skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wish these reports would break out the average vs. the distribution.

The report does that for you, if you trouble yourself to look it up, and I quoted that part of the report in a comment I posted yesterday. Here is a longer quotation for you.

"In numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments, the United States performed below the PIAAC international average. In numeracy, the U.S. average score was 12 points lower than the PIAAC international average score (257 versus 269, see figure 1-B), and in problem solving in technology-rich environments, the U.S. average score was 9 points lower than the international average (274 versus 283, see figure 1-C). Compared with the international average distributions for these skills, the United States had

"• a smaller percentage at the top (10 versus 12 percent at Level 4/5 in numeracy, and 5 versus 8 percent at Level 3 in problem solving in technology-rich environments, see figures 2-B and 2-C), and

"• a larger percentage at the bottom (28 versus 19 percent in numeracy, and 64 versus 55 percent in problem solving in technology-rich environments at Level 1 and below)."

There is more detail for you to read about if you are interested in the details, in the study report published by the international study group, with the report linked here hosted by the United States National Center for Educational Statistics.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf
A friend of mine (from the US, native speaker) spent a year in Japan as a schoolteacher under the JET program. We kept in touch via message-boards and such. His written English notably deteriorated over the course of the year. It's possible your friend picked up some non-native language habits during the course of his stay.
Also, for the particular case of MODBUS over TCP, MODBUS itself doesn't have any security aspect (by design) it is a very simple byte read/write protocol really.

http://www.modbus.org/docs/Modbus_Application_Protocol_V1_1b...
User Testing in Data Visualisation
No. Bolt-on security doesn't work.

It is either possible to do something securely and won't really take significantly more time, or it's not possible to do it securely at all, and no future update is going to fix it.
The problem is those things end up being forgotten or interfaced to in so many places that in the end they become un-fixable or won't be fixed to keep other stuff running.

You need to do it right from day #1.
I don't use Calculus every day, but the whole "stop thinking about specific Y-values and start thinking about how functions behave together and influence each other" is just invaluable in a world ruled by numbers that are in constant flux.

To be honest though, I always thought that Linear Algebra would've been a much better AP class than Calculus. Sure Calculus naturally follows Trigonometry, but Linear Algebra has the same sort of "teaches these critical thinking skills" effect and, more importantly to me, was much more visual and easier to get excited about. Especially when our class started futzing about with OpenGL and particle fountains towards the end of the class.
As much as i abhor commenting online do bear with me.
You say that "We cannot live in perfect harmony". That's not a thing", however what is this in comparison to. Surely this would be comparative to the rest of the eco-system. Animals make changes, they create habitats and dam rivers, however as it is more rudimentary (sticks and holes in earth) we dont consider it a change to the enviroment.

Creating our homes in a more ecological and recycleable way would be in perfect harmony. The arguement is whether we should go further and drastically change the enviroment, do we have the right as the dominant species on the planet to abuse its resources for ourselves (as seen in the attached xkcd whose figures roughly show the populations of mammals who we have artifically inflated to such proportions for our dietray wants).

So if we changed our architechture and agriculture then yes we could live in perfect sync and harmony, it's just that we wont.
I build stuff like that - my approach is to limit capabilities to the absolute minimum, and anything that is not needed for function but necessary for debug/diagnostics stays on the device rather than going across the network. This limits the devices a fair bit - firmware update across the network with no local interaction is not allowed, nor is accessing the local data store. Want to email me and talk about this?
I doubt you're an actual InfluxDB user, but I'll bite. If thousands of people are using a free standalone server, is that a bad thing? If VCs subsidized the development of this free software, is that also a bad thing?

Software doesn't get written for free. That won't change. VCs can subsidize it for a while but eventually it has to be commercial.

It's also worth noting that FoundationDB was totally closed source and disappeared after the Apple acquisition.

That won't happen with InfluxDB. The open source standalone server code that we develop will continue to live on regardless of what happens with the company.
Great, now make a drone or self-driving robot to randomly run around the country messing with peoples' insecure lights. It'll be one huge party.
Aliases and port forwarding are hardly "tricks".
Why and How Amazon Is Building the Alexa Voice Platform
George RR Martin denies being dead after George Martin dies
I agree. It's also possible, I presume, to hire a car for the day. You don't need to be the owner of the vehicle, surely?
ahh this is great! opencv tutorials with detailed explanations on the algorithms are hard to come by. i've found tutorials really useful to learn some of the standard processes in image processing (i.e. grayscale and blurring to remove noise).
so, IMO, I don't think any of them failed because they were
> standardised and supported in all JavaScript engines while those other things were either proprietary runtimes or browser specific API's

I think they failed because they were closed off, and nobody could read the shitty code, so people wrote shitty code. If we have things open, it gives people an incentive to make it look/work nice. Sure, not everyone will, but it makes it easier to shame those that dont.
Maybe they'll appreciate your honesty?
> And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.

