skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> all theories, including General Relativity, are incomplete.

I agree; but there's a big difference between:

- A theory that is incomplete because it doesn't cover absolutely everything, including where we haven't tested yet and won't be able to for the foreseeable future, but makes correct predictions everywhere we can actually test it; and

- A theory that is incomplete because it makes predictions about some things that are obviously at variance with observation, even though it makes correct predictions about others.

GR is an incomplete theory in the former sense; and theories that are incomplete in that sense can still be used to safely rule out competing theories that don't match their predictions in regimes where those predictions have been extensively confirmed.

However, classical electromagnetism is an incomplete theory in the latter sense; it made obviously wrong predictions, like the ultraviolet catastrophe and the instability of atoms. And even the correct predictions it made, like using the Larmor formula to predict radiative properties of atoms, were only obtained by using the theory inconsistently: by first assuming, contrary to the classical EM prediction, that atoms could be stable at all, and then working out what classical EM said about how these impossible objects (impossible according to classical EM) could radiate.

In a situation like that, you can't safely use the theory to rule out other theories, because the theory contradicts itself, and you can prove anything from contradictory assumptions. That's why classical EM physicists couldn't say "well, the Schrodinger theory can't be right, because I can't use it to derive the Larmor formula". You can't consistently use classical EM to derive the Larmor formula either; you have to sweep certain things under the rug and wave your hands that somehow or other it's ok.

In a situation like the latter, yes, you're right that anything that can give some handle on making predictions is going to be at least tried. But that's a very different situation from the former situation, where we have a correct theory that, within its domain of validity, doesn't have any of those issues. The only issue with GR is that it's not a quantum theory, which means, in the eyes of many physicists, that it's incomplete; but that incompleteness has no practical consequences whatsoever. It certainly is not a reason to entertain alternative theories of gravitational waves that get other predictions wrong that GR gets right.
You misunderstand. Apple can't unlock the phone with the signing keys, all they can do is make it easier to brute-force the passcode. If this person had used a long passphrase instead of a 4-digit code, even this software hack wouldn't help.
Distributed Systems Reading List
Just seeing this. I haven't heard of this so I will gladly check it out.
Moral change is so hard that people assume it's impossible. But if you can tackle it, it makes so many things easier or at least possible.

It's at the heart of the Baha'i approach, which has development as its goal, but starts by training young people in honesty & altruism and developing a community oriented around local service (it aims at adults too, but they're harder to reach unless they are already basically on board). It's a little weird to talk about on a technical forum, since the approach assumes a spiritual view of human nature -- the unifying power of prayer, we have a higher conscience, etc, but I think it's true, and I find it to be systematic and evidence-based.

I think people love being trustworthy, but they tend to develop cynicism about it. They want to be part of a trustworthy society, but they haven't seen it work yet. That makes me think it's possible to grow a society where honesty & justice are the norms, even embedded within a society that is corrupt & cynical, if a small critical mass of people support & encourage each other. They'll attract positive attention and grow, in part because of contrast, if the desire is there among the general population.

It's is a slow process though, and I often feel discouraged because it's the kind of thing that requires generational change, and which I doubt I'll see finished in my lifetime. But when I stop and think about what else I'd work on, I can't think of anything more solid in the long term.
How to Select the Best Car Insurance Policy
Monitorable, gracefully restarting, self-upgrading binaries in Go (golang)
Do you really think those (abhorrent) kinds of people make up the bulk of Twitter's voice? Because my feed certainly isn't.
It's not about the government getting access to a tool like this, Apple specifically doesn't want to create a tool that can easily defeat its own security, to then hand over to the FBI. The government has, on numerous occasions, shown it has some pretty horrible practises in securing information, and this kind of tool being let out into the wild is bad for For everyone (not just Apple).

Why risk opening that Pandora's box? If the tool doesn't exist, it can't be exploited by bad actors
The plan was to have it enabled by default but that decreased disk performance drastically because of limitations of the encryption hardware. So they scrapped that plan, and its now only an option. Since it was optional, I doubt a majority of users looked at it, let alone enabled it. That's probably why Android doesn't figure in these discussions at all.

Having said that, high-end devices [1] from Marshmallow onward (6.0+) are supposed to have encryption enabled by default, according to the Android Compatibility Definition Document [2] so we'll probably see Android playing a bigger role in the encryption debate in the future. Budget phones are exempt from the requirement.

