skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wouldn't matter. If Amazon didn't want them accessing their servers, they could file suit under the CFAA. They could also allege copyright infringement, since judges have ruled that the temporary copy of a page stored in RAM from which factual non-copyrightable data is extracted (as would be the case on an Amazon product page) constitutes an infringing copy, and trademark infringement and dilution.

The existing body of law is very hostile to scrapers. Server access is treated like access to land. The "owner" can kick you off whenever they want.
ElasticSearch is very nice as a JSON data store and has great integration with Spark/Hadoop.

The only issue is that its write performance isn't great and there have historically been questions about how to get official support. It's definitely got a bright future ahead of it.
IMHO the decline of western civilization began when KFC added cayenne pepper to the extra crispy. :-(
Okay, I'll think about this. Thanks for the discussion. Have a good weekend.
Jenkins is not my cup of tea, but in its defence:

1. High startup time is amortised over long run times. Jenkins is a general CI server, not an interactive build tool.

2. High memory usage is true, though again tolerable given the role and importance Jenkins will assume in any sane project.
What a fascinating way to solve the problem.

You want Sunday as the first day? Fine, do your index zero-based and Sunday is Zero.

You want Monday as the first day? Fine, index 1-based and use 7 for Sunday.

Kind of brilliant.
You can get simple API implementations for most languages, with lots of convenient translation layers that let you switch your code in seconds. They can't change APIs on a whim, that would break existing installs.

Or for most of these just use standard filesystem access to your local copy.
Prior discussions of this piece:

206 comments, 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438

138 comments, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570
The last time I look at LevelDB it didn't support multiprocess access to the same file (so ended up using SQLite). Ha this change?
"We will remain steadfast in our efforts toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity."

But doesn't the full human experience include both the best and the worst?
Kind of ironic given the name of the first New Yorker to become President of the United States.
I think women make better caretakers. A father can stay home and be the caretaker, but I think a mother will have a more positive nurturing influence on the child's life if she is there as much as she can be.

If you can afford a nanny, I wouldn't think you'd be raising funding.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/
They claim the pruned branches based on potential actions is a novel approach, but it seems common sense to me and I'd be surprised that several other games aren't already implementing this in some fashion.
Most animals test things in a manner that relies on stumbling upon answers, but humans have evolved the ability to systematically discover things like this.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-cha...
This reads like an apologee... But what is there to apologize for? They said that Tay was meant for entertainment, and I doubt that any wholesome varient would be a tenth of the hilarity of a neo-nazi sex crazed chat bot.
In some ways it's a relief that ExoMars' sensors will take weeks to commission; it's got cameras on board, including one which was intended to be able to take 5m/pixel images of Mars' surface from orbit. Pointing this at what's left of the upper stage could well produce some rather interesting data.

It'd also require ExoMars to be extensively reprogrammed at very short notice and risk bricking it, which is not something you want to do with a critical part of a billion-euro science program...
Opus Testing [pdf]
I have been using GoCD exclusively and have been quite satisfied. The pipeline as a first class citizen concept really resonates well.
An alternative which is truer to the original would be to use Ó. It means 'grandson of'. But perhaps the other part should also be "deanglicized", giving either Ó Caoimh or Ó Cuív.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe
Is there any other evidence of this being a coordinated attack?
Yes, as you point out, due to the first sale doctrine. Such a thing doesn't exist in the digital realm.
See HTML5 canvas.

That's what Google Docs switched to so they could guarantee a consistent UI across different browser platforms.

For the full OS implementation see NodeOS and Runtime.js. NodeOS is a V8 runtime built on top of a very minimal linux kernel. Runtime.js is a full OS implementation from scratch written entirely in Javascript.
The data format is important. ORC/Parquet being substantially faster then Text or Sequence files.

But the query engines are far more important in terms of performance. Just spend any time with SparkSQL and then Hive and you'll know what I mean.
I suspect a Google Bomb style attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
If you're not asking yourself "what could a small but well-coordinated group of bad actors accomplish with our online tool" you're just being negligent.

This 'but we did it in China' rationalization is so flimsy. What happened with Tay was easily predictable given the nature of Twitter.
>and now you think that limiting expressive freedoms is a good idea just so copyright infringement doesn't happen?

I don't know why you think I said this. What I said is that games with little replayability will be easily watched instead of played. And when games are easily watched instead of played they will not make as much money for the obvious reason. As such, if you want to make a successful game and have a successful business making games, you either figure out a way to work with Let's Players so that you make money from views (or ban Let's Players from playing your game), or you make a game that provides additional value when it is played on top of being watched, such as a game with high replayability like roguelites, for instance.

