skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How many people are qualified to "verify there's no backdoor to your CPU"? Certainly not your average user.

I meant there are no backdoors in firmware. Some poor phrasing on my part, sorry. Backdoors in CPUs are obviously a completely different issue altogether.

> Allowing Secure Boot to be bypassed is a backdoor in itself.

You can have open source implementation of Secure Boot as a Coreboot payload. One such implementation is Tiano Core (UEFI).

> Allowing the end-user to modify the firmware at all also allows malicious actors to do the same.

Modifying firmware to flash Coreboot usually involves at least switching jumpers or actually physically flashing the memory chip.

But even if there’s no hardware switch you are still free to implement whatever security you like in the firmware. Because you control the firmware. So if you want to have signed payloads that’s just fine!
It also depends very strongly on the rules of the game. There are variations where you can get a slightly better than 50% odds just by playing "correctly" if the rules are in your favor. (single deck, hit on 16, etc etc)
Hah... Perfect HN. The only comments on a post about the Indian IIT are about the little college in Illinois.
Israel's Newest, Most Advanced Sub Is Their Last Line of Nuclear Deterrence
Take a look at Visual Studio Code. I too have this (probably unfounded) resistance to using full blown Visual Studio for projects outside of work, but have found Code pretty good for developing Javascript and HTML etc. Nice and light, pick a directory as a project, good GIT integration, reasonable text editor, built in debugger etc.

For me it's a good balance between a straight up text editor and full IDE.
https://www.math.hmc.edu/~su/fairdivision/theory.html

Or more specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy-free_cake-cutting

On a tangential note, something that's always bothered me about write-ups of "envy-free" division is that they assume a couple of things I don't think are true:

- That someone cutting a cake always executes exactly the cut they planned.

- That once the cake has been divided, no one will experience envy because their piece is worth, to them, at least their "fair share" of the total.

Take the classic example of envy-free division of one cake among two people. The solution is simple enough that most people understand it instantly: person A divides the cake into two portions however they please, and person B then selects one of those portions, A receiving the other. Everyone will agree that this is intuitively fair. But it's certainly not fair for either of the two reasons I dispute -- A might still envy the portion of the cake that went to B, imagining a different world where the entire cake was theirs... or A might slip up with the knife and create one portion which is obviously better than the other portion, which B then chooses.

Rather, I think the benefits of envy-free division come from two other points:

- The parties involved agree beforehand that the process is fair. This requires them to be able to understand it, which is easy for the two-person division and quite difficult for more than two.

- Instead of assuming that division goes off without a hitch, we can observe that if you receive a portion you're unhappy with, it's because you messed up. The blame falls on you rather than someone else.
So, how you doin'?

grin
Look at the history of a Chinese character like 馬, which means horse [1]. You can see how it's a drawing of a horse, and has evolved over centuries. There's plenty of scope for emphasizing particular strokes etc.

Modern Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet, so their word for horse is "ngựa" (probably).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Translingual
In a way that is kind of the full stack computers we had up until the PC won the war of the home computers, right?

Upgrading an 8 or 16 bit computer usually meant buying a new one. And although they had hardware and memory specs, little was known about the OSes themselves.
A perfectly reasonable alternative, which is not really any more mathematically difficult nor harder to implement in software, is outlined in several sections of the Kruschke paper that I linked.

In general though, I would dispute a lot of your claims about what industry statisticians (or "data scientists" if you want to use a buzzword) need to do. One of the primary jobs of industry statisticians, it would seem, should be to slow everyone down on purpose, because everyone is in such a rush to get "insight" and "actionable information" and to get some sweet data viz of some KPIs that they are doing horribly shoddy statistics, and mutating the craft of statistics overall into some kind of shoddy data journalism / data story telling circus where the careful avoidance of statistical pitfalls doesn't seem to matter to anyone.
A New Job Guarantee
> We’re going to continue doing YC Fellowship (!), and Kevin Hale is going to be the managing partner of that.

-- 4 days ago, http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-updates-and-additions
145 = 5 mod 7, and I'll often reduce terms mod 7 when doing the math mentally.

EDIT: I mean of course that 145 is equivalent to 5 (mod 7).
It doesn't matter whether they were or not because their branding was ineffective. It's the old saying about a tree falling down in a forest and nobody being around to hear it.
It's consistently amazing how ingenious some of these runners are in figuring out ways to break out of the apparent rules of a formal system and get creative with it. The TASbot guys have also done things like RAM manipulation of Pokemon games in order to rewrite the game code into displaying twitch chat.

