skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, this prompted me to go look for a GPL PalmOS editor I wrote 11 years ago and _someone's put it on GitHub [1]_ and updated it 2 months ago. It was the first serious programming I did.

I used a bizarre structure where the each onscreen line in the document (soft-wrapped) was represented by a (uint16?) character count and pointer to an array containing the characters. I had to write a custom memory allocator that put adjacent lines next to each other in memory to make moving characters between lines efficient.

Way too much overhead, and if you changed font you had to completely reload the file, but it was pretty quick even on the old 68K Palms.

[1] https://github.com/rtiangha/SiEd-Dana
Low barrier of entry for high yield, thus their popularity. Though they really don't scale well, and you can end up with the stuff of nightmares.
The thing about cycles
I was looking over an old VPN of mine and found this file in all the directories-- I feel like it's something that's been dropped all over the place-- does anyone know what the point of it is? I tried googling it- but it just returns pages that have it publicly accessible. Does anyone know why its being dropped and if so what framework is doing it? Cpanel? I am certain I did not put it there.
> super-human image recognition

That's a bold claim. As far as I know there was one paper that reported a model beating human scores in a specific test (imagenet, I believe). Whether that translates to "superhuman" results in general is followed by a very big question mark.

In general I really struggle to see how any algorithm that learns from examples, especially one that minimises a measure of error against further examples, can ever have better performance than the entities that actually compiled those examples in the first place (in other words, humans).

I'm saying: how is it possible to learn superhuman performance in anything from examples of mere human performance at the same task? I don't believe in magic.
Markdown support means that I already know how to use it. I don't have to figure out what hotkey bolds text, underlines text, turns things into bullet points, etc.

How do I add links to this? Is it even possible? If it was markdown, I already know how to add a link, no extra thought required.
Testing Strategies for Docker Containers
I've learned a lot about Python from reading Peewee's source, thanks.
I'm in Denmark, that's too close to Norway in consulting terms, so can you say what the company was so I can make sure never to take a consulting job with them.
If this kind of simple-minded extrapolation worked, we would all be flying personal vehicles that could break the sound barrier right now, and would take vacations on the moon.
Cisco invests $150M in Spark for Developers innovation fund
Seems somewhat harmless- its PHP source is:

echo "<h2>Server info</h2>";

echo "You're accessing: " . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . "<br>"; //or $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']

echo "This server's Ip: " . $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] . "<br>";

echo "This server's hostname: ";
if (function_exists('gethostname')) {
echo gethostname() ;
} else {
//for php < 5.3
echo php_uname('n');
}
echo "<br>";
> Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years ... [and] will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point another technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already "maxed out" Moore's Law? Aren't hardware manufactures already running into problems at the quantum level because of how small and packed transistors are already? That would be why we've "maxed" CPU speed at around ~3-4GHz.
Well they certainly managed to "disrupt" something, like trustworthy lab results!
My father is a clinical oncologist/researche who is approaching "voluntary" retirement age. He's incredibly depressed about it given the sudden boom in successful research in the field. I believe the reason of the trend isn't just sudden interest, but quantity of production as well.
There is one place where visual programming is alive and well and has been for a long time. That's programming PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers). It's easy to forget about PLCs[1], but it's an old and large niche in large corporations that do a lot of industrial automation like assembly lines, (automobile) manufacturing, oil & gas...

Most PLC programming is done using Ladder Logic [2] and various visual tools tools for creating and editing Ladder Logic. Here's a screenshot of one such environment, RSLogix: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4yEj065J1q4/maxresdefault.jpg

It's an interesting data point because A) it's a highly technical field where accuracy (and verification) matters B) almost everybody who does PLC programming spends all their time in a visual programming environment.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic
Either FF or Noscript disables that for me in Firefox. Works in Chrome though.
SEC: RIEDC, Wells Fargo Defrauded Investors in 38 Studios Deal
I think this you can view this from a different point of view.

In my opinion this is because what people think software is.

So if you see software as code which expresses what you want, the question is what do you do when it does not do what you want wrong, or do you want something additionally.

So software really is our desire for some specific thing. But it is also a tool which can express arbitrary things. So its a mirror which reflects back on us to discover our real intentions and desires.

Eventually its more of a conversation in which you expand and direct your intentions. And programming or software is just one way to do that.

I think eventually AI will be able to deliver such reflecting conversations to us, the question would be which medium (hardware, operating system, programming language) will it use.

