skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.

It's certainly painful, made all the more painful by the death of Yahoo! Pipes which was helpful in turning these (once rare) non-RSS sites into something usable.

The closing of Reader signalled this change (which is why so many of us lamented it so much; not for the product itself, but for what it meant for the web). If you fight hard enough, you can still turn all of this garbage into RSS and toss it into your feed reader (I like tt-rss), but RSS as a mainstream tool is already dead (outside of a few niches, like podcasts, which are also slowly moving into walled gardens of their own).
I think the whole discussion heated up because it's not generally understood that US/Western Europe "white areas" are talked about.
You gave me my big laugh for the morning.
To extend the metaphor a bit more, that guy born on third base very often expects the ones born in the dugout to hit a sacrifice fly the very first time they step up to the plate, so that he can score the run.

In the context of baseball, that is absolutely the correct play.

In the context of life, screw that asshole. Hit a bunt right to the third baseman and try to beat the double play.
Code generation and Computer Aided Software Engineering is also "coming" and will make the lowly developer and programmer obsolete.

Too bad that the 80 / 20 split does not quite work for things people pay for and rely on.
Seems like just 1.9.15 renamed for the branch?

http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.10
I'm glad to see they are finally addressing this problem. One of the largest requested features has been better management of selective sync folders [1] and many users have left for other solutions since they still haven't fixed it in the existing client.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201812...
NASA: using the sun as a gravity lens to study distant exoplanets
Really? Old Nokia phones were beautifully designed, as are (IMO) Lumias (not sure how much of the latter is attributable to Microsoft, though).
Singapore follows the British Westminister parliamentary system, which places no term limit on the Prime Minister. That is true for most other countries that follows the same system, like Australia and Canada. None of those countries are run by nepotistic dynasties. I don't think the lack of a term limit necessarily leads to more corruption.

My quote was simply to point out the absurdity of getting yourself elected the head of a country - one that prides itself on being free from corruption - just so you can get rich from it. Both Lee Hsien Loong and Lee Kwuan Yew are very capable people who no doubt would be far richer had they applied themselves to the private sector rather than public.
I can't imagine Obama suing somebody insignificant for defamation but Trump has a track record of doing just that...

I think you're right that politicians in the West generally refrain from doing so not least because they're concerned about looking ridiculous or overbearing. Legally they can though, and more minor politicians often do if the claim is sufficiently incendiary and well publicised.

Here's a British member of the House of Lords suing a politician's wife simply for implying something over Twitter
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/lord-mcalpine-lib...
And the UK of course also has a fine tradition of MPs losing their libel lawsuits and sometimes even ending up in jail for perjury as a result of the original claims turning out to be largely true.
Tip #1 for young programmers: Specialize in something
The technical delivery is poor. Hiccups, corruption, and drops in service are pretty common :(
The market is telling you to leave San Francisco, you should listen.
I mostly liked this article to show some of the basic features of CLOS, but was a little disappointed about the attitude toward the end. The attitude toward some of the more advanced features of CLOS like method combination reminds me of the attitude that some people have for functional programming. "Well, it's cool you can 'map' and 'reduce' a function across a list, but why not just use a for-loop?" I think most people on HN can see why that may not be a good attitude to have because of the larger implications of functional programming.

Method combination has an overarching theory behind it. My take is as follows: Methods are by definition associated with a set of constraints on the arguments. The constraints are, for the most part, specified by their class. Because classes form a mathematical lattice, we have the notion of "more and less specifically applicable methods" for a set of arguments, and so the aforementioned constraints can be ordered and usually the most specific method is called, as the article explains. But the key thing to notice here is that if we remove the notion of "more or less applicable", and replace it with just the notion of "applicable", then we can do some interesting things.

For a particular generic function (Lisp parlance for a method with unspecified constraints), and for a given set of arguments to the function, there is a set of applicable methods. How we arrange to execute these applicable methods, and how we arrange to use the results of the executions, is what constitutes method combination.

There are two trivial ways to arrange what gets executed. The popular way is to just execute the most specific only. The other trivial way is to just execute everything. Many kinds of non-default method combinations (like the LIST method combination) do this. Another one, which I find generally more useful, is the + method combination. (This sums all of the results of the applicable methods. One usual example is calculating prices with additive taxes.)

Many problems can be decomposed into one which sounds like the following: 1. Classify your objects into a (multiple-inheritance) class hierarchy. 2. Write down the behavior that is applicable to products of these objects.

If you can do 1 & 2, then these aspects of CLOS and method combination can solve your problem in a clean way.

* * *

There were a few nits I had with the article otherwise. What he calls "forms" are not forms. "Forms" are memory representations of the syntax. The syntax is called "symbolic expressions" or "S-expressions" or "S-exprs". An even more pedantic nit is that IF is not called a "special form", it is called a "special operator". The combination of a special operator and its arguments make a "special form". (But who cares. Even seasoned Lispers say "special form" for operators.)
Good question. On OS X it seems the size of a directory is typically a multiple of 102 bytes (often 102 or 306). I ran my script again with "find / -type f" to select only regular files, and it showed file sizes ending in 2 being just slightly more common than 0. Odd sizes are still less common than even ones, though, so the overall conclusion is unchanged regardless of whether you consider checksumming of directory entries to be a valid application.
I did include two qualifiers there.

>In his mind, and the minds of his constituents, the "information gathering" aspect is a sly wink at the other sadists in the room.

I'm not so sure. You could have a model where the main purpose of torture is for information, and the value of that information is so much that you don't need a high chance of it being effective, and even if it's not effective there's not too much harm done. Trump has certainly claimed it to be effective.
Hahah, wow. Sorry about that. It auto-downloads the pdf, so the best I can do is a search result link.

