skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It will be interesting to see how password/touch id lock for Notes works. Will they be end-to-end encrypted? Will they be searchable? Or is this simply a UI feature to protect against someone looking over your shoulder?
Also, that this is another example of more specialized chip sets eating away at general purpose CPU/GPU market share.
That's true, but lots of things are bad in ways that probably aren't exploitable, and NSA is well positioned to make judgement calls like that.
Yeah, but you can usually acquire an network of API keys without making the connection obvious (depends on their API access policies of course) and rotate them as appropriate. Also, many APIs offer the same data through a public interface that can be accessed by scraping, so you can scrape and avoid identifying yourself.
I disagree. There is a lot of evidence that terrorist groups are incredibly ineffective. Not just recent attacks in the US, but statistics world wide and through all of history. Gwern wrote a detailed essay on how incompetent terrorist groups are: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

>9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the US - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke...

>Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.

Also see his essay Terrorism is not about Terror: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
I can't believe that's [1] the best low-light picture they could find for their flagship mobile OS preview page.
It doesn't even add anything to the story:

Night Shift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation to determine when it’s sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes.

[1] https://www.apple.com/v/ios/preview/a/images/preview/blr_her...
In Prague, Czech Republic. Everything seems to be normal.
Every place I've ever worked relied on heroics to some degree. Some more so than others. Project is way behind schedule? CRUNCH TIME! Only one person knows the code base? Give him all the work! Critical bugs found close to release? All nighters until they're fixed! In all cases, what was needed was more discipline and process. But if you ask people, they'll often tell you "process is bad and project managers should go off and make their spreadsheets and let me write my code in peace!"
Didn't investigate it at all. Not really sure if it would or wouldn't be meaningful. Just thinking off the top of my head, Word of Mouth should be generated by ad spend. It's measuring ad efficacy in a way. Which might be better than ad spend (total dollars) for predicting success.
Is apple using this to get more apps integrate with HealthKit? Many developers feel integration with HealthKit turns their app into a commodity. Categories such as Weight, Workouts, and Sleep have a new slider menu that reveals great apps you can easily add to your Health dashboard
Yeah, and will it work on OSX, too?
Interestingly, neither you nor I can likely design a DVR or go to the moon. The difference between us and other apes is, we can cooperate by the thousands/millions to get something done. Maybe that's the critical difference.
>Even though it provides denotational semantics in the categorical setting for various side-effecting constructs the thing is inherently non-compositional.

You don't know what this means. Monads are precisely about composition.
I know. And it's stupid to think I always write flawless 'C'. I just know how; doesn't mean it's always correct.

I just smell a lot of despair in these threads.
Hm, maybe add in fuel rods in place of the fuel to generate the heat? I mean, sure, an open and unshielded just sub-critical reactor is going to have 'environmental effects'. But if the point, from the black budget perspective, is to have an under the radar bomber, the environment is going to shit anyways. Project Pluto is a good, and completely insane, starting point into nuclear scramjets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

Choice Quote edit:"After delivering all its warheads, the missile could then spend weeks flying over populated areas at low altitudes, causing tremendous ground damage with its shock wave. When it finally lost enough power to fly, and crash-landed, the engine would have a good chance of spewing deadly radiation for months to come"
Impossible to know without knowing anything else about the company. :-)
This would imply that all/most posts about popular culture figures are highly upvoted in HN but I doubt this is the case (no data, just subjective impression).
I only heard of Bowie because of The Labyrinth. :-)
Is a Billion $ Powerball Finally Profitable to Play?
Wikipedia to the rescue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_Afr...

The first graph looks biased (or unclear) in the representation (percent of what?), but the PDF used is here:

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pim09st.pdf

The total of males in prisons in 2009: 2,096,300

White 693,800

Black 841,000

Hispanic 442,000
>The 'z' in 'IBM z Systems' stands for 'zero downtime'.

Maybe also meant to imply, the ultimate? :)
Heh. Just guessing.
Show HN: Rst2ansi – a rst document renderer for your terminal
links does not work for me
agreed very curious to know whether this means apple does not have access. I have a passcode on my phone/computer/icloud so casual snooping is not really an issue (and i don't hand my phone to people to play with or share a computer) so that would really be the only benefit to someone like me
Is it just me, or does that seem like a surprising set of features for a mid-cycle release. Typically it's just bug fixes for anything other than a major OS launch.
Oh, that was the timeline. Click into one of the articles and you'll see more pics. Wikipedia inherits it's roots from the encyclopedias, where text was a lot cheaper on the printing costs than pictures. To some extent, the bandwidth for text is cheaper than .jpgs even still today.
8 Fantastic Resources for Coding and Beyond
In the past, specialized architectures tended to lose out to the performance gains of generic x86 chips. I'm thinking RISC vs. CISC, or Sun's attempt at a custom Java-optimized processor.