I do not think it will use building blocks (hardware, operating system, programming language) created by humans. Because those are to incomplete and arbitrary.

remember the building blocks allow for plenty of room to allow bootstrapping on multiple levels.
An AI could create blocks to create a solution that is so very simple we can't even imagine, yet is unthinkable for humans right now.
One of the better societal aspects of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was the concept of "Meths" - super rich people who could effectively afford to live forever by inserting their consciousness into new bodies (or "sleeves" to use Morgan's terminology). One of the downsides of this was that, since the rich lived effectively forever, they only accumulated more and more wealth in greater and greater quantities, and limited the trickle down to other people.
A chart and the related data would be useful here.
Character is fine when talking about Unicode. As in: “That character at code point U+1F918 is not showing up as a proper glyph for me.”

You might be thinking of how a single Unicode character does not necessarily map to a single byte in UTF-8 (the most common Unicode encoding). Some programming languages call a single byte variable a char or character; is that what you are referring to?

Incidentally, the U+1F918 before 'about' is not available as a glyph on my system — i.e., I don't have a font installed that has it. The creator probably uses a Mac (as evidenced by his exclusive use of ⌘).
The growth of life expectancy looks quite linear to me: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Lebenserwartung_Deutschl...

I don't really see a miracle technology coming around the corner that will help us reduce deaths faster than now.
Oxygen[0] by Nick Lane makes a pretty compelling argument why this will not happen. With perfect health you can at best achieve ~120 years age. I think this paper A unifying view of ageing and disease:the double-agent theory[2] covers some of the arguments in the book.

To give a simplified view, the big obstacles are a) a technology capable of repairing damaged mythocondrial material in a living organism and b) a technology capable of repairing neural cells w/o replacing them (that is if you want to preserver 'you', not just your body). That is assuming that our current understanding of senescence[1] is even mildly accurate.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
[2] http://www.nick-lane.net/double-agent%20theory.pdf
Plenty of paths
This guy advocates for keto by cutting sugar http://quantifiedself.com/2015/12/effects-year-ketosis-jim-m...

He measures a lot of molecules in his blood streams and noticed reduced inflammation amongts other benefits.

I find his short talk nice and detailed although I'm a total newcomer.
So is something like VSGAX an ETF or is it an index fund?
> Using Snapchat and Vine’s in company groups to foster camaraderie. Email joke chains and daily funny memes and gifs

Please be careful when doing this and even consider not doing this.
Show HN: Free scanner for GHOST, Heartbleed etc we built over the weekend
For example, the Python best practices document recommends 1 blank line after functions and 2 after classes. Linters enforce this. However, this can be a detriment to readability in some cases, such as closures or classes that have no body, only superclasses.

Some might say you can mark lines as not being linted, but that then makes the change vulnerable to bikeshedding. For some people, being able to force the conversation to not happen because the linter is authoritative might be good, personally I prefer to follow the guidelines but be aware of the fact that they are there to aid in understanding for future coders not to adhere to a standard.
turn off adblock for WSJ in chrome incognito and it works
Depends on what kind of prototyping. At the current state of neural networks DSLs are mainly helpful if you want to tune a network architecture for well-established tasks like image classification for the Imagenet dataset.

Outside of that I see more dynamic alternatives used much more.
And the reasonable way of controlling the population is killing about 150000 people per day, many of them in quite unpleasant ways?
Overall, I got an impression that Ada encourages value-based programming. It is possible to do a lot of things without dynamically allocating a memory.
Material Design communities on Gitter
"Once" assuming nothing randomly breaks while you're not looking. What if your cronjob doesn't fire? What if LEs script has a bug and you're not up to date? What if one of the (Python?) dependencies has a bug or breaks? What if LEs servers are being DDoS'd? Can you enumerate and account for all the failure scenarios? I've already botched things with acme-tiny&LE in several different ways.

I'm not claiming these risks are that significant, but given that LE takes just as much time and effort for initial set-up as a standard multi-year cert, if not more, I think the mantra "some risk of failure is more risk of failure than no risk of failure" is something worth baring in mind.

And I'm not convinced having 90 day certs is a huge security win. Not only can someone do a lot of damage in 90 days, but your private key (the important bit) can't be rolled every 90 days anyway without integrating your rollover scripts with your HPKP config. If you botch that then your visitors can't come back to your website until the pin expires. Scary. Site ending scary. And if you're not using HPKP then i'm not even going to debate the security pros and cons.

On remembering to renew certs... there are many many services out there to send you reminders. Pick 2 or 3 and use them all. Or use a CA that sends reminders.