[1] - For device implementations supporting full-disk encryption and with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) crypto performance above 50MiB/sec

[2] - http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/source.android.com... Full Disk Encryption (section 9.9)
Secure access to the open Internet for users in censored regions
Facebook Is Making a Map of Everyone in the World
Arithmetic, reading and writing performance has a strong genetic component
We use flatdoc and Swagger UI for building docs, like: https://open.coding.net

flatdoc is a small JavaScript file that fetches Markdown files and renders them as full pages: https://github.com/rstacruz/flatdoc

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation from a Swagger-compliant API. http://swagger.io
The best way (IMO) is to make it unbreakable, and off by default. Then the people who care about privacy can have it, and the justice department can be happy most of the time.
How to Search Engine Optimize URLs with Keywords
You know, you could just

apt-get install cdecl

And then do it on the command line. But hey, let's turn everything into a web service, with NSA et al. monitoring as a bonus feature.
Between this and the on-going case with Microsoft Ireland, would anyone like to speculate on the impact to US tech companies ability to compete internationally if the US Justice Department wins?

There may not be a foreign equivalent for US companies working on complex or enterprise problems.

Europe is often times the second highest revenue generating region outside of the US for US tech companies. Do European businesses care about this? Would this cause them to adopt a lesser alternative? Does this comply with EU Model Clauses that govern regulated verticals like defense, finance, academia, healthcare, etc?

I am not a lawyer, but I can't imagine the EU Model Clauses would allow for something like this.
You don't see a whole lot of people taking lengthy trips in their cars to achieve trivial perks, though.
Everything doesn't need to be a monopoly but investors will want to cash in somehow. Github is perhaps a good example of cashing in on Git.
from wikipedia[1], apparently there is already quite a bit of existing caselaw for the All Writs Act:

"In the case U.S. v. New York Telephone Co. 434 U.S. 159 (1977), the Supreme Court established a three-factor test for the admissible application of the All Writs Act: the party ordered to perform an action cannot be too far removed from the case, the government's request cannot impose an undue burden on that party, and the party's assistance is necessary."

My guess would be that "undue burden" is probably what the judge is pondering. Possibly "the party's assistance is necessary" (it doesn't say "convenient"!) seems interesting in this case as well, if there are other means to break into the phone (NSA, John McAfee[2]).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Writs_Act

[2]: https://www.rt.com/news/333326-mcafee-interview-fbi-apple/
I also subvocalize what I read which slows me down, but also helps me remember, I think. My eyes can read faster but if they get ahead of the sound, I will get tripped up and have to backtrack. I also subvocalize my thoughts as one-way discussions in my head with people I know. But that made me remember/realize that I sometimes imagine someone I know reading what I am reading, which I think incorporates even more brain circuits in order to memorize it, although that's not why I do that. I don't choose to do any of those things; it's involuntary. I also enjoy rewatching movies with people who haven't seen it. I put myself in their position in my head and experience it from (what I think is) their perspective.
Open Source software largely handles what patents are intended to do. If someone makes some cool software, then someone else works out how that works. Then they develop code, which they publish under an open license. Then others contribute to it, or if that doesn't work then they fork the code and thus innovation AND publication occurs.

And as software gets more complex, you need to support it and build new features. That happens all the time without the aid of patents. In fact, when a patent is made, then sure its patented but so what? It can't be used for decades, and so only one party benefits and the idea that is beneficial to society stagnates.

This is not a zero sum game here. If you patent a medicine for 10 years, then people like Martin Shkreli come along and jack up the price of their product, nobody is allowed to offer cheaper medicine and literally millions die.

Or you have a situation where a non-lethal arrow is patented, someone independently comes up with the same idea, documents it and sells it, does to want to patent it and then gets sued to an inch of their life. Then you have an independently document invention, and no innovation.

The argument doesn't stack up.
... which is illegal. If they'd only enforce against this, things would be both more fair and more safe.
Well, they do not aim to earn money out of Telegram, so I guess that'll just work fine if they sell some stickers or things like that. The thing about Whatsapp and others is that they are a profit minded company, Telegram isn't, they just need money to keep it running
I'm sure they're working on getting that integrated with Google Cloud Vision api to recognise objects without the qr codes :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eve8DkkVdhI
> As long as the public interfaces are still unsafe, it doesn't seem to me that there is significant latitude to qualitatively improve the security of a libc implementation.

Of course there is. The glibc bug we're talking about would not have happened if libresolv were memory safe.
I feel you on the cleanup side--there was another interesting docker app on HN today that you may want to look at if you're running a large DB in your container: https://github.com/muthu-r/horcrux.