I'm not saying that those games shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that you have market disadvantages if you choose to go that way, both because a lot of people don't think those games are actually games and because of the Let's Player effect. And yes, you can point to Firewatch or Gone Home but in my opinion those games are outliers boosted/distorted by media outlets that like those types of games or by studios that spend a lot of money on marketing. If you're not willing to do the homework (i.e. spend a lot of money on marketing) then you shouldn't expect a game like this to be a success because I don't think the market is there at all. Whereas for a game more focused on gameplay the market is obviously there.
The post install script can be like any other script the user can run. There's no sandboxing so it can access anything the running user can access. So essentially, yes, it could infect any other module in there. I believe it could even run an "npm publish", which is pretty scary.
How to Increase Alexa Rank?
I'm pretty sure "INVALID" lets you park in disabled person parking spots.
Not sure of a "vulnerability", would like to hear more about that. Unless the "repeat after me" feature is a vulnerability or it learns to copy too much from input?

Here's a small sample: http://imgur.com/gallery/VhlAW
Another fun edge case -- people with just one name.

Teller (of Penn and Teller) legally changed his name to just "Teller". Apparently his drivers license reads Teller NLN for No Last Name.
This reads like science fiction:

Learning from Somebot's introduction.

Last week we deployed Somebot to $location. Our confidence in Somebot was high because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices. We are deeply sorry and assume the full responsibility from Somebot's actions. Moving forward we will make sure to include safeguards to reduce the amount of pain caused by Somebot's deployment.

Our deepest condolences to the families of the affected and to the survivors. Megacorp cares about your well being. To help cover expenses from the tragedy we will deposit $money in your Megacorp account.

God bless the federated nations of Megacorp.
The bot learned from interacting with users. A bunch of people took to bombarding Tay with racist/sexist/antisemitic remarks which worked their way into its vocabulary. I'm not sure if you could really call it a vulnerability as this is pretty much what the bot was designed to do. It's more of a flaw in the inability to properly filter the content that works its way into the AI.
> A metric major fuck ton.

[Citation needed]

I don't have have reliable scientific evidence either way, but my speculation is that the vast majority of differences in outcomes between kids can be attributed to: genetics, nutrition, parental wealth, and education (in that order). I've found no reason to believe that "hav[ing] an active role in your child's life" (versus hiring good nannies and teachers to do the same), has much long-term impact on kids. Sometimes, when I'm cynical, I think it's a kind of moralistic conventional wisdom that's mostly perpetuated as a way to keep women "in their place."
The specific one they're describing is, I think, a feature that would have Tay echo anything you sent it. That one was somewhat more "annoying embarrassment" than "coordinated attack." The bigger problem was that Tay began spontaneously tweeting ugly statements, a problem that can be summed up as "When Twitter is your learning corpus, you are at risk of your learning corpus being made up of tweets."
I think Click is ok really, although as you say, it's aimed at a general audience. I do find it annoying when massive things go on in the world of technology and are unreported, but they have a five minute segment on helper robot prototypes or Second Life.

I guess I'd just like a more 'serious' tech programme on TV.
Cloud Foundry used to be built on GoCD, and before that Jenkins. But it's close to 100% Concourse now.
It was mostly out of 4chan among others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tay_tweets has lots of examples, most of them 4chan-level.

These few are completely different and certainly interesting: https://i.imgur.com/iVof3D4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YwlfwyL.png https://i.imgur.com/IlpFUiZ.png (though it's hard to confirm they're legit, as Retr0spectrum points out).
My legal name is Martin C. Martin. This has only been a problem for computer systems 2 or 3 times. Once or twice on some no-name web site, which rejected names where first and last were the same. The other time was when the company I was working at was bought by Oracle. Oracle's internal email system simply refused to create a user with the same first name as last name.

(For the curious, I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar and changed my name in college.)
This is an apology, but Microsoft got a ton of attention in the past few days from the press. Could the Tay incident be a marketing ploy (that took a worse turn than expected) to bring the public's attention to Microsoft's work on AI?
Comma.ai's neural network car and the hot new technology in robocars
I think the vulnerability was msft underestimating the extent of effort 4chan users would put into trolling Tay.

By the end of the day, Tay could 4chan with the worst of them.
Well it does solve a small technical problem, trusting vendors is hard Sony, Target etc. are "trustworthy" but still got nicked and the credit card data of millions of customers was compromised.
But that's not a problem most consumers have to deal with, their credit cards are insured, debit is a different story but in the US at least the amount of debit transactions is still fairly limited.