Is that no longer the case? ARM architectures seem to be beating x86 for low power, mobile devices. GPUs are being used for many easily parallelizable workloads.

Is an overall slow down in Moore's law making chips designed for specific tasks (like Deep Neural Nets), attractive again?
I'm pretty familiar with the USDA SR dataset, and here are my thoughts (examining data with one of my experiments diarytail.com)

1) People in the enterprise space will be willing to deal with the weird nuances of the USDA-SR data. For example writing 'beef cooked' vs' 'beef raw'.

2) In the general consumer space, there is a huge problem in getting the general public to find ingredients they use. I found lots of people typing in brand name ingredients not matching what is in the USDA data set.

To me, the problem is partially solved with My Fitness Pal's huge dataset of user generated data. However the flip side is it is missing most of the micros as they are entered via a nutrition label.

Another solution might be to reference nutritionix.com 's dataset (I think the joyapp.com uses it also)
I think Stalin gained influence in part by "having the goods" on a lot of people, but I don't have a citation on that. This didn't happen in a democracy to begin with, however, there was much more open discussion and dissent within the ruling party before Stalin than after.

(I don't have a firm opinion on what modern surveillance will do politically over time, just answering your specific question.)
Author here.

This software is still in alpha, and lacks in both handling some reST features and style extensibility, but is still pretty much functional.

I made this for another project of mine where I needed to render some document parts over the terminal, and decided to give reST a go.

As always, suggestions are welcome.
I avoided AV software for most of my life. Though, when I worked as a student admin, I would always install AV for the majority of my users. Most users (especially older) simply could never learn not to download that cool new 'freeware' app or game or not double click a downloaded exe (the fact that hidden extensions are still the default on Windows OS is absurd).

As a more savvy user, I did not desire the typical AV bloatware (Norton, McAfee, etc) stealing up half my cycles and spinning the hard drive without pause. I knew enough not to try and 'open' resume.doc.exe.

However, AV's have trimmed down, SSDs are becoming more common place, and it seems the biggest attack vector is browser based. For the last few years, I've run a few different AVs (Kaspersky, ESET, Bitdefender are decent).

I run adblockers, don't install Flash games or Applets, but it is nearly impossible to stop all browser based attacks. I'm not sure the AVs have helped much, but they give some sort of psychological benefit, at least.

There really is no good solution anymore unless you're willing to give up 90% of the web (via NoScript or using a primitive console based browser). I believe the future for tech-aware users will be browsers in some sort of container / VM that reset themselves upon each session, with absolutely no control to the file system or data from other sites.
Monads themselves don't compose nicely. There's no guarantee that the composition of two monads is itself a monad, for example. That's why Haskell has monad transformers. But monad transformers are quite hard to reason about (they're not even commutative).

It's true that in a certain sense monads are "about composition", but that doesn't mean they aren't without issues, and I certainly think it's appropriate to call monads non-declarative. In fact, I think "being in a monad" is more or less the essence of what it is to be imperative - which is why they're useful! Quite often we want to be imperative.

The word "compositional" is quite vague. I wish people would stop tossing it around so lightly without explaining what they meant by it.
Someone created an issue to add non-US content:
https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation/issues/26
Testing callbacks in Swift with XCTest
This is why Apple still tries to own their entire supply chain, to a point where their suppliers don't have excess capacity to sell to others (or legally can't). It continues to protect their scale.

Amazon Web Services is in a very similar boat -- it would be hard for others to replicate their scale.

Ironically in the AWS case, it is their selling of such scale that enables a whole lot of other companies to buy scale (in this case infrastructure) and eliminate that advantage from their competitors.
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 1/11/16
Again, I'll fall back on C here: C is a pretty simple and easy language, and before newbies were told that they were newbies and that C was hard a lot of useful program code got written by newbies.

Javascript, let's pick ES5 because it's convenient, is a generally accessible language. Like, we've built the entire modern web with it and without more fancy things, and it's been great.