Honestly, we only need a statistically significant sample for a few buckets...so unless uBlock and chums hit ~85% none of this effects me. The same is true for virtually every "good actor" in the space.

You just need to be able to run an A/B test that is statistically accurate + analytics + RUM.

https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/

~37%

Ad blocking is a reasonable proxy for tracking blocking since they usually go hand in hand. [e.g. uBlock]

Real world, I see ~35% block rates at $DayJob. I don't care about that at all and I'm amazed any "good actor" would given 65% of the population is more than enough for as many statistically accurate samples as you'd need.

So when you say "you are doing the right thing", what isn't included in the above?
Visit the linked article. It's a typo.
That's technical debt, and it's hard to fix. A prototype, sure, it can have flaws, it's a proof of concept of feature X, not feature X SECURED. But then the release has to be a rewrite. If it's not, those flaws are more likely to become permanent. And when they do begin work on repairing their codebase, they'll spend several times the money and time to fix than if they'd spent some time early on. They'll also likely introduce numerous other issues in the process.
>“Small companies (with under 10,000 users) will not be obligated to provide a permanent technical capability, although they may be obligated to give effect to a warrant.”

I can imagine someone getting creative and redefining what they call a user… though I can imagine this devolving into if you have under x page views… and then x time spent on site… how much bandwidth over the wire… etc.

Such a joke, I hope everyone is enjoying their view of the circus lol
I call this the "we don't do anything special" fallacy. They consider hackers to be something like in the movies where a team of slick black leather clad folks plan a digital heist, and why should a bunch of movie stars care about our little business.

In truth it's much much more like how Google just has computers trying to index every site on the internet that they can find. Most of the attacks these days are broad searching things, just testing every exploit they can against every site they can.

Also, seriously, Google will find and index those GET+DELETE non idempotent URLs and ruin their day.
Mobile Games to Make Time Fly
If you enjoyed that, there's plenty more where that came from at https://regexcrossword.com/
No worries, the bassoon is never anyone's first choice ;)
Do you know the medical doctor who published a mathematical method (named after herself) to compute the area under a curve? Truly revolutionary! https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
> I find Phoenix documentation very good and the number of examples are increasing a lot day by day.

We can beg to differ. Yes, it's improving, but there's still a long way to go before it's at the standard of more mature frameworks.

> The default included bootstrap is just to show the landing page. You have to add your own css which you have to do if you use any other framework or library.

Sure, but if you're going to include bootstrap then you might as well do it properly rather than half-assing it. Better to not install bootstrap, I'd be fine with that, but to include it kinda-sorta then have bits missing is just going to confuse newbies.

> Phoenix is nothing like Django or Rails. Phoenix is very modular

Maybe it is, but you have to get far into the learning process to figure out where everything fits together, with pipelines, plugs, and so forth, before you can add and remove what you need. Out of the box Phoenix comes with a ton of dependencies and configuration you need to reason about first. In that respect it's very similar to Rails and Django.
Wait, doesn't everybody think about the voyeuristic implications of any new technology?
Identity provides deterrence from things ever reaching that state.

Having your passport or ID saved would make you think twice about committing some kind of crime
There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you're influencing prices only with your own funds, not conspiring with others or trading on information which you're not supposed to trade on.

On smaller exchanges with less liquidity you see it all the time. If average trading volume is 20k shares, buy 50k and you will move the price. Then sell in small blocks, maybe through multiple brokers...
No questions. Just wanted to say I'm glad you made this. A few years ago, I was playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and World of Warcraft a little too often. Had the idea to merge the two, since WoW is basically an amusement park. I mapped the project out but never put anything together.

Anyways, I'm thrilled you made it happen.
Flash does provide a lot of nice/cool things. The problem is it was abused because it was "cool". If we could get people to use it only when necessary, then I probably would have been OK with it. Too many people end up using this in inappropriate places.
I guess your "random hardware" was still not random enough:
My notebook that goes crazy after the upgrade is certainly not an "oddball" as it has

the Intel processor,

the Intel chipset,

the Intel graphics card,

the Intel WiFi card, most expensive of that times,

the maximum amount of memory for the CPU and chipset (4 GB) and

the most expensive Windows 7 version installed.

I'd even say it can't be more straightforward than that. And what's worse, the Windows 10 Upgrade program "tested" the configuration and claimed "everything will be fine." Now it nags even after I reverted to Windows 7. Windows 7 has no problems, Windows 10 has problem with interrupts handling.

