skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not commenting this as some sort of social scientist who has all the statistics and research on this.

I can only really speak about the experiences of my own country Norway. When I listen to people of my grandparents and parents generation it is evident that engineers and scientists were held in high esteem in their days. This is what boys often dreamed of being. Fathers of my parents generation would push talented kids to become engineers, architects etc.

In my parents generation these perceptions took a major change. E.g. my mother was a journalists which was not regarded very highly at all but which became very sought after in my generation.

If you look at media both in Norway and other western countries you see a clear utopian perspective where technology solves all sorts of problems for society. Think of the view on rocket engineers and atomic engineers in the 50s and 60s. Scientists and engineers come across as the heroes in the 50s and 60s.

As one gets into the 70s, there is a drastic shift and science and engineering seems to suddenly turn into the source of societies problems rather than the source of its solutions. You see the beginnings of an anti-technology political movement. All the pollution and urban problems that developed in the 60s and onwards is blamed on technology and science. With the hippies you get this sort of back to nature ideas.

Think about the Jetsons, and American cars which looked like they had rocket boosters. All the illustrated science magazines that popped up. Surely there was a technology optimism in earlier days you can trace in adds, TV shows and what not that simply does not exist today.

To me China looks like the 1960s west. You can even see the faint beginnings of the counter culture, where people are increasingly alarmed about all the pollution and environmental destruction.
How to Not Get Hacked, According to Expert Hackers
I am not sure what you are getting at. Are you counting productivity by LOC?

To sum-up:
- This is not her only project, just the main project
- She has taken grad courses, doing a grad course in MIT will easily be more work than average developer do in whole year.
- She had to study several research areas before choosing her main project. It is unlike I read the tutorial of currently trending distributed system Apache Spark and now I know everything about state of the art research. It is going through dozens of research papers in that domain, understanding all the concepts, identifying the gap in existing research, figuring out how to fill that gap.
- You will fail several times before finding a good approach. The author have mentioned she had tried with Scala first, later switched to Python.
- Even the results are good, you have to write the paper which is not trivial, and getting it accepted before getting rejected several times.
- Worst case scenarios are also likely. Mid-way in the project you have found out someone else has recently published a paper. Now your work is worth-less because it is already published. Or you have found it there is an obscure paper that also outlined the approach you have taken, now you have lost the novelty factor of your paper.

TL;DR: 200 lines of some UI JS code is not same as 200 lines of new deep learning algorithm in TensorFlow.
An abort()/__builtin_trap/etc shouldn't generally be manipulable.
You are correct. The naming scheme is confusing as heck. When Android device manufactures transitioned to armv7, a dev tools company I worked with at the time made the decision to drop armv5/armv6 support. But users were absolutely confused by this, because device manufacturers continued pushing the marketing names. The worst for us was ARM11, which was like a dual armv6, because cheap device manufactures continued pushing new devices based on this instead of moving to armv7.
To me, it sounds like the author is advocating for what we did when we used Subversion and merging was painful for non-trivial differences. In my opinion, the reason for switching from SVN to Git isn't that it's so distributed (you need to push centrally to get CI and share changes after all) it's that branching and merging are so much easier there's no excuse not to.

We create a branch for nearly every ticket and definitely for all features.

Master is essentially production ready or already in production while our development branch get run through CI/CD on every commit. The development branch is rarely broken and in almost all cases is where we branch our features/fixes from. It's up to the branch developer(s) to merge development back into their branch before bringing their branch back to dev- but since we're a small team and branches rarely live longer than a week merging back causes so few issues that we don't even flinch.

Gone are the days of SVN where you'd spend two weeks off commit and pray your integration went smooth.
In case someone's interested in history, related change (return on malloc fail) was done in March 2015 in a general alloc-fail cleanup across the codebase. https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/918bb8652969fd53f0...
AutoCAD used a separate monitor connected directly to an S-100 graphics card. You'd enter commands into the AutoCAD command line interface and do the drafting on the graphics monitor.

That also explains the way ACAD works. Had the program been created in the post-terminal age it is likely it would have been a point-and-click application, like, say, SolidWorks. Instead, they relied on commands such as "line", "circle", "pline", etc. typed into the console. You could also type the parameters rather than clicking around.

ACAD also came with a version of Lisp (AutoLISP) you could use to extend its capabilities. In general terms the approach was to use AutoLISP to create a DSL that made drafting much easier for your particular application.

For example, I had a set of programs that created a DSL I could use to layout circuit boards more efficiently than through raw command drafting. If I remember correctly, I could type "dip" and my code would ask a series of question to ultimately place a, say, DIP 16 package with certain size pads and holes on the current layer.