I'm glad LetsEncrypt exists, but let's not treat it like the be-all-and-end-all.
But it's in their best interest to assume it wont happen.

If I correctly predict, as an actuary, the demise of the industry, I don't win anything. If I can calculate a superprecise premium for my insurance product based on this being true, I have an expensive product that underperforms the competition, and management is not happy. Whereas if I ignore superlong trends, I get to earn my salary, probably until I retire - you know, it probably won't happen. I value a product competetively. And if we miss, it won't be my only problem. So even if I can do the right thing, I will be punished for the event.
Thanks for sharing your experience here, I'll go straight to lego when I go to set it up. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a Go binary for system tools like this.
Aside from the economics of all this I'd suggest that on the basis of what we know about most humans, we'd end up with an appallingly ossified society. The Maos, Stalins, Kim Il Sungs[ list the dictators ] etc., in their 21st century forms will be ruling the roost for ever and a day. The last figure I saw on 'freedom of expression' across the world was (2016) 14%.

For example: "Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. "

https://www.freedomhouse.org/issues/freedom-expression
It is much faster than humans
Marshmallow Challenge TED Talk
On demand staffing infrastructure is tooling up (and not just for taxis). If you (fellow worker) think dealing with HR is unreasonable now, wait until you are dealing with the Google help desk equivalent.

Guilds are a non-ideological alternative to unions. Specially for software development, such collective organizations would have been very useful even now, but in the future will be critically required.
According to Inferno's benchmarks section[1] that lists Mithril, Mithril is actually slower than React when it comes to DBMonster and is slower than all others listed. As an aside, domvm seems to be exceptional in its performance and size. Yes, others are faster, but the library is much smaller. The flexibility of it is also pretty awesome and holds a place in my heart after making my own mini framework years ago.

[1]https://github.com/trueadm/inferno#benchmarks
Getting to 150 and then stopping ageing means you'll live the next 850 years of your life in the body of a 150 year old. That doesn't sound fun.
Please Don't “Learn to Code”
Pubmed amino acids and cancer.
...paid Hiatt for the rights, and then renamed the seedling the Delicious as a marketing ploy.

Says it all really.

If you have to tell us it's delicious, it isn't. Much like the GDR and democratic.

Meanwhile hundreds of regional varieties are being pushed to extinction.
The performance graph is deceptive for two reasons: (1) Leaf with CuDNN v3 is a little slower than Torch with CuDNN v3, yet the bar for leaf is positioned to the left of the one for Torch, and (2) there's a bar for Leaf with CuDNN v4, but not for Torch.

It's good to see alternatives to Torch, Theano, and TensorFlow, but it's important to be honest with the benchmarks so that people can make informed decisions about which framework to use.
Not really. You still need to write formulas using a textual language.
I don't get many predictions right, but 3 years ago I stated to a group of colleagues: "By 2019, Microsoft will be the largest open-source software company on the planet." Yes, I deserved the laughs I received.

Not sure about the accuracy of my prediction, but I'll bet I'm closer to right than wrong by that time.
EV can die a fiery death. It is bullshit. I don't see a reason why LE can't issue wildcards in the future, though with their current setup they are even less important. Email certificates can be issued by LE as well. Code signing is the only one I see as problematic.

In either case, I suspect that LE will take a huge bite out of CA's bottom lines, since there are a lot more DV certs out there than EV ones.
Actions speak values. If you aren't acting on what you call values, they aren't values.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?

==================

This is talking about biological immortality - obviously an external event can still kill a person. In fact, a catastrophic species-ending event like a meteor would still be devastating.

And we still have to worry about runaway viruses (the Black Plague), political mind viruses (Nazism, Communism, Islamism), bacteria (Malaria etc.)

The biggest danger would be, as it already is, overpopulation. I think people would have to make a trade-off: have children or live forever. You won't be able to have both. At first, only the rich would be able to afford children and live forever, but given a long enough time period, social mobility will rotate enough people into being rich enough to afford it.

Now think about it realistically and philosophically. If computers are going to take over most of the tasks we do today - driving, cooking, research etc. as well as have a worldwide network of knowledge (eg Watson, Google) then what does any individual person become? Like an animal in a zoo, who exists mostly for pleasure and socializing but whose services to others aren't required. We can already see this as people get internet-connected cellphones... why ask your parents anything if you can google it? Both parties actually prefer that we google it.

Now imagine if it moves to even less latency, via heads up displays or into a computer-brain interface. What is each individual person really doing if the hive mind already has all the answers? Why do other people need this person? Just for pleasure and interaction.