And the Windows 7 "hours long" update problem is surely known to Microsoft, I've diagnosed it on my machine too, this function:

wuaueng.dll!CUpdatesToPruneList::AddSupersedenceInfoIfNeeded

appears to still (after the 2016 March update of the Update Client (7.6.7601.19161) and KB3102810 installed) be called almost infinite number of times. I guess it's some unnecessary recursion on an O(N to a high power) loop which was tolerable for small number of existing files in the list of all updates, and now explodes. Microsoft appears to avoid fixing that code even if it's quite obvious for anybody who knows to interpret the stack.
Good to hear. Cruise seems like a pretty interesting little startup with a smart approach to the expected problem of having both regular and self driving cars on the road in the future. Now that it has the backing and resources of a large automaker, the sky is the limit. Good luck guys!
"Although the test program was considered a success, no plans were pursued to fly any of the reactors."

Edit: I misunderstood the wiki article. Carry on.
Coding Consistency
I love how you act like these are inevitable or aren't America's issues.

The fact that poor children aren't getting enough food in a affluent Western country is abhorrent, the fact the US refuses to provide comprehensive language classes to the children of immigrants is intentionally meant to disadvantage them, the fact that the US school system has a massive disparity of funding is on purpose so that those in rich neighborhoods get a better quality of education.

Of course America's students results are worse when the American people seemingly don't care about them. Maybe you should bring in a better class of politician and instead of constantly whining about your "high" taxes you pay MORE tax and help the disadvantaged. Or heck you could cancel all of your corporate welfare and ultra-rich subsidies and use that money to help the poor...

The US prides itself on being a Christian country, but they don't act like it. Christians are socialist in nature[0].

[0] http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2011/08/12/from-jesus-soc...
I'm no expert, but I've seen plenty of flotsam and jetsam on beaches in my time, and I can't recall seeing a barnacle on any of it.
I wonder if the competition wouldn't just skip the security, then beat you on the price because you are paying lots of money for security experts. Most customers don't care about/understand security and your company fails.
I'm amused by the use of Modbus. I worked on Modbus networking back in the 1980's at Modicon (a company that disappeared long ago that created the "standard"). Using a protocol invented before the internet to control devices on a semi-public network is insane.

The original Modbus was designed to communicate with factory devices controlled by logic controllers over serial and eventually over a custom token ring network. Modbus got moved to TCP at some point when I stopped paying attention. Modicon rejected TCP when I was there because the OSI model 7 layer network stack was going to be the next big thing.
Well, if lights (and the article mentioned TV) repeatedly goes on at 3 a.m. this ca give quite bad reputation to the hotel. A few bad ratings hat reservation sites can have a notable impact on the business.
I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.
i totally agree that the fun part lies in understanding how things work under the hood. i never understood how edge detection work until i worked on an implementation with JavaScript and canvas, and that was a fantastic learning experience. the motivation behind this article was to provide a general idea of what image processing could do, and hopefully encourage someone to delve deeper into the mechanics of image processing :)
"Public schools aren't the greatest when it comes to accelerating social mobility - a lot of my graduating class is still in my hometown."

<sarcasm>"Social mobility" doesn't necessarily mean moving upwards only. Public schools therefore may indeed contribute to public mobility and even be an accelerating factor to it!</sarcasm>

The fact that the graduates of your class are still in your hometown does not really say much about social mobility, it does only about mobility.
Working with an overseas software company – project kickoff meeting
If the government goes to a judge and gets a court order to access information this is what I consider reasonable and in fact a good thing!

It seems to suggest that technical feasibility and cost needs to be taken into account as well. If it's technically impossible due to Spider Oak style end to end encryption or for example the new iPhones (6+6s) having some very advanced encryption features I'm not certain that there is a requirement to insert a backdoor.

If the security services were monitoring a person who was genuinely planning to kill people and they asked you to put in a limited back door?

Most services remember do not have encrypted backend systems and it'll probably always be this way.

Mass surveillance is the complete opposite of this and is a totally unreasonable intrusion.
If it's flooded, just use a commercial underwater ROV. The oil and gas industry has been using them for decades.