AGDQ and SGDQ are two of the coolest video game-related events held every year. They're always streamed on Twitch, and recordings are posted to youtube. Anyone who has even a mild interest in gaming should check them out. https://gamesdonequick.com/
As a percentage of the population almost no one watches cable news. Fox's best nights sometimes approach a significant fraction of one percent of the nations population, usually less. And all other channels are far, far lower ratings.

Another thing to consider is MSNBC is also nearly unwatched. If you thought 28K AJ viewers during daytime was bad, imagine MSNBC at exactly half or 14K viewers. Given deep enough pockets, AJ could have continued.

Narrowcasting is strange, watching channels fight over almost no viewers is like watching academics fight over nothing. Yet supplying the almost no viewers with an internet feed would require quite a few gigs/sec of internet bandwidth. There's quite a wide, unserved gap in the media industry between "a couple people watch me on youtube" and "I have a cable TV channel". There's probably a startup opportunity in there, somehow.
I heard if you play perfectly on a totally random round, the dealer has less than a 0.5% edge (depending on the rules) which is very good for the player, compared to other games.

If you count cards on a small hand shuffled shoe, even with a basic system it is relatively easy for a player to have a fraction of a percent edge. Good players can have a few percent edges.

However, most casinos nowadays use large shoes and frequently (or even constantly) machine shuffle the cards. This effectively almost completely negate card counting.
Open source is cool and all. But I'm not exaggerating when I say that doing the same thing in LaTeX would take years longer than doing it in InDesign, assuming the output of both is close enough to what I'm trying to achieve. So those years count toward something for me.
Personally, I see the lottery as an opt-in tax on hope geared towards the poor.
I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...
OSHA slaps Amazon for not reporting job injuries
Follow Up to “The Sad State of the Web”
Yeah, that works, although it might be quite tedious. There are several ways to speed up the convergence:

- Ask your friends for a referral. If you're ill, chances are that many of your friends are too - age, environment, and upbringing are contributing factors.

- Ask a doctor in an adjacent field whom you know is competent. Rinse, repeat. This is also know as 'optimistic routing'. Works wonders in any field of medicine, and likely beyond.

- Ask the local medical board. (Never tried it, but it should work).
> If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of Energy?)

I very clearly said I am not going to lump together NASA and the DoE. Now you're claiming to people, who can clearly read my post, that I did lump them in, when I explicitly did not lump then it.

I do lump the State Department in with the military, as it's all more or less the same thing, beyond even that the CIA etc. routinely uses the State Department for cover ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/06/state_dept... ). Foreign embassies that have the ambassador go out and threaten the other state's executive with US military intervention can't really be considered on the domestic social spending side of this military/social breakdown that is being discussed.

> It's bigger than this other number

The point is that military spending was being presented as smaller than it is - by saying veteran's benefits were not part of military spending etc.
I never said they were good, I meant that if your branding doesn't get a customer through the door then you could be selling winning lottery numbers and nobody would know.
> putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that.

I disagree. Node was OSS-licensed under GitHub back in the Joyent days, but the inner circle was still very much closed. PRs languished for months or even years. The leap from there to here for Node is, arguably, bigger than the leap from closed-source to open. Evidence: io.js had to happen.
Miniatur Wunderland on Google Maps
1. Because maybe the author wanted to keep the property hidden and only expose a getter function and hide the setter?
2. Same reason. They are being set internally. A sane programmer would not give you the power to do that because its a product of internal calculations.
3. Naming of method/function and variables is the second hardest thing in programming :)
4. The callback of on.('floor_button_pressed') gives you an floorNumber argument which is more than sufficient. What event in real life would you describe with on('in-droor-button-press') ?
In both cases the fault was in your own company and you are trying to use that to distinguish between two suppliers. There's no guarantee that Amazon will continue to be so lenient in the future (though you aren't the first person to mention them acting like this). For what it's worth, I think the new direction for MS is a good thing. They're far from my favourite company, but I dislike them less the more they release software as open source.
The licensing part of that page (and the linked documentation) contains zero information about the licensing of the data. It's not going to be useful until that's cleared up. And then it would also be good to state where the data is from, the source etc.
Yogi Berra quotes – in my view, applicable to tech too
Why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array?
The section with the red background is very bright -- it is difficult to read the text.

Please include examples of files cleaned with the tool.
Ask HN: Feedback on Product (just launched)
You can check out the site here: https://www.sybg.io

Excited for any and all feedback - thanks HN community!
> I don't see how my agreement to their policy should provide them with immunity to what would otherwise be criminal.

But it wouldn't be. It's their computer. If I use your computer, you have every right to examine every file I created while using it; you have every right to install a keylogger; it's your computer (whether it would be decent to do those things is a different subject).