Our Container class is built so that if you use the `with` statement, container termination is handled automatically even if there's a program fault.
I live nearby and I wouldn't call it neat. It looks like a parking garage, because it mostly is one.
>What's wrong with the letting the government get access to the phones of a few potential criminals/terrorists?!

Not much wrong with the FBI ruining guilty peoples' lives; it's all the innocent people they'll inevitably fuck over.

edit: Not to mention there's no such thing as a "back door for law enforcement only".
But does that imply that the technically inept don't deserve privacy, even if they want it? I think it does, and is therefore an unviable solution.
I believe PEGS are a better, modern approach to parsing.
PEGS are only mentioned in the article, with no links.

Here's the PEG paper:
http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/lang/peg.pdf
No matter if some one searches for his vital thing, so he/she wants to be available that in detail, thus that thing is maintained over here.
http://buyfollowersfast.org/
It actually depends on the idea. Einstein's theory of General relativity and special relativity are "ideas." So are my "ideas" for building the next facebook killer. One is more complex and "correct" than the other, and each "idea" is merely a description of things—a collection of infinitely smaller ideas. Descriptions can be detailed, wrong, or absurdly vague.

I have an idea for obtaining two apples. It involves going to the apple tree and obtaining another apple and adding it to the one I already have. Simple, but valuable idea because its constituent ideas are probably low cost (the apple tree has apples... find an apple tree... reaching for the apple is also a simple concept). Of course the value of this idea is the sum of its constituent ideas. So it may turn out that there are no Apple trees in the vicinity and no one knows where to find one. Then the value of the idea is inversely correlated with the cost of the constituent ideas (finding out who has an idea where there is an apple tree). The idea for physically obtaining the apple once you are at the tree is to physically reach your hand up to an apple and apply a sufficient force to remove it from the tree. It's a brilliant idea, but it is also cheap since 90% of people over 3 years old probably know how to do that.
The account was created just to post this spam.
This is exactly the argument that the 'man on the street' is going to think of. There are reasonable checks and balances in most cases for searching things like houses or wire tapping phones, so people need some good arguments as to why it shouldn't apply to a phone's data as well.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11160748
> Many languages provide excellent guarantees, but that does not protect against bugs in the implementation itself (logic).

This is the black and white security fallacy. Memory safety problems are, statistically, a huge quantity of security bugs. By eliminating them you drastically reduce the number of bugs.
This is a dangerous meme, it's a complete fantasy...

Cars in the US do about .4 kg of CO2 per mile on average and flights 0.2. There's 2x.

In addition, air travel has a much more damaging effect than the same amount of CO2 emitted on the ground. [1]
There's another 2x-4x.

So you end up getting a 4x-8x bigger warming effect contribution per passenger mile. And since you are going about 10x faster in an aircraft, an hour of air travel is 40x-80x more harmful to the atmosphere than an hour of car travel.

The per hour figure is much more relevant because these people would not get around to emitting nearly as much travel co2 in cars even if they drove them every day for 10 hours. Their 2-day trips would turn into 2 week trips. IOW the vast majority of the trips of "elite flyers" would just not get taken.

--

[1] "The IPCC, for example, has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone."

- http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/cli...
There's no need to exterminate anything. When you have robotic infantry deployed at theater scale, a largely non-lethal peacekeeping approach could be taken with relative ease.

I'd argue robotic infantry would be a massive leap towards improving the security and humanitarian situations in some of the world's most terrible places.

Unlike long-term deployment of human soldiers, political will wouldn't really factor in to robotic deployments. That would translate to less genocide and suffering in the world.
Ask HN: How do you track what you learn?
I would like to know your recommendation for a tool to track what you've learned this day/week/month etc.

Some sort of a service where you could easily write notes about the stuff you came accross while developing something.

For instance if I find a very useful link that shows me the correct way to do something, I would like to write that down somewhere with a simple explanation using my own words.
What about Cmder then?

http://cmder.net/

It is slick, has nice copy/paste, can resize, do split terminals, and tabs.
PCA is useful as a pre-processing step to reduce the size of a data set to be used as the input to a machine learning algorithm.
I can't even imagine the hassle that a photographer would attract trying to take photos of "other people's kids" in a major western metropolis today.