And now think about your life when you were 1/3 the age you are now. Do you remember doing a lot of particular things? How does it feel to realize that most of the things that you did, it's almost as the same as if you didn't do them? Had sex that one random time with that person - how much would it matter to your current self if you did or didn't? Outside formational life events, most routine things you do today might matter to your future self almost as much as to some stranger!

So what is this continuity between your current self and future self? If you lived until 5 million years old, how much of your life could you really meaningfully remember, unless you are accessing an external memory? If you lived 5 trillion years but only remembered around 50 years total of your personal life, how is that much different than a person living 300 years and remembering 50? Only that you continue to live and your self preservation instinct always wins.

The older I get, the more I have questions about the meaning of my future self living 1000 years from now, with dim memories of my current self, versus someone else living 1000 years from now. Does anyone have similar questions and what answers have you come up with?
I hope that Let's Encrypt will be able to issue wildcard certificates at some point.
Are cryptocurrencies leading us into an economic system based on trust?
Bug in Facebook login system
What an optimistic roller coaster that reading was.

If you are interested in (anti) aging science Aubrey de Grey work seem like a good start.
Good read! And timely as well, as it comes on the heels of the next big thing, the launch of the ETMF:

First ETMF by Eaton Vance Hits the Market

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/first-etmf-by-eaton-vance-hits...
I think the confusion may stem from the MapD logo on the story page linking to mapd.com/blog/ rather than mapd.com as would be more typical for a commercial interest.

Looking at the product page, is MapD hosted or do customers build their own servers?
What version of FF? On FF 44 this code works with the following warning in the console:

The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.
It should be undergraduate work to replicate studies. It would fix all this dumb shit.
The Best Way to Convert a Web App to a Native App
A med student told me his team found that starving cancer cells wouldn't work because they were better at sipping glucose than normal cells, meaning healthy tissue would suffer first.
It might be more of a crime. Before, you removed the remaining 50 year potential. Now you removed the 500 year potential. One could say the damages increased x10.
> Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years.

You're putting too much faith in the judgment of centuries-old "teenagers". My guess is that they would squeeze 100-200 years of drinking and partying into 5-10 years :)
If they can get you to 150 and stop your aging, it implies a mastery over the physiological context that means you can stop worrying about the age of the body as we might have previously. The aging would get repaired one way or another.
Use webroot auth and it's fine with nginx. I just ran my first set of renewals with half a dozen domains on nginx. All fine apart from one which hadn't used webroot when I first set it up. Edited the config and it then worked fine.
I thought this was going to be about Racket...
Having the parser recover from errors is very useful if you want to build a text editing environment for your language, for example. It would allow you to highlight errors to the user, and to provide context-sensitive help, even beyond the position of the first error of the user's input.
If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years?

(since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)
... with your head attached to tubes and wires floating in a jar. Oh yeah ... but thanks to VR it will feel like being on vacation.
"That evolution, which seems so inevitable today, brought us better graphic cards – which lead to better games, brought us the world wide web,"

It should be remembered that in the early days of the web, some people argued that it should remain text-only. Basically, if you couldn't read it on the command line with Lynx, they weren't interested. Of course, the web seemed different at 9600 baud (or even slower).

Being color-blind, I am not enthusiastic about the idea of visual programming, just because a lot of visual tools are color-coded in ways that are hard for me to work with, esp. if the default settings are not easily modified. Even syntax-coloring in a text editor is a chore to deal with.
Right, but that's different than saying he doesn't like old people because he disagrees with them.
Saying a blogger isn't a reporter is not belittling. Its correct. Blogging isn't reporting, as plumbing isn't carpentry.
It's sad how fuzzy the CSV file format is for such an important commonly used kind of file. Like how the name of the first column can't be "ID" or Office will give you an inexplicable error about some "SYLK" filter you don't care about. [1] Who would ever want to name their first column "ID", huh?

[1] https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=117508
What do you define as "perfect health" when you are made up of cells that keep being regenerated?

Some animals have biological immortality as far as we know. Most however enter senescence after reproduction, probably because evolution optimized for that.

I think that if we sampled people's DNA at 15, and then used a retrovirus every few years to refresh the DNA in the cells, we would solve the biggest issue of random mutations piling up. But this is a long way away. Of course, there may be other processes that build up but a youthful immune system should be able to fight them relatively effectively.

Even so, the chance of death would only be reduced from exponential-exponential to exponential, since the chances of someone living A to B and B to C are independent and therefore multiply.