It's not private correspondence if you conduct it in public; it's not private computing if you do it on someone else's computer. If you want privacy, use your own device.
Motivating Employees without Fear
Well, my son asked to go because he wanted to see the new airport addition (and it's insanely cool). I'm the one that had to be dragged out at the end because I get way into the mechanics of the attraction.
Cold is different from diabetes. You can self-treat one, but not the other.
Everyone Is Freaking Out About the $1.5B Powerball, and the Stats Agree
Awesome, thank you :) . My bad, I did a Google search but I didn't think of looking at the source.
Is this another [1] standard language feature that's being chalked up to Go now? Everything old is new again.

[1] The first being statically-linked binaries.
Just to be clear I never said RT wasn't a government mouthpiece. I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.

I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.
> There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well

> As ever, support for Broadcom wifi and Nvidia graphics is nonexistent.

This is exactly the big issue with adoption of any *nix system on laptop or desktop. No user wants to have to live with quirks. Users just want their system to work.
Your chance of winning is not the same if you never pick a number that could be drawn with the winning combination.

If you never pick 7, the winning combination could still have a seven in it. By never picking seven, you are voluntarily abandoning 1/69 of the white balls and 1/26 of the red balls. There are (68 C 4) x 25 + (69 C 5) such combinations out of the (69 C 5) x 26 possible combinations, or 31598138 out of 292201338. You lower your chances of winning in the first place to 89% of normal by avoiding just one number.
How on earth have they arrived at odds which aren't an integer result for a lottery?
http://www.trbimg.com/img-56954025/turbine/la-fi-mh-powerbal...
A place that'll make you want to stop using music while working
Interesting. When I finally went to college after leaving high school, my handwriting started evolving into a joined style. I just figured that I was writing lazily. I suppose it is the path of least resistance as there aren't stops between letters but there isn't anything extra like there is in cursive.
I'm dissapointed they didn't mention previous incidents like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3shr29/mods...

And subreddits like /r/rickandmorty or /r/TagPro or /r/theexpanse where the creators actively participate in discussion and in some cases modertation
Redwood City to San Francisco via Cal Train. Usually couldn't catch an express train in the hours/days meetups were typically held, plus walking a few blocks.

And yea, outside of the Bay Area / My college town I don't have a good grasp on what other public transit systems are like.
Religious flamewars are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't conduct them here.

In fact, your comment ("we need to shame islam", "toilet paper", etc.) is egregious enough to be a bannable offense. Please don't post any more like this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10891505 and marked it off-topic.
I worked at my first startup at the age of 26 and was the third employee, got to know quite a bit about the business side of things. I was far from mega-rich. I barely had a positive balance in my checkbook.
AURA Live Android TV DVR Watch Sports/News/ Movies and More
>When Joyent decided they didn't want to embrace anymore, the community took the extinguisher out of their hands

Joyent wound up embracing io.js, and Node.js is moving at a very fast pace now while maintaining LTS branches in parallel. It's a very well managed project, in my opinion.

Aside, how come anything remotely questioning of Microsoft when there's an announcement is met with downvotes?
Welp, time to pick up over to BSD land. Pulse Audio is not something I want to live with on my machines. Sorry Patrick.
Obviously you did not reach the level when you can program the behaviour of four elevators in the same time :) About the first and the 20th floor: How about if you've got 15 people on the 20th floor and one person on the 1st? Every button press is a request that could add more weight to the particular floor. After all the goal is to transport as many people as possible for a given time.
Chomsky Hierarchy
What is the basis for your blanket statements about psychiatry "mostly writing a prescription" and "talking ... the thing of the past"?
It would be easy to dispel the accusations by open sourcing windows [/troll]
I'm sad that there isn't a Qt Licensing dance to explain the changes.
That's correct. V8 license is required in v8-*.h files because they are v8 header files that chakra shim uses. The implementation files has Microsoft license.

E.g. All files in https://github.com/Microsoft/node/tree/chnext/deps/chakrashi...

Disclaimer: I work for Chakra team (powering node.js)
I feel as though I do process lists via ansible. You could be less abstract and provide code. Otherwise, it is hard to take this complaint seriously.

Here we install Jenkins jobs....

- name: create the job config.xml files
sudo: true
template:
src={{ item }}
dest={{ conf_jenkins_home }}/jobs/{{ item | basename | replace(".xml.j2", "") }}/config.xml
owner=jenkins
group=jenkins
mode=0600
with_fileglob:
- ../templates/jobs/*
notify: restart Jenkins

And install SonarQube plugins...

