skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've thought very long and hard (and written loads) about writer's block, and have made a lot of personal progress in dealing with it. [I'm currently 550,000+ words into a "write a million words" project.] I'd be happy to chat about it with anybody who struggles with it.

I like to think of writing (or any creative work, really) as a large-scale process with many intermediate steps, like say, producing diamonds. You have to start by locating the raw materials, drilling them out, getting a sense of what they are, isolating them, cut them up, polish them, set them, present them, sell them.

Block can happen at any point along the process. It could be that you don't have enough raw material. It could be that you're not sure how to cut the particular stone that you have. It could be that you've got the wrong tools for the job, or that the job itself is not worth doing.

The challenge is to zoom out from the present moment and to see the bigger picture, and often to move upstream in the process. Sometimes you need to abandon the process altogether, and maybe return to it later.

The creative person's anxiety and paranoia can seem like a petty thing compared to say, somebody who has to deal with "real" problems. (I'm reminded of Anthony Bourdain saying "Cooking professionally is hard work. Writing is a privilege and a luxury. Anybody who whines about writers block should be forced to clean squid all day")

It's a fair point. That said, I think it's useful to try and understand what exactly the block is. It's fear, anxiety, attachment to outcome, a sense of incompetence and worthlessness.

Elizabeth Gilbert also has a great TED talk on dealing with that, about separating your self-esteem from your work: https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius?langua...
Ask HN: Suggestions for an opinionated Node.js framework with ES2016 syntax?
I am about to start a new project and have been evaluating the various NodeJS frameworks out there. As everyone knows, its sort of "choose your own adventure" right now and the sheer scope of choices are insane. My hope is to find something with the following attributes:

- Well suited to creating a RESTful API
- Node V4.x and above support
- ES2015 syntax support (no Babel transpiling)
- Stable, good documentation and community (this is a big one)
- Opinionated. For example, we’ve been using SailsJS and its great except doesn't support ES2015 and can be a little slow
- ORM support. Preferably with a MongoDB connection option.
- client side support is unnecessary

So far the most promising one I've found is AdonisJS. Any other suggestions would be appreciated
You're giving me cold sweats now thinking that angel list emailed my company
There's a numberphile video on that I just watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ltrPVPEwfo

I really don't like this formula. The numbers grow absurdly huge really quickly, and the only way of finding A is brute force search (and there are multiple possible values, they just pick the smallest that works.)

It's like saying the number 0.235711131517... contains information about all the prime numbers. Well it does, but once you see how it's constructed it's not terribly interesting.

Anyway I think you are saying that the constants might have low kolmogorov complexity. That is, the constant could be compressed to many fewer bits of information.

That seems unlikely. There's no reason why constants can't be arbitrary or random. Perhaps there are many universes and each has a different constant.

And trying to fit an expression to them is impossible, because we only know them to a few digits. That's not anywhere near enough information, and any expression like that will almost certainly be overfit. But if you insist you could try RIES: http://mrob.com/pub/ries/ries.php?target=1836.15267389&rst=

None of the formulas get out more characters than they put in, or even get more than a handful of digits. It's indistinguishable from a purely random number.
> Sad to say that it's better viewing than almost all free-to-air TV in Australia.

and germany.
what is a CN computer?
Without risk of death of the main player, it's not as interesting.
strangely, searching Shodan for product:ssh port:443 finds nothing - when I know there are boxes around running sslh or similar to run both SSH and HTTPS on the same port. Seems like you can hide in plain sight when the scanner has no idea you're there.
If you want to work at Google/Facebook, you should try to find someone inside to refer you. Otherwise there really is no cost to aggressively following up with recruiters if they fall silent.
What scares me is that we've pursued this in such 'medical' terms.

It really influences how people think. Remember when it seemed insane to see advertisments about how "8 out of 10 doctors recommend ___ brand cigarettes"?

It doesn't seem crazy to me now that there is so much "health" based marketing around marijuana.
When I was at uni we spent some time in the lab playing around with Magneto-optical film and polarized light, it was supposed to demo the Kerr Effect. I had fun with an old floppy disk - you could bring a bar magnet close to the disk's film and watch the magnetic domains flip under the microscope.

Would be pretty cool to print some patterns using this technology and view it the same way.
I'm pretty sure getting a degree from a school nobody has heard of is only marginally better than having no degree at all.
https://player.twitch.tv/?channel=bwatanabe&autoplay=true&ht...

html5=true will play html5.

But I had to disable every possible ad/tracking blocker (even Firefox native) for it to work, kind of ridiculous.

P.S. The deer crashed, so its not moving.
It's just another thing you need running on the server that must stay patched forever.