You don't need a hundred-tonne robot to find a fuel rod, so they can at least get that part sorted. Once they know where they are, build something super rugged (I'm thinking basically a remote controlled shielded fork lift) to do the lifting.
The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go
Except they a) know where the room is anyhow and b) GPS doesn't tend to work very well indoors
That's true - fair point.
This would be expected in a very Normal distribution, but there are some skewed statistical distributions where you would not expect that to be the case. For example, if you're doing an analysis of the following data:

1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 98, 1000000, 1000000 then the mean would be 2,004,851 / 100 = 20048.51. In that case, 98% of your sample points fall below the mean.
Good point, seems like places get sold products that are smoke and mirrors. If they knew what was going on in the background they would be shocked. Best plan is to build up a big customer base with a smoke and mirror product and then sell out and hope you don't get sued.
Are these robots operating fully autonomously? If so, why?
yes! i've found it really useful when dealing with images of items in different lighting conditions. i've struggled with understanding histogram equalization, would you happen to have good resources that explain how it is done?
Judging books by their covers (by Richard Feynman)
Did you keep a straight face while you suggested that people actually upgrade firmware?
Does the US have these kinda Robots or are "we" also under the myth of Nuclear Safety?
Facebook’s OCP helps competitors build hyperscale data centers together
Another point missed is that the lock mechanism on something like an elevator fire-service switch is not exactly robust, and a person determined to access it could probably do so quite easily with standard locksmith tools or even a screwdriver or pry tool.

The keys make casual mischief easier, but would not stop anyone more serious.
What Ruthless Innovators Can Learn from the New England Patriots
Badoo switched to PHP7 and saved $ 1M
We protect the wrong things and we slow everything down
One option could be to introduce a third party user driven based end-2-end encryption on the data. This would mean, you can say "Man i am happy to cooperate but i have nothing in my control".
I met my mp over it, he told me to "talk to the hand". He's a tory boy, never worked, doesn't care.

I also met a friendly Lord over it last year who already opposed it loudly, and ensuingly had his political career murdered for his trouble.
Adobe Animate isn't a new tool, fyi. It used to be called "Adobe Flash Professional". They renamed it in order to distance it from Flash.
>> I don't agree that this is the problem.

Life skills? I think it is. My sister was substitute teaching and a frustrated math student wanted to know "what this is good for". She said "how will you know if someone is screwing you over?" to which the kid seemed to find a fresh interest is the subject. Learning without application to real life can be boring to a lot of kids.
Or you could just kick the door in - and turn the lights on. Then write "HACKED" on the wall with a spray painter. (sarcasm)
Many ‘abnormal’ sexual tastes are neither rare nor unusual, study finds
> In the end we shall be able to describe every idea or thought in purely mathematical form.

That is a very ironically imprecise sentiment.
Hacker!!
Hunting for Malware with Machine Learning
I made a small purchase in store at Home Depot with a credit card (a bad habit, which I've resolved to do less of [0]). A few weeks later I received an email asking me to review it, to an email address I had used for online ordering. In retrospect, it wasn't so amazing that they'd correlate this information, but that they'd have the audacity to assume I wanted my relationships with them to converge.

It's similar to price checking something on Amazon, not even logged in, and then them spamming you about that item. Your average person is so overloaded and unobservant that these things apparently don't set off their creepy detector.

[0] I started doing so because it's easier to return items, and I try not to keep stock when a store can do that for me. Speaking of returns, they run your license with a 3rd party verification company that is obviously also surveilling you. Furthermore, if this company's digital voyeurs decide you should no longer be able to return items, you have little recourse. I believe using a credit card avoids them wanting to see ID [1], and obviously prevents their system from denying your return.

[1] Although I've got my license's serial number / 3D barcode covered with blackened masking tape. A picture, name, address, and birthday is more than enough to "identify" me for civilian purposes, thank you very much.
And the Joke Sensor
Diablo II 1.14a – Support for Modern OS X
It's moving towards a kind of Daily Mail fantasy land, in which there are peedos and brown-skinned terrorists everywhere, simultaneously wanting to live their lives taking advantage of the country, and also destroy it.

I see my tax bill going down, knowing that the few hundred quid extra I have per year (which is basically lost in the financial noise for me - meaningless) means that somewhere someone who really needed that money or the service it paid for is now being fucked over. I don't even know who; Cameron and chums (I go sailing sometimes with a chap who used to share a house with Dave Cameron; apparently he was a self-entitled tosser then as well) are fucking poor people over on my behalf, presumably thinking that this is what I want. Or maybe they don't even think it's what I want; maybe they're on some bizarre Randian kick, living in the Westminster bubble in which poor people simply don't deserve any help, and this is some kind of moral crusade from their messed-up Westminster bubble. The benefit to me; zero. The cost to the people at the bottom; devastating.

I see our "leaders" acting as absolute cowards; these are the people who should be inspiring us, but instead they rush to surrender our freedoms as fast as they can. Again, presumably because the Daily Mail tells them that this is what we want. The other lot aren't any better. Remember when Harman wanted to introduce compulsory ID cards? She had a long record of voting in favour of more government power and fewer civil liberties. Intellectual and moral cowards, the lot of them.