The biggest issue i see with this is that this isn't the most sustainable business model credit card costs are balanced more or less by the trust that the issuers has in the credit card holder (your credit limit, interest etc.) and the trust the acquirer has in you when you perform a transaction, prepaid cards are more or less notoriously untrusted by both because the issuer basically thinks you are too much of a liability to give you credit and the acquirer doesn't know who you are because that card has no credit history and single use cards are much more often abused for illicit purposes.
> people exploited a vulnerability in Tay

Which vulnerability are they talking about?
This imgur album provides a good overview of the kinds of interactions that occurred before the shutdown:

http://imgur.com/gallery/VhlAW

From what I understand the bot started interacting with /pol/ (4chan) - and I guess - /b/ as well.
I'm not that into c++ but I thought better error messages was one of the main if not the main point of concepts.

Basically the problem with templates is that there is no check for whether a thing can be satisfy a function/operation till it's fully expanded and it's hard to figure out where the "error" occurred during the template expansion. I thought concepts were meant to be like type classes (and type class limits to generics) in other languages so that the template writer could say that a template parameter has to implement x,y,and z and if the type passed in doesn't put the error at that expansion.

An optional constraint on a feature(templates) otherwise too powerful for good error messages.
Is the vulnerability they're talking about just having her repeat what you tell her to say? Because that's some oversight....
Celebrating Daemontools
> PriceZombie was not built on top of Amazon.

Not technically for the reasons you stated. However, it is evident that PriceZombie was financially built on top of Amazon's Affiliate program. It's hard to argue against that when Amazon contributed 90% of revenue
I don't have a problem with IA's operation in general, but individuals do own the exclusive copyright on their works. The forums they post on generally have a ToS that states the user grants them non-exclusive license to display the content. This doesn't automatically extend to the IA. Thus, if an individual doesn't want its work to appear on the IA anymore, they can issue a DMCA takedown request, as can be done for any other copyrighted information on the internet. The IA should respect these instead of trying to claim that there is a public interest in keeping them accessible.
At least with the older 3DS Fire Emblem (and to be fair I didn't play it too much), it didn't seem particularly clever. Mostly just choosing which character is more vulnerable, moving into range (probably using a standard A* path algorithm), and attacking with their best option (plus some healing and a few stage specific things).

Pretty standard A.I. from what I could tell. But my memory might not be that great, it was awhile ago that I played it.

Is the new one significantly different from that? What stuck out for you as being particularly clever?
This leads me to wonder if there is less effort put into trolling on the Chinese Internet. Does anyone with experience in both internets (weebo & twitter for instance) have anything to share?

Also does anyone know of some good English language digests of what is happening on the Chinese Internet? I was really interested by brother orange when that happened, and only knew kind of late.
Yeah, I think them calling it a "vulnerability" makes the entire post seem disingenuous.
WHen I started programing (mainframes) in the early 80's I came across an odd instance in which my name messed things up. All printouts had 3 letter as a banner that were used to identify who to hand them too once burst up from the line printer. Popped onto a trolley in which they would be shipped up to us programmers. Now alas I only had a first and surname and in part due to bureaucracy had to add a middle letter as PG was not acceptable for some unknown reason of standards that was in play. SO I added an X for PXG and then spent several years explaining to anybody new that my middle name was not Xavior.

Equally during my training we were coding a script upon a GCOS 8 machine and had to copy current edit file to a new file and on the system (asterix)SRC was used to reference that file.

Now one person doing the exercise thought they would cheat,
looked at mine, then another chap and concluded I'd copied his and he would be clever and not make the same mistake. Turns out the other chap he was checked was with the initials SRC and whilst neither of us had copied anybodies this cunning chap ended up with (asterix)MTW. Sadly this chap went on to the systems division and too this day, still bewildered how and who he sucked up too for that position with such talents.

So names are and always will be amusing at times, in more ways than breaking a system as well.
in the USA there are about 160M people with credit cards. for a preliminary model, let's assume 10% value privacy or have enough transactions where privacy trumps rewards/protections. assuming the startup captures 50% of this market, that yields 8M users. if the average user spends $1000 per year on private transactions -- this card won't replace all CC transactions, only the ones where privacy trumps rewards/protections -- and the company earns 2% per transaction, the company generates $160M in revenue under these assumptions. obviously the key variables are (a) 8M users and (b) $1000 annual spend.

to size the whole market, look at all 2015 credit + debit purchases and ask yourself what percentage of those would have been made private if some solution made things simple and easy enough. 1%? 5%? 10%?

the potential for private purchases seems promising, esp if they (or someone else) can expand the market by making private purchasing as easy as private browsing.
> - High startup time.

This is really not a problem. If you're starting and stopping your Jenkins often, you're really doing it wrong. Jenkins is a server, and really should only get restarted when there's been an update. Not to mention, other large servers that are not Java still take time to startup... there's a lot going on during initialization.

> - High memory usage.