Modern languages don't have things that make things easier for newbies--they have things that advanced users "think" they would've found useful earlier, they have things that advanced users who need speaking and conference gigs would prefer to have to present on, they have things that runtime writers would prefer to have for their microbenchmarks, and so forth.

Don't think for a second that any language features added are done for the benefit of new users.

Taking your module example: look, it's braindead simple (because it's a braindead implementation, honestly) to make an ordered list of modules and includes in JS. You learn the IIFE pattern, you order your script tags, and you're done. Once you have a little more genuine size in your app, you move to preprocessing your scripts, maybe just with make and cat--I've done this, it works fine. Only later do things get really complicated.

The nutziness of the current environment is that the developers are truly so fucking lazy and shinyphilic that they can't take the damned time to learn the old ways--the simple, obvious ways!--and then use them. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
In this metaphor, all code (new or old) is a liability and the revenue/value stream derived from it is the asset. As a developer, you're trying to maximize assets minus liabilities. It's okay to take on a liability as long as it's balanced by a greater asset.

But buying on margin increases your volatility and risk exposure, so you shouldn't take on more than you need to. Assuming zero transaction costs, it's always a good idea to substitute less code for the same benefit.
Absolutely, but people should still be aware of the compromises and not confuse categories.

Very few apps can make do with only a key-value store and if you have to throw a relational db in the mix, why introduce more moving parts unless absolutely necessary? ACID, referential integrity, SQL. Sometimes it feels people are willing to ditch all this for very little gain.

Let's face it, how many apps out there can't really run a beefy relational DB with potentially an absurd amount of RAM?
I agree with the author wholeheartedly, except for the mathematical analysis at the end.

I believe one of the existential threats to our country is becoming a dictatorship. I'm always shocked when I share this point of view with people around me and their reaction is basically, "that's so unlikely it's not worth worrying about". There are many examples of this throughout history, e.g. the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, those that the author cites, etc. We should not be so arrogant to think that we are somehow exceptional and immune to this.

My personal belief is that there are certain constants in the dynamics of human nature, and one of them is seek power. Broad, unchecked domestic surveillance is a dangerous tool to give to a potential dictator. We should not set up a framework where a power-seeking individual can circumvent our democracy through coercion.
I think most proof-verifiable languages are too limited to prove many types of security correctness valuable to tor users.

For example, side channel attacks. A classic attack on computerized cryptography. I don't know of any proof language that can protect against side channel attacks.

If you look online there are a few lists of tor attacks. The attacks include: snooping on exit relays, application issues, traffic correlation, website fingerprinting, congestion attacks, blocking tor access (declining to extend). Most of these are issues in the design of the tor system, not something I think source code proof systems are capable of preventing.
Is there a feature comparison with Pixi somewhere? Why would one pick StageXL over Pixi, for example?
Stock options are super-complicated, there are many gotchas, and there can be serious tax implications. Like having to pay taxes on "profits" from exercising options before having the revenue from selling them, which may prevent options from being exercised. I think all these drawbacks often make stock options have near zero value in the eyes of employees. Which makes it not that fit for purpose, which is supposedly to motivate your employees and align their interests with those of the company.

Is there a better way? If you run a startup and you want to achieve the same ends of providing a form of compensation that's tied to the future success of the company, but doesn't involve immediate outlay of funds, how would you structure it? It should be as simple and straightforward as possible with a minimum of gotchas, and avoid tax implications as much as possible. I'm kind of surprised YCombinator hasn't innovated anything in this space, like they did with "the Safe"[1].

What about something along the lines of making a pool of X% of the gross revenue of the company each year, and dividing that among all the creative employees fairly, and adjusted by how many months of the year the employee was at the company. Then just paying that out every year as the end of year bonus.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-safe-a-replaceme...
Yes, the idea is that the manufacturer is in the position of knowing the most efficient way to talk to it's gpu and the driver knows everything it's happening memory wise. It'd be interesting to have a prototype done in some open source linux driver. Tbh, I'm probably not good enough for that.
They're also charged with ComSec. If your main source of info on the NSA are the Snowden leaks, you're not getting the full picture.

If you're really interested in the subject of the NSA's history, and what it does, James Bamford's work is pretty interesting. Very dry books, tinged with his politics (more so Body of Secrets [1] than the Puzzle Palace [0]), but interesting none-the-less.

[0] The Puzzle Palace http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-Or....