The degree of automation one could be achieved through AutoLISP was remarkable.
> Big companies buy 'disrupters' when they fear their market share is at risk.

Yep. I can see why they don't wait for them to crumble though. What if they don't? That's a big risk to take.

When a potentially disruptive product gets bought, it virtually always means death of the product. You get fed a line about how it's going to keep going, and then a few months down the line, it has all been integrated into some existing big company product.

What's sad to think about is that sure, a lot of these companies would have failed, but how many would have succeeded? We'll never know. I don't blame founders: it's pretty hard to say no to a mountain of cash when your future is so uncertain. But deep down, I still wish more would take the gamble.
What did you find were the reasons you needed a mentor?
I think lots of people get the idea of PhD is worthless learning from PhD graduate from some mediocre varsities. Getting PhD from any elite school (like MIT in this case) or elite research group is absolutely priceless.
Thank you for the feedback! I will change the wording of that FAQ question (+ answer) and make it more detailed.

I'm not sure about how I should go about demonstrating what makes this model more secure, except making it more obvious that it doesn't involve storing your data on servers not under your control which is the case with solutions like email and skype.
The way the term medium is used here really bothers me. For one, because I was taught that a medium is a oneway communication channel. Further more, because the plural media has an idiomatic meaning in English, that is the publishing industry. I find it Ironic that it's in the name of the site, even, although I should judge the content by its merit. I don't because it's tl;dr and I got lost around the explanation of SVD (a link to wikipedia would be enough).
Germany Successfully Tapped into John Kerry's and Baroness Ashton's Phones
> Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay?

This would work better if your cities hadn't stopped moving in the 70s. (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html)
Parallel computation with molecular-motor-propeled agents in nanofabricated nets
OK, let's look at a practical example, something that frustrates me about many current web-related tools.

Tools like Sass and Watchify can monitor for file changes and automatically regenerate SCSS or Browserify outputs when known source files are modified. They also employ caching techniques to make that regeneration efficient, instead of rebuilding everything each time. This functionality is very helpful, and it is available with a simple shell command that works on any major platform.

However, at the moment such tools typically don't notice when new source files are added and automatically start tracking them as well; this generally remains true even if the new file is imported by an existing known file. Similarly, such tools may break if a file that was being watched gets deleted.

In practice, this means you get automatic and efficient rebuilds as long as you are only changing known files, but you probably have to restart a watch process manually if you add or delete files. Fixing this would be high on my wish list for a modern web build tool, given what we already have.

How would you set Make up to solve this problem?
You would have loved East Germany in the 90s. (But seriously, it's depressing.)
companies get tax deductions for those expenses which means they need to submit receipts.

They can't expense a random "market price" but an actual ticket, if you then upgrade it it's fine, if you just say airline a had it for 200 and airline b had it for 300 and you can't expense the cheaper one.
If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know It Exist?
Strangely enough, this PDF appears to be a completely empty document. All I get is a blank, 1/1 page. Have to regard it as, well, not informative...

(Let's hope whatever the error, it gets fixed.)
Small isn't better in every way, but one way in which I think they are indisputably better is that the owners a local business are embedded in the same social context as their customers, employees, suppliers and externalities. All business are run by monkeys with smartphones, and they make more humane decision when they have to see and shake-hands with all of their stakeholders at little league on the weekends.
> I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998.

Seems very ironic, if you remember that time in Asia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis)
All fair points -- nothing is guaranteed, but sooner or later you have to trust your tools. Like, maybe there's a backdoor in your compiler so certain lines of code are compiled so that they notify chairman mao when you shop for red notebooks ... .

The repeatable builds projects go a long way towards preventing this by producing identical bytes from different compilation chains. Ultimately it's good to have a combination of static analysis, multiple toolchains & 'many eyes' providing checks and balances for each other.
I think you're right. Most of what we read in media is the latest hype. Unicorns were hype and covered to no end. This weeks hype is the end times of tech.

There's no middle ground in most of the news I read. Imo, the markets are tightening up forcing companies at all stages to cut their budgets and/or generate revenue.

Tighter markets and harder conditions does not equate to the stagnation of tech. They are not the same. In fact, constraints lead to greater innovation.
You shouldn't do continuous integration without continuous deployment, because you don't know whether you're relying on code that is not ready to go to prod. And you shouldn't do continuous deployment unless your test coverage (including load+perf) is so exhaustive that every possible change has zero risk in prod. Literally every team I've ever worked on had to manage production deployment tactically in terms of "are the right people available if we roll this right now" and "how much effort would the rollback be" and "is this an especially important day for our customers".