- name: install sonar plugins
sudo: true
get_url:
url={{ item.value.url }}
dest=/opt/sonarqube/extensions/plugins
owner={{ ansible_ssh_user }}
group={{ ansible_ssh_user }}
mode=0755
with_dict: "{{ sonarqube_plugins }}"
OpenBSD doesn't use GRUB. OpenBSD's EFI loader is a port of the existing second-stage loader, boot(8). It can load both i386 and amd64 kernels, and there are EFI binaries for 64-bit and 32-bit firmware.
It wasn't too long ago in this country that planes were crashing all the damn time. Go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_accidents_and... then sort by date and you can see the number of incidents in the US just evaporate.
So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

It didn't. DNA is simply a complex structure, which, placed within another complex structure (a cell, containing appropriate amino acids), creates further complex structures (proteins).

Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

I don't know. However, I disagree that information needs to be an independent physical property for consciousness to evolve.

The steelman [1] version of your view, I guess, would be that "information" is equivalent to "complexity". Certainly consciousness relies on complexity, but it's not equivalent. Hurricanes are very complex, but certainly not conscious. Some say that complex systems like waterfalls and hurricanes perform complex information processing, but I think this is wrong.

There's a fundamental difference between a human processing information (say, a bronze age man reading about metallurgy from a wax tablet and using the knowledge to craft a sword) and the actions of DNA, or hurricanes, or waterfalls.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man
Practically anything can be performed at the level that it would be considered an art.
SSH tunnelling for fun and profit: Tunnel options
It is - thanks for sharing!
I am also stuck at number ten. There is a link "Wiki and solutions" in which I guess we could find some useful theory. Still haven't taken a look at it.
You can always use a VPN, register with a dummy email account, and pay with a prepaid credit card if you're concerned about such things. Alternatively, subscribe to everything so your preferences disappear.
I'm skeptical of the ability of big, old companies to change their internal cultures enough to become nimble and responsive.

Old companies have calcified political structures and old managers that have enough political capital to detonate any change that threatens their fiefdoms.

Software/Services businesses are not slow and comfortable with huge moats that just appear. You can't afford to be slow and bureaucratic. You have to be constantly changing, reorganizing, and employees have to be comfortable living/working in a zone of continuous chaos ... where you aren't exactly sure what the next step is ... but you are experimenting to find out--and internal groups are always rising and falling ... and managers are always rising and falling.
> Apple could conceivably do something similar in cars by building one or two models that compete directly with the most profitable cars

If it were that easy, why hasn't anybody done it?
Because companies are considered people, but not the employees...
At least some people think there's even a business in _free_ charging stations: http://www.chargebox.com.
Yet another battle in the War On General Purpose Computers is lost.
canad-eh-1 would be snarkier perhaps.
I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_the_Places_You%27ll_Go!
But the toilet discussed here also has solids that need to be collected and disposed of. Composting toilets come in varying sizes, and properly maintained, result in mulch as the end product, not mountains of barely degraded poo.
A white noise is a good choise to make the work done.
Burn Rate Greater Than Enthusiasm = Failure
This is the best comment I've read today, thanks.
> optimization decisions that the V8 team have made

Optimization decisions that V8 team have made are much more universal than it might seem.

It is true there are sometimes strange artificial corner cases - but those are often either bugs or temporary solutions that are going to be replaced with something more generic as soon as they start to hurt too much code.

> which ends up with having to jump through some hoops in a for-in loop

Could you clarify which hoops precisely do you need to jump through?

I am not sure I can imagine a reasonable chunk of code that strives to be both fast, well written and wants to use a context captured or global for-in variable.

for (IWantThisVariableToEndUpOnGlobalObject in obj) { }

How often do you write code like this?
A better build system with Rollup
Buy health insurance. When you're young, or even middle-aged like me, the cost is only a fraction of housing.

The problem here is that the very condition that needs treatment makes people seek excuses for not seeking help. This is why I advise leaning on friends - they won't look for excuses.

And by the way, the "open enrollment" period is open right now: https://www.google.com/search?q=health+care+plan+finder
>I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment.

It seems like half of this submission is a graveyard. Disappointing.
Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law
> how come anything remotely questioning of Microsoft when there's an announcement is met with downvotes?

Selection effects! Posts about Microsoft doing something cool will attract a readership in which Microsoft fandom is over-represented, compared to the average readership of HN.
Sorry to be snide, but seriously?

curl -L https://git.io/cleansweep | sh

For a security tool?

[edit] I still think it's a great idea, though [/edit]
Udacity Guarantees Graduates from Nanodgree Programs Will Find a Job in 6 Months
Possibly, but what's the problem? It's pretty much a "just works" file system where you can lose 1-2 disks where blocks are continuously checksummed and scrubbed to ensure consistency.

What exactly would you rather be using?