[1] Body of Secrets http://www.amazon.com/Body-Secrets-Ultra-Secret-National-Sec....

Body of Secrets is an easier read, because it's written more around historical events. The Puzzle Palace got a little too in the weeds for my liking. One of its primary sources were a ton of unclassified internal memos, newsletters, etc, and he goes into things like who ran grounds security at the NSA's Fort Meade location.
As the author notes, we've tread this ground before when J. Edgar Hoover essentially ran the country via intimidation/blackmail for decades. It always shocks me that Hoover's reign is mentioned so lightly. Democracy wasn't functioning during those decades because one unelected individual had hugely outsized power.

NSA surveillance is a backdoor to democracy because it enables blackmailing of politicians or inconvenient people. The CIA does this all the time abroad using information the NSA gathered.
I agree there will be a lot of failures in self driving cars, especially in the short term - but these should be in the nature of graceful degradation.

In the long term, 4 or 5 nines will probably better than most drivers.
That said, it's only little off. They may not be able to read the text on your phone, but they can see that you have a phone in your hand.

Also, things will get worse since satellites are not really the future. Solar-powered high-altitude planes that can keep themselves aloft for years are potentially much cheaper to launch and operate, and much more flexible, so I'm guessing this is where things will be heading in the next few years. They may be easier to detect and shoot down, true, but they seem perfect for domestic surveillance ops.
I'm not sure if OSM really needs to be as cautious as they are. I don't see how you could argue that "Main St begins at X1, Y1" and "Main St end at X2,Y2" is a single copyrightable work instead of 2 separate non-copyrightable facts. The sentence or package which contains these two separate data points may be a unique work that qualifies for copyright protection, but the raw data points aren't once you separate them out.

Open-source projects have a history of being hyper-sensitive to these concerns so that they never have to waste time with lawyers lobbing IP claims. A certain distribution derived from the sources released by a prominent North American enterprise Linux vendor comes to mind, as does WINE's refusal to accept any code from anyone who has any relationship with or connection to Microsoft whatsoever.
Agreed, that was the essence of what I was trying to say.
Monopoly money stocks
I hope they bring this Night Shift to OSX as well, just for consistency. I've used Flux for years, but it does have some quirks like when waking from sleep.
It does not really matter how important it is inside the NSA. Universal surveillance is useless for spying foreign governments, targeted surveillance is the tool for that. Thus, it should not enter the cost/benefit analysis anyway.

(By the way, it also at best useless for fighting terrorists too...)
Yep. We do this where I work (the 9.4 equivalent using SECURITY BARRIER views) and it is extremely useful.
>Processor architecture is not processor architecture is not processor architecture.

Interestingly, I've come across multiple computer people who didn't know this basic fact. Hardware engineers, sysadmins and devs who were surprised when I said a binary/EXE for one processor architecture (and hence, machine instruction set) cannot run on another architecture (except for special cases that may exist nowadays, like maybe Apple related to PowerPC vs Intel CPUs?) But even then it is probably due to special extra steps being taken.

Edited to add hardware engineer category.
A lot of useful information from PNaCl has informed WebAssembly, and a bunch of the same developers are involved.
This is very common for tech companies operating in Canada. Though it is interesting to consider nonetheless.
How does your project differ from rendering an rst document in to a manpage?
There's such a pervasive notion, especially among techies and other white collar types, that artists and musicians either don't deserve a good living or should be happy just to get to do what they do, regardless of income. It's a tremendous sense of entitlement on the one hand, to express contempt for the individual while expecting unlimited access to their work. I believe Astra Taylor made an interesting point about how this idea of the artist as the mandatorily broke but (ideally) self-fulfilled creator is also increasingly extended as a metaphor in recent business press when discussing the plight of graduates, interns and freelancers.
Any updates to Mobile Safari's support for new HTML/JavaScript features? Perhaps support for service workers?

(I didn't see anything about Mobile Safari on this page, but maybe there's something nonetheless...?)
Something like this? https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/browser-a...
It would definitely be useful for traffic lights to be beacons, but I think you might underestimate the government time scale for renovating and modernizing our infrastructure on a national scale.
This is probably the unstated purpose of the software rather than providing stratagems for officers responding to incidents-- the repertoire of possible moves contains only "violence" or "ultraviolence", so information on which to use when responding to an incident isn't that useful.

The police already build dossiers on people who attend protests so that they will have targets to discredit or harass.

When do the citizens start building dossiers on the police?