In my opinion less is better. RSA/4096-bit key encryption only. I don't even care if you use the root user. The ability for someone to crack a 4096-bit key is impossible in practice, and if your SSH server has a bug then it doesn't matter what fancy things you have setup.
It's very hard to get a sense of how more or less likely a child is to pursue a given profession than normal. You just sort of have to eyeball the bars before and after, which tends to visually accentuate changes to common professions, even when there might be a much larger percentage change for an uncommon profession.
And how the tobacco companies are evil and terrible but hey! Wanna smoke pot? That's all GOOD!

Marijuana should be legal but discouraged, not permitted to be advertised, put in plain packaging, kept behind counters and not turned into novelty products that appeal to teenagers like foods.

Hard to see how it's much different to tobacco really.
I know bandwidth quotas are becoming a thing in North America, but they're getting worse in Australia - both upload and download usage is counted on fibre and ADSL connections, and mobile (cell) metering has always worked that way.

I want to be a good seed, but not if it costs me hundreds of dollars a month.
CN = china. So, computers based in china, although I am at a loss as to what the thread parent is saying exactly about "CN computers actually being US". Same with "zero day'd/patched" — aren’t those opposite notions?
Oh interesting. I heard that CloudFlare was going to take over, but that may just have been about "we will handle paying the salary of the right person once they are found".
It wasn't initially clear to me when reading... Is this referring to the Sandstorm environment automatically applying updates as they are released to the apps you have enabled? Or are these vulnerabilities that the Sandstorm environment itself mitigated without the need to apply a patch?

Clicking through it seems like they are saying "security non-events" meaning if you self-hosted an app yourself you would have been vulnerable, but because you managed the app through Sandstorm, you were never vulnerable. This is definitely very interesting!
hmm.. we have the CORS allowed, so this shouldn't be the issue. It's possibly the cloudflare captcha issue.
Congrats to the SpoonRocket team on finding a buyer in the final hour!
Crystal and Kemal
"We don't automatically generate a reverse edge"

Wait, then you don't actually have relationships as first class citizens? Does every "thing" know what is connected to it? I mean, where do you draw the line between graph databases and an object database with one way links?
It seems to say that just because something passes virustotal with 0/56 doesn't necessarily mean it would pass every AV in a real attack.
So basically like every hackerspace. I think municipalities need to really get behind hackerspaces as a concept if they're to survive the next few years.
Research Suggests 'CS for All' May Mean Lower Pay for All
Well, this was a lot of fun!

Game of Life:
http://ncase.me/simulating/model/?remote=-KDMc4MyNjW2j-zHfri...
1. Not good enough for YOU maybe being slightly better at solving a class of problems or a better memory (on almost any metric) is a measurable improvement and qualifies.

2. Irrelevant (just like #3 and #4) because we're not talking about identical cloning.

3. We domesticate on iteration and result, not strict design.

4. Reliability is a lot like saying we get results, just not 100% of the time.

We probably already have altered humans in circulation. The Israelis aren't waiting around for approval, they are just doing it. I wouldn't be surprised by someone discovering the US Military has embarked on a genetic program (Bourne Identity style). Even the Germans were doing it in WW2, so I could see it coming to light in my lifetime. It wont be commodified in the US in 50 years, but swiss facilities might be an option.
Ha yeah. I know NPR One you don't need to remind me that I'm listening to NPR One constantly.
These are things Sandstorm mitigated even before the vulnerability was reported, much less patched! The magic solution is fine-grained containerization, meaning every document goes in its own container and Sandstorm (the platform) manages access control to containers.

This page describes individual CVEs and how they were mitigated: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-event...

This page has a more general overview of the concept: https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works

(It's funny how many people initially react to this idea with something like: "How is that not obviously wrong?" Guess what? It works. And no, it's not inefficient -- our managed hosting service runs a healthy profit margin.)
> Note 3-20-16 10:00pm PST: The Deer Cam computer will likely crash in the next 5 hours, and the admin is away. If the Deer Cam is offline, it should return 3-21-16 by 3:00pm PST*

I guess wrong time now!
Further on that, you could probably create a batshit-insane zoo of some sort which combined a variety of animals in a fixed environment. Make it an Apple TV app/channel.

In a physical zoo experience, the animals are caged and often just hide out the day. In the batshit-insane zoo, they'd be entertaining everyone all the time without any animal welfare issues.

In can foresee a time where the majority of people (e.g., not purists or those with money to travel) are more regularly entertained by virtual animals than the real thing.

Take GTA V, add Godzilla and let the public watch what happens.
I used to run my own mail server and had no trouble with deliverability for about 15 years. In the last 12 months it became so bad with certainly email providers (I am looking at you Microsoft and Yahoo) that I was forced to change over to a dedicated email service (I went with luxsci).

It would appear that some of the large email companies have effectively outsource spam filtering to the email service providers (email from one of the known service provider == good - everyone else == drop 1 in 20 emails randomly). This means that in practice it is impossible to run your own email server anymore if you care about deliverability.
There's a cookie-based article per month limit.
Nice project and write up! (I didn't make it there last year, so I didn't see it...)