New features should be on branches off master, and master is the code we've already pushed to prod and agreed is good enough not to roll back.
Could you flesh your idea a bit more? I don't relish digging through that meandering blog post from a random author.
Valuing high-tech companies
Berkshire Hathway's annual shareholder letter [pdf]
Yes, but it becomes harder to tell where in the code that happened. If you run abort() or the like, you've got more information as to the circumstances of the crash.
Palantir pulled in about 1b in revenue last year. Splunk 500m, and tableu and hortonworks less than 40m each.

No idea on profit margins here... But it would be surprising if palantir was NOT worth more than these three
> [...] their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business.

I have worked for a bank before coming to Google. The biggest difference, even in the core business, is that people speak up to management and call bullshit out.

Memegen, for all its flaws, wouldn't survive one week in the open in a bank, and the perpetrators would be fired.
While I see the value in having a robust standard library, is it really that hard to apt-get or brew install Cairo or some other 2D drawing library?
Land in close proximity to a few select locations is a finite resource. (The point of Manhattan, say, is that it's compact.)
Debugging, explained
The summary of that guy's Phd summary
http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-phd-abridged.html

{"1":"for various reasons i also spend a lot of weekends in new york and make more friends with people working on data and journalism","2":"my friend jean-baptiste who reads it asks why my blog is so good but my paper drafts are so bad","3":"at the beginning of this year i start telling people that i wish i had more female friends since i realize that there are many fewer women around me than before","4":"to keep myself from thinking about my uncertain future all the time i start a cybersecurity accelerator cybersecurity factory with my friend frank wang with the goal of helping research-minded people start companies","5":"i am too lazy to make many friends so i spend my free time reading cooking doing yoga and running"}
Auto Dealers Hate Tesla Motors – Here's Why
The hardware hasn't really gotten significantly better in the last 10 years to get people on the upgrade treadmill again. Phones are on that curve now, but eventually they are going to top out too, and your iPhone 10 won't be that significant an upgrade from your iPhone 9.
I'm on the other side of the pond, but: If London mostly ignores things outside of London, what makes you think Brussels will be more attentive?
There should be a way to connect a card reader to a newish System Z machine - IBM is famous for its legacy support - likely via some wonky shit over SNA. MUMPS is also fairly portable to new architectures as it was cross platform out of the gate.
We shouldn't complain too much: the potential of the buyout draws many founders into the game in the first place.
Is it "stealing" if I'm walking by the store and an employee comes out to the sidewalk and offers me free samples, even though they did the same thing yesterday?

Some of you guys have a promising career waiting for you at the RIAA.
A big problem is that webRTC is highly MITM-able. You have to exchange initial connections using a server. So no party has any way of knowing if you are MITM attacking.

You might be able to do something diffie-helman shaped at the javascript level (hard to ensure it actually works) to show a fingerprint of the shared secret that could be confirmed via outside channels.

But all-in-all this does not offer ANY security over a server because there is no way to show it is not just being stored on a server.
Asciinema player: open source terminal session player written in ClojureScript
Thank you for this, already had 3 sessions today, it's very good!
Show HN: Netflix Counter
A simple javascript snipped to calculate how much netflix you have watched.
the UK has 65 million people and Japan 120, so there is quite a big difference. Many places in Europe are also densely populated, more so than Japan even like Belgium and Netherlands.

I didn't mean to imply that engineers are not needed. But rather that I don't think the reverence for engineering is linked directly to population density and scale of a country.

Germany is a good counter example since you bring it up. The strong position of engineering in Germany vs Britain as nothing to do with population size issues but rather to historical context. Each country has very different traditions and histories.

For Germany e.g. it could be mentioned that the medieval guilds lasted far into relative modern times. They preserved the status of crafts. Other factors is that in Britain finance and trade came to dominate due to the huge colonial empire, something Germany didn't have and instead had to rely on domestic production to build their nation.

One could go on for any time about all the myriads of different experiences and traditions.

It surprises me how often people just quickly explains any sort of issue with population size. Frequently differences between Europe and the US is also explained away as a function of population size, as if the vastly different historical developments isn't of significant importance.
With some sort of peer discovery functionality, this could be a pretty cool open, cross-platform replacement for Apple's AirDrop.