How times have changed.
> Its called the deep state you fool

You... that's where you lost me.
The Animatrix depicts a lot of robot vs human strife. Pretty good shorts :)
The difference is that tools and equipment for wiretaps already exist. Tools that bypass the security features of more recent versions of iOS don't. Hence the FBI's desired insecureOS would be a new product, developed under compulsion from the FBI and the courts.
> Since when did the government become the enemy?

Is this a serious question? There are volumes upon volumes providing viable, defensible answers. The problem is that you have to empathize with the under-privileged and unrepresented.
Just as gates is trumping on about how it's an isolated special request for data from his competitor Apple the FBI just requested data unlocking from another 6 phones...
What tool? Apple can just give the government the private key for that specific phone. Done.

Everyone else is still safe. Safer, I might add.
So long as there is a clear process for the government to get access to specific keys for specific phones.

If Apple is CAPABLE of building such a tool (and use it for themselves), then I think the government should have access to it too.
Zuckerberg supports Apple's battle with US
GCP has locally attached SSDs on almost all machine types and up to 64 TiB of block storage, configurable. What features were you missing?
Probably the latter, just pointing out that the health of Spark doesn't necessarily say a lot about Scala's health in the long term.
Sounds expensive when no one is looking at how the magic works.
fascism
yep. tried to do the same!
I think I need someone to explain this to me because none of this hype makes any sense.

I am usually wary of oversimplifying these sorts of controversies, but this one does seem exceedingly simple to me. It goes like this:

Is it possible, even with Apple's help, to break the encryption of <insert device model here> without knowing the encryption key, given that the passphrase provides reasonable entropy?

If the answer is other than a flat, unambiguous "no," enjoying the consensus of the scientific and security communities, then that device is simply not secure, right?

...and, to extrapolate just a bit: when device that are secure by this definition are in the mainstream (and my understanding is that even current iPhones, unlike the one at issue in this case, are) then this is entirely moot, right?
HN, we are writing our high level overviews as Readme MD files. Any ideas on how we could help condense this info for open source contributors?
> Of course nobody's really concerned about 3.2 cm in a century.

You mean 32cm in a century at the current rate of 3.2mm/year. I think people are concerned about even that number, although the real value is likely to be significantly higher.
I think that's a misunderstanding on the part of the author.

The judge's initial order was issued ex parte -- meaning the judge issued it to the justice department without Apple lawyers being present to argue against the order. Instead, as it was issued ex parte, the judge invited Apple lawyers to respond to the order after the fact by offering reasons it was an undue burden.

Essentially, Apple wasn't there to agree or disagree to it. The Judge encouraged Apple to object to it in recognition of the fact she was issuing it ex parte, not to nudge them out of inaction.
> does not need a good type system

Yeah, I'm just saying that "higher kinded types" (which, again, Rust isn't getting anytime soon), does not make Rust something that isn't targeting systems programming; in response to "you folks are really targeting C/System programmers".

Many of Rust's designers are experienced systems programmers. A _lot_ of effort goes into making it systems-ready.

> it is about what minimum you need to bootstrap a system

Rust works on any target LLVM compiles to, and you can opt out of the standard library if you're writing baremetal things. There already are people writing low level Rust things.

But yeah, I know the skepticism you refer to; seen it in action before. But in the case of Rust I've rarely seen any concrete points being brought out (aside from perhaps "LLVM doesn't target enough things", which is fair). The language developers do try to take input from everyone and make it more systems ready; but there really isn't much that can be done when there isn't any input other than a strong preference for C.
How to avoid cross browsing using CSS Hacks?
Basically, the purpose of PCA is to reduce the dimensions of the dataset by finding components that most influence the data. I think your last sentence is quite accurate to describe what PCA is.
Yup. Your feed might not be full of spam, but how are you going with searching for specific tweets? And I'm assuming you aren't a female who tweets about feminism or calls out mysogynists and who consequently gets threatened with rape or murder; you're not a woman or defending women who build or critically review games; you aren't being doxxed by gamer gaters; you aren't trying to debate a controversial issue so you aren't getting flamed or trolled; you've never quietly joked about a dongle at a tech conference and not realised you were a little bit too loud and subsequently lost your job when someone tweets your photo instead of confronting you directly or taking it to conference organisers; and lastly, you aren't a teenager being influenced by celebrities encouraging you to buy into a vapid and stupid lifestyle instead of contributing to society in some meaningful way.

You live in a nice world if that's the case. Twitter is great for you, but pretty awful for everyone else. Which is great, but let's leave Twitter to this niche market and let everyone else find some other medium that isn't so corrosive for them. People of course don't leave this medium, and it beats me why.