" a Person of "Top Gear" fame. Digging up the freebase record doesn't show any obvious reason why this would happen.
Person of Color.
The essay collection.

He's probably marginally better known as an essayist than as a novelist, except that his one famous novel (IJ) is one of the giant novels of the last 30 years. After IJ, the most impactful works of fiction he's produced are short story collections, and while I like them, they aren't the most pleasant reads.

The right way to approach DFW is to read his essays for awhile, and, if you find that you enjoy them, you can look at IJ as a long series of essays from an alternate universe.
That's a big if... and they'll be pretty hard to find.

They would need to set up some seismographs and either use explosives or meteor impacts to map the interior of the moon to try to find accessible lava tubes.
1% the Code (2001)
I made a purely css library with techniques similar to this in case anyone is interested, http://picnicss.com/ . The main shortcomming is the already mentioned uglyness of some html, but I haven't found js compatibility an issue.

For example, to toggle a button is really similar to set a rule like $("button.cta").on("click", fn); vs $("input.cta").on("change", fn);
15th Century Almanacs Online
The negative reviews could be why it was never full. I wonder if there are consultants in the restaurant business that can help places like this through the wave of people that are more interested in eating at an acclaimed restaurant than trying some small new place that opened up nearby.
Google search the URL and follow the link. Works for FT, WSJ and many others who have some agreement with Google.
It really depends on the amount of calls you'll have to make. What if you had 10,000 lights? What we tend to do is allow for partial updates with PATCH on just the lights you'd want to change.

ie

PATCH http://bla/url/lights

{ light1: ON, light351: ON, light 4672: ON }

I think that since generally documentation around RESTful API's is generally very good with in-browser demo calls, interpretation of the REST API although differs between implementors, is generally relatively similar enough.

However there are cases where REST design just won't work, or implementing the design abstracts work from the API supplier to the consumer. Where once a "runThisScript(object)" would be easy enough for a developer, now the script itself must be implemented by the developer to call the RESTful endpoints.

In cases like this, we occasionally break REST design for the convenience of developers.
It's tough because infosec is a terribly inefficient market.

The vast majority of end users don't care about security until they are impacted by it, at which point they blame the vendor and scramble for a quick fix and then quickly go back to not caring. As a result, end users are rarely customers for security. (Or privacy, which really is just a form of security.)

The vast majority of vendors do care something about security, but the knowledge and skill of actually understandings security is rare. Therefore most of the actual customers for security are ignorant customers who are looking for something that will make them feel secure.

Ignorant customers tend to fall back on secondary indicators of status such as name and brand recognition and the opinions of those who are deemed experts in a given field.

This makes security a bit of an in-club, where experts recommend each other through their expert advice. It also makes security a field where snake oil can get a lot of traction if it can correctly mimic these secondary signals or can piggyback on them. All fields with ignorant customer bases tend to be somewhat status-indicator-driven and anti-meritocratic.

I'd advocate focusing your efforts more narrowly at breaking into this market on the positive (non-snake-oil) side. There are three ways I can think of to do this:

(1) Try to get a job with a highly regarded security firm.

(2) Look for the things that vendors use as secondary indicators such as certifications, and try to get at least one of those. Then use that to break into the market and start building a reputation.

(3) Target a specific popular software product (e.g. OpenSSL, nginx, Apache, etc.) and identify a real vulnerability. Then "market" this vulnerability with a catchy name that will get you some recognition as its discoverer. Then use this as a credential. But be sure the thing you identify is real enough to impress those who do understand security or this could backfire a bit.

For #3 I would highly suggest wading into the probably very shark infested waters of NodeJS and popular NPM packages. Node is the Hot New Thing and development has been progressing rapidly and chances are popular Node security and authentication packages are riddled with non-obvious holes. It's likely that you could identify a single insecure programming practice that is systematically encouraged by the nature of the JavaScript programming language and then bag dozens of vulnerabilities based on it by searching code bases for that pattern. "Eval" or any form of it has been a likely candidate in the past but that one is mostly common knowledge today, so you'll probably have to find a less obvious one. The core Node code might also be a fruitful place to look, since we (at my venture) recently had to delve into it a bit and it's a chthonic blob of C code if I ever saw one. Start with libuv, but keep some eye bleach and religious iconography handy.
By that logic, nobody should ever leave a bad review because the food was disgusting.
You Stink, He Explained
You know, I generally agree with your sentiment, but the OP wrote the comment without casting aspersions and without blaming anyone.

It was a bit terse, I agree, but it is a legitimately noteworthy fact that so few female authors are on the list. Noteworthy if you think it's because YC is biased, noteworthy if you think it's because so few female authors wrote meaningful books this year, noteworthy if you think it's because female authors aren't publicized as much.

(It could also, of course, just be a random thing that happened this year, but I still think OP had a right to point this out).
cmd.exe and batch script are horrible, no argument there.

Powershell is a huge improvement, though, and in many ways far surpasses the unix command line environments. You have real objects at the prompt, with fields and methods, you aren't just wrangling plain text all over the place. Naming and parameter sets are consistent and non-cryptic. Everything is tab-completable (command names, parameter names, [some] parameter values, types, registry keys, paths, history, etc, etc). Writing new shell commands is super simple. Parameter sets for scripts and shell commands are completely declarative, no more manual argument parsing.

Not to say there aren't weak spots: performance and the error-handling model come to mind. Disabling execution of scripts by default, in a scripting environment, also a massive facepalm. There's also the separate-but-related matter of the terminal host environment itself, which has been historically terrible on Windows. At least with Win10 that's finally moving in the right direction.

Anyways, it's a shame people still think "Windows CLI" == "cmd.exe" because most of us moved past that 6 years ago when Win7 included Powershell by default.
It looks like the optimization I remember was implemented in gccgo, but maybe they never added it to the main compiler: http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/277
I agree, but if I'm going to buy an MGP rye, I'd rather pay for the Bulleit label than the Willett label. If I'm going to shell out for a Willett bottling, I'd like to think it's something special.

Nothing at all against MGP. And major brands using MGP are much less problematic than the "artisanal" "distillers" who do nothing at all but slap a label on MGP.
Kindergarten Has Become the New First Grade
The Noise-Arch Archive: Underground cassette tape collection
I have to admit I was quite skeptical when I clicked on the link, but this was a pretty interesting read.
‘Tis the season to prototype
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2612483/whats-so-bad-abou...
Long cold winter nights gives plenty of time for hacking ...