Curious, was this a first BM project? (It's certainly up at the level of complexity that very often completely misses the deadline and either gots take out to the desert half-done, taken out a year later than planned, or abandoned altogether.)
I believe that's the entire reason this product was built:

> OwnTracks is open-source and uses open protocols for communication so you can be sure your data stays secure and private.

I think OwnTracks was named because you "own" all of the data.
> He's still going at it 100,000 ssh attempts later.

I got hit with >100,000 on my main desktop a few years ago when I was procrastinating fixing my heavy-handed fail2ban config. I noticed what was happening first from the lag it was causing. It turns out >10 SSH password attempts/second can eat up a significant portion of my 3GHz "Yorkfield"[1] CPU. It wasn't hard to discover the problem: the logfile was rapidly filling with failed SSH password attempts. This is particularly useless as I have used

PasswordAuthentication no

for many years. There is no chance that the script was going to gain access, but the system load from the rejections was terrible. So yes, I fixed fail2ban and added a few more "instant-ban" rules against anybody that tries password authentication, but the real fix that was moving sshd to a random port. Invalid SSH connection attempts dropped to approximately zero immediately. It's trivial to find with a port scan, but in practice almost nobody has even bothered.

It's probably like the old joke where two hiker see a grizzly bear and one stops to re-tie his shoes. "You can't outrun a grizzly!" "I only have to outrun you."

[1] Q9650 (E0); it still works great, even if it's starting to show its age
Redistributed but unattributed version of the Bloomberg original:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11324446

Notes that $777B is Australian dollars.
(Repeating comment from earlier discussion)

This updates /opt/usr/java/lib/security/cacerts [1]. On Kindles old enough that Amazon has long stopped doing feature or non-critical bug updates, that's all this update updates.

[1] http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3254035#po...
Sorry for the slow response, I've implemented this already.
Stem cells used to repair hearts unfit for transplant, perhaps?
That's fucked up.
I feel the same about NYT links. Incognito isn't doing the job anymore for me on that site.
Why is the Deer taking rest now.
I am so bored, I really want it to start moving again.
I miss the deer.
Yea, reading your page detailing the CVEs, you show that all reported grade 6 or higher CVEs against Wordpress in 2014-2015 were not ever exploitable against the Sandstorm hosted app. Of course, it's just a static page reflection, so that certainly helps your attack surface!

But I 100% agree with your premise, providing dependable security (even at a reduced functional footprint) is a key deliverable for Sandstorm and adds tremendous value to the platform. I assume you have found that adoption is hindered significantly by people "nervous" to try it? The premise is if you can make Sandstorm feel more safe, easy, reliable, it could it become mainstream. So security benefits are a huge bonus.

It also looks like the Sandstorm authentication design has really paid off. I think it's part of the initial complexity of evaluating your system, which is unfortunate, but it's great to see it providing real-world protection for a lot of your apps.
Sorry, I did not intend to discount this service in any way. More like showing a practical use.
setjmp also works fine, and besides, "1,000 times slower" is meaningless if the thing that's 1,000 is not actually the bottleneck.
The Gravitational Constant could conceivably not be a constant. Experimental measurements are over the map - most only agree on 3 - 5 significant digits of accuracy.
As I've come to understand it when implementing deep learning machine learning the hardware requirement for running a trained neural network model efficiently is much lower than the one required to train it. I've also read somewhere that if an instance of AlphaGo run on a modern powerful desktop machine would compete with the cluster used in Lee See-dol match which consisted of something close to 2000 of CPUs and more than 100 gpus then the ratio in wins would be only be 3:1 in favor of the cluster. Much less than if you would compare it to the ratio of computational power so that gives you hint of how much of the intelligence in it is about previous knowledge gained vs brute computing power. To me that also implies that a lot of the innovation done at DeepMind is more about improving the speed of which a neural net learns and aquires knowledge and less about the running time of applying the model. And that's probably an important distinction in the discussion of this technology.
Brutalist Websites
The animals in GTA:V do have attacks (sharks, dogs and mountain cats bite, etc). If you use a mod to play as an animal it becomes your melee attack.

Modding support in the GTA series is excellent, and has spawned a large community. It's refreshing to see as locked down games with DLC sold for extra are becoming the norm, with a few notable exceptions such as the Fallout series.