...but would probably need WebRTC functionality in Safari to work on iOS devices
I wonder whether Alphabet is a way to try and ride these waves.
DotSwift 2016 Highlights, part 1
I've never heard of a 64-bit armv7. So I decided to look it up. Looks like this Reddit thread already said a lot of these things, i.e. armv7 is 32-bit, the document is blank, one of these things (armv7 or 64-bit) is an error:

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/47zqzz/raspbe...
because entropy is directly related to the number of possible values and number of values in the password, which is what i am comparing

i then went on to establish those values as being only those in the english alphabet, 26 characters, stead your referenced ascii set or even the diceware character set which allows some special characters

then i took the minimum suggested diceware length of 6 words, rounded the average word length of 4.2 up to 5, which gives us 6*5=30 characters

so one diceware password example:

affixafireafootagainagateagave

can be seen as diceware would have it, 6 words of length 5:
[affix, afire, afoot, again, agate, agave]
or 30 individual characters:
[a,f,f,i,x,a,f,i,r,e,a,f,o,o,t,a,g,a,i,n,a,g,a,t,e,a,g,a,v,e]

so utilising any underlying pattern, here only using the diceware wordset, weakens a passphrase of equal length

or if you want to abstract away from the actual values that you use to determine a passphrase's strength you could say: diceware lowers the entropy of an individually random value passphrase of equal length

but that phrase unecesarily contains verbage that can confuse whereas my previous comment showed all of the number possible permutations in such a way as to easily see that one is greater than the other making the guess space larger
Tx fees are always paid by the buyer, but technically money is nominal and who pays it doesn't matter. Visa charging merchants 3% is exactly the same as them charging consumers 3% or splitting them 1.5%.
Proving _knowledge_ or simple properties about the pre-image doesn't get you much of anything interesting.

In this protocol the prover proves something that makes the preimage valuable to the verifier. This generally puts into the land of ZKP for general computation; and in that land, facts about pedersen commitment are not more efficient to prove than SHA256.

(except with exceptional parameter selection... e.g. constructing a EC group out of the field created by the SNARK constructions' group.)
There are so many 2D libraries out there that we should know what basic form that take by now.
I disagree with the authors premise that there can only be 2-3 behemoths. Has he not been paying attention to how kids use mobile apps these days? No one is locked in to a single ecosystem like they used to be.

People use gchat, Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, and iMessage simultaneously, for distinct purposes. And all of their friends do too.

As long as the app present value, kids these days have no problems switching back and forth between apps, meaning they can get hundreds of millions or billions of users too.
It's true that at the top level, most of Linus' commits are merge commits. However, on a per-subsystem level, we very much favour a nice linear history. In most parts of the kernel, it's rare to go beyond 2 levels of merging, which given that the kernel has something like 1500+ developers and well over 10k+ commits per release cycle, is fairly linear...
I think the key to network monopolies there is going to be iot device + backend. The backend/network is where the lock in/value will come from.
Hi,

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Ah, good question. Most of my students did OK, and were generally good at doing whatever was necessary to get a decent grade. My complaint had more to do with how the problems were posed -- they seem to create a rather stilted view of what math is about.
The amount of execution time is a simple public parameter of the system.

These schemes require reducing the verification program to a circuit in advance, so its execution time is already fixed by virtue of that translation.

(In practice the existing implementation is not using constant time cryptography; and so it could have timing/cache/EMI side-channels; but this is "just engineering")
Show HN: The first and only app to let you text from your Apple Watch
Huh, didn't know that - I'm starting to like GitLab more and more!
Why would a hedge fund hire auditors who don't have any idea what they are doing?
I was actually looking for this http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t... and we had an interesting discussion going at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10798352

Both might still be a bit too rumbling. If you want the least rambling, the Economist is almost always the way to go:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...
Show HN: Git-khaled – Khaledify your commit messages
That's right. I wouldn't claim that rqlite is scalable. That's not the point.
Hackers were behind Ukraine power outage
> in accordance with mandatory "retirement" at age fifty.

I've never understood the obsession that a lot of mathematicians seem to have with age restrictions (e.g., the Fields medal).
> I think the industry can support multiple competing unikernels in different languages.

That way we can reimplement existing, common facilities not once, but N times -- and still not support what I was alluding to (namely, allowing specific subcomponents written in a language appropriate for that component).

> Rigorously define ones interfaces while hiding implementation details

Fine, but then there's little advantage to mandating a single address space and language.
Is this including local government? Because I remember reading that the Detroit public school system uses punchcards still.
Relative to a single SQLite database, rqlite is pretty fault-tolerant.
Gravitational Waves Hit the Late Show [video]
FireLayers Coming to RSA After Winning “Get in the Ring” Contest