Perhaps more of an issue for some, but again, Jenkins is a build server, and should be on it's own hardware/vm, with it's own dedicated resources. If you're trying to squeeze by with 1GB of ram, you can, but you should expect the obvious results. The more complicated your builds, the more resources they're consume. Compiling GCC usually takes 1-2GB ram by itself. I don't consider this a problem.

> - XML configuration files.

If you're using Jenkins properly, you should not have to interact with any config files. Sure, if you're running it behind Tomcat or something, you'll need to dip into the configs, but not liking Jenkins because it has XML config files is shallow and superficial, in my opinion.

> - Non-Unixy feel. Lots of things just behave like they're not really native.

I'm not sure what to expect from a deliberately cross-platform system. Of course it's not "native Unix-like". But neither is any software written to support OS's that are not Unix-like. And again, you manage and use Jenkins from a web interface, so if you're on the command line, you're doing it wrong. (as an aside, Jenkins has native support for running shell scripts, which I make heavy use of... can't get any more unix-like than that).
Yep have tried it with WAL and it still doesn't beat LevelDB. Thanks for the lazy suggestion I added disclaimer on top of the page right away!
If there was ever a webpage that needed a facelift, it would be Jenkins, so hopefully this is not just a backend rewrite.
I'm glad I could provide value.

For finding good resources on personal investing (these sites will have the standard suggested reading):
www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance
www.bogleheads.com

If you want to apply your abilities to investing it's a little harder. The theme of Malkiel's book is that there is no way to regularly beat the market, and I agree with him. There are opportunities but they require a great deal of effort, resources, and risk tolerance. Look into George Soros shorting the pound (I think that's the story), what I typically do now is follow along with what the big boys are doing publicly, evaluate it on my own, and then make an investment there. I avoid leveraging, futures, or going short because I will never be able to devote as much time to valuing them as other market participants. I have recently purchased a fair amount of Alcoa based on some "activist investor" market theses.

What you want to do is learn the basics (how to invest personal money in the standard fashion, based on Malkiel and Bogle). Then come up with a riskier strategy on top of that that either leverages someone elses analytical hard work or requires minimal effort on your part. There are hundred of people you'd be competing with working hundred hour weeks if you were to try to play the leveraged game (doesn't mean you can't win thought).

I never worked with Goldman or their ilk so I can't speak from personal experience. My guess would be that there was no personal meeting, just an email exchange followed by some quant analysis, followed by negotiation (in person, over phone, or over chat). You're definitely right that that scene was a hollywood fiction.

If you want to chat more feel free to email me at iawHackerNews at gmail dot com.
I really liked the video last month about webrender, which really looked like the future of rendering web content. It sounds like this Houdini stuff would not work so well with a webrender type infrastructure? That would be a real shame and sounds like short sighted thinking in this proposal.
Have you been living under a rock?....
Or no one in Microsoft feels free to speak up when they see a bad idea coming down the road so something like this just sails through instead of getting flagged. I've seen it -- not this big of scale, but I've seen it.
Microsoft seems perpetually five to seven years behind the culture. You can see it in their ads, their product names, their outreach. Ironically it can actually be quite lucrative.

I remember talking to people in the music group about MySpace (I was not an employee). They looked at me funny. Ten minutes later someone finally said "You keep pronouncing the product wrong. It's called MSN Spaces."

The people working on MSN Spaces -- specifically musician outreach -- hadn't heard of MySpace. That very week MySpace sold for $580 million. After it sold, I saw the same guy in another meeting. He STILL hadn't heard of it, nor taken the time to check it out.

There's a certain stupidity that each of the big tech companies foster. This particular flavor is Microsoft's and with the chatbot here it rings again. This one was so obvious... and so preventable.
Yeah, version control of Jenkins itself has always scared me. There seems to be a pattern that we go through.

(in the beginning, there was light...)

* Create a small, tight, single-purpose Jenkins job

* Add a small tweak to it

(repeat adding tweaks)

(realize the Jenkins job now contains MANY different configurations options and the job itself is now a shell script in its own right)

* Sweep the "job" into a shell script. Check in said shell script

* Back up the Jenkins config, and hope no one asks why something's happened.

I now have a plugin that automatically checks in the Jenkins config to source control, but it again doesn't solve the problem of matching up a particular jenkins artifact to exactly what built it, and why.
/pol/ found cool new thing, proceeded to mess with it for laughs.

I wouldn't characterize it as a 'coordinated attack'.
Amazon Provides DIY Echo Plans for Raspberry Pi
The Cambrian "explosion" was based on the fact that Cambrian rocks have many new organismal forms and body plans not found earlier in the fossil record. Analysis of DNA sequences from currently living organisms suggests that this diversification occurred much earlier than the Cambrian. Scientists that focus on DNA infer that these diverse organisms simply failed to leave a fossil record. Meanwhile, many paleontologists don't like the idea of such substantial gaps in the fossil record.