I've been having a lot of fun using a police mod where you can spawn FIB elite units that are allies. It'd be great to command an animal army as well!
I love this style of website design.
They haven't done any feature or bug fix updates in a long time for that Kindle, and this update contains no features or bug fixes. All this updated does is install new Java certificates, presumably to match new certificates on Amazon's servers.
But not before we determine whether salt is bad for us.
The -fno-exceptions flag also makes me sad, because it encourages people to write libraries that are worse than they could be purely for the sake of interacting with code that chooses not to use an important feature of the language. Exception support should not be optional.
are you serious? thc and nicotine are two different drugs. they are different. they do different things. and the sky is blue and 2 plus 2 equals 4.

you don't have to smoke cannabis to get thc. you can eat it, and many people do.

if you just don't like the idea of it, that's one thing and completely understandable, but claiming (even rhetorically) it's the same as tobacco is one of the stupidest things i've ever read on hn.
It is Germany after all.
I'd guess the children are just testing its limits. They do that with everything. It's how they learn about the world.
> radio is a shitty channel through which to market your podcast

Maybe I'm just not the average NPR listener, but any time I have terrestrial radio playing, I'm highly subject to interruptions (eg., the end of my drive, a meeting during my workday, etc.) I always almost find an opportunity to resume the broadcast (via podcast) helpful.
The product page: http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/
As smart as Mike Pall is, it isn't just that he's some crazy genius. Lua lacks a mutable prototype chain which can really spoil javascript performance and optimizability.

As far as I can tell you can't something like:

Array.prototype[0] = 5;

and make [] the same as [5].

There's a lot of edge cases in javascript that make its optimization much more complicated than lua's.
I seem to get the HTML5 viewer by default in Firefox on OSX.
correction: much larger than a floppy :)
Ask HN: I’m writing an OTP encryption algorithm. Where should I ask for review?
I have always heard and respected the advice: Never roll your own crypto! Well, I’m planning to roll my own crypto. This might be less stupid than it sounds as it’s going to be a glorified one-time pad, and one-time pads have the delightful properties of being incredibly simple to understand and also completely unbreakable (if used properly).

It’s the parenthetical condition above that worries me, and I’d be grateful for some peer review after I finish the first version of my algorithm.

I don’t hang out in crypto circles, so I thought I would ask HN: Do you have suggestions for communities, persons or entities who might be interested in reviewing my algorithm and implementation?
Yeah... Honestly Wordpress is my least-favorite example because it's the one case where the Sandstorm version of the app has significant features removed (namely, the ability to post comments). This is why we push it to the bottom of the app market, despite being a popular app. However, as noted in the document, we could produce a version of Wordpress on Sandstorm which has comments and is still just as secure. It's just that we'd need to spend some engineering time on it, and there are so many Wordpress hosting services out there that I just don't feel like it's the most valuable use of our limited resources. :/

For apps like Etherpad, on the other hand, Sandstorm has blocked several serious security vulnerabilities with zero loss in functionality -- in fact, Etherpad on Sandstorm has more robust sharing / access control than Etherpad stand-alone. :)
It's as dynamic as any rasterized game engine. Siggraph 2012 demo has exploding meshes at full speed for example.
yeah but that's what every government, and many employers, do, everywhere. it's a basic PR strategy for exercising power.

hell, that's even what people do to each other when they want to break up a relationship. your s.o. did something you really can't stand, or maybe you're just over it, but don't want to admit it? blame it on all the other stuff that accumulated over the past 3 years.
The problem with automatically generating reverse edges is that it causes data explosions and duplications -- for e.g., if you're adding facts like X -- IS_A --> Human; then automatically generating the reverse would cause a Human -- Reverse(IS_A) --> X; which would list all the humans on the planet. Whichever machine serves this list would immediately run into memory issues, not to mention, any query using such a relationship is going to be very slow.

DGraph uses type schema to understand the relationships an entity can have. So, you can have an entity of type A, where A has relationships R1, R2, and R3. So, you can then deduce that A has relationships R1, R2, and R3. Of course, each entity can be of multiple types (for e.g. Tom Hanks is an actor and a director).

This approach is very scalable, because it avoids unnecessary scans over the distributed database to find all the relationships an entity can have. Rather, utilizing a schema to deduce such information; and then hitting the right servers to get the data.
You've basically written a HIPS - Host Intrusion Prevention System, or at least a base layer of it. Antiviruses on Windows are popular to have this kind of protection, I don't know of commercial solutions for other systems.
I am surprise there is no mention of machine learning...
uBlock Origin seems to be able to get around it.

For Safari, I went ahead and added the rules missing from uBlock from uBlock Origin too. This seems to have helped somewhat (Forbes wall etc.)
There is MAC framework inside MacOS X kernel, but it's only for Apple usage. Developers arent' supposed to use it, because Apple states that it has no ABI stability and it can change unexpectedly from version to version. That is probably why it's not used by any commercial software (or it's so rare).

Instead, Apple designed a KAUTH framework, which is way more limited than MAC, but can be used to implement some features that will be stable across kernels (it has ABI stability). There are already some AVs that are using KAUTH.
And so does India. Marijuana was legal in India til 1985 then US government forced Indian government criminalize it.
Apple "privacy czars" grapple with internal conflicts over user data