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubs.c...
Hmmm - not necessarily... The operative term is "social support" so as long as you have access to that you should get the benefits. More relationships provide more access to support and stabilising relationships. Strength of relationships are of course important and an important correlate of social support but not a be all and end all. For instance you could obtain support thru sports club, church, book club etc of course you want to stay away from 'negative' relationships too which is easier for the more superficial ones. Strength coupled with a bad relationship can be quite damaging too
You have freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean everyone should agree or respect your opinion.
If, on the other hand, you genuinely want to understand what "white male privilege" is all about, you should look at how women of racial minorities fared in your home town, or other similar towns.

Such an analysis would not yield the results I believe you expect. Most of the minority families from my town have been very successful -- they put high demands and expectations on their children, worked hard, etc. The world didn't expect them to fail, as it does with "white trash" males, and their potential was theirs to make. In no universe am I saying they excelled because of affirmative action or anything of the sort -- they worked for everything they got, and earned it -- but society isn't predetermined to expect failure from them.

I grew up a poor white male in unfortunate circumstances. Nothing was expected of me (I often joked about wishing I was Jewish, because then I'd have expectations), and every door was shut. There were no advantages. I remember one particular malignant teacher saying to another, after I had left a room, "water flows to its own level". And of the white males who I grew up around, most did menial jobs and cycled in and out of unemployment, some went to jail, etc. 90%+, roughly, still live in that small town.

The whole white male privilege thing seems to be a classic divergence between the median, and the mean. A small percentage of spectacularly successful white males pull the mean up, while the median lies in the masses of people living miserable lives. But the masses have to suffer and acknowledge their privilege because of the mean.

Or maybe we should simply discard with the whole premise of trying to simplify large groups on traits.
if you want a more technical review of the Windows beta, read this: http://docker-saigon.github.io/post/Docker-Beta/
But note that beta 8 was released a few days after that review and already introduced some changes.
Also, for the Windows beta, it very much is still a beta.
"A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam"

Except it didn't. They were driven by drivers, only difference was software controlled the speed so they could drive closer together.

https://www.eutruckplatooning.com/News/495554.aspx
Ugh, I always forget that I shouldn't do that here (I move URLs out of the way like this for email) and its been too long to edit. http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...
> No one is attacking your grandfather.

The previous poster said "your grandparents". A narrow minded assumption that every white person reading his comment would/should identify with.

> The previous poster is simply pointing out the better mortgage rates many white Americans of his generation would have received as a direct result of the racist culture.

Then quit complaining to the current generation(s). Grow up, start acting like an adult and move on with your life.

> in Atlanta in the 1980s

Yeah. One town. In the 1980s. So now what?

Did you know that in the 1920s, when Turkey over took the Ottoman empire, they slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians? A mass genocide that still has ripple effects until this very day.
> Insurance?

If the thing you insure against actually happens, premiums go up to the point of it being uneconomic.
Well said. Thank you.
Apple does something similar in Photos on iOS.
Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy
>People ask white guys to remember the privilege they experience because it is invisible to them

So for everyone its different. And apparently, invisible. How are people supposed to remember things that they never perceived in any way, shape or form?

And how does one accurately assess and analyze the "privilege" retroactively? At what point does the privilege begin and end?

Where does the hard work, pure luck, and skill take place?
I am not sure if I just overlooked something, but autorandr doesn't seem to stay in the background and wait for a change but needs to be called manually, is that correct? While saving profiles can be useful if you do that a lot, that task is easily solved by writing the xrandr command used into a shellscript.

x-on-resize looks like a good alternative to xoutputd though. It's probably worth to take a closer look at it and use the one whose code is simpler and easier to read.
A Different Approach to Low-Rank Matrix Completion
A local backup is fine for your history, but if the server get shut down it's not a 'connected scale' going forward now, is it? I'll be bummed if ours stops sync'ing at some point.
if you want a more technical review of the Windows beta, read this: http://docker-saigon.github.io/post/Docker-Beta/
But note that beta 8 was released a few days after that review and already introduced some changes.
Well no shit; there's the Geneva convention and shit that makes practices like torture and such illegal. The US can waltz right over that though, because what is anyone going to do?
I think what I like best about this piece is the way in which it emphasizes the cultural homogeneity of Silicon Valley and the tension that enjoying and benefiting from that culture creates. It's absurd that each of these companies present itself as radical, creative, and free-thinking, when it's just another start-up with standing desks and Nerf guns lying around. Even the snack selection is stereotypical "the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars."

At the same time, the more relaxed, casual, and less hierarchical corporate structures that these companies have adopted can be very rewarding. While they haven't yet nailed the work-life balance considerations for many employees, more comfortable environments may end up fostering more productive, more inclusive teams (albeit there's a long way to go w/r/t diversity in tech) [1].

Just a plug: I've been a subscriber to n+1 for a long time, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it on the front page of Hacker News. It's a fantastic publication.

1. http://nyti.ms/1oCxUeF
I sometimes use ExpanDrive on OSX, which is a nice GUI wrapper for what I believe to be something like fuse sshfs:

http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/

It works well, though there can be noticeable latency sometimes, even when saving very small files. It can also mount S3, FTP, Dropbox, etc.
THE END OF (NUMERIC) ERROR AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN L. GUSTAFSON
> Right, but the point of the article is that they were doing it to the wrong person. That doesn't mean it does not work. Causation does not imply correlation.

I think this case make it obvious that it's impossible to tell if the person you're torturing has the information you're looking for and is withholding it, or simply doesn't have the information. That's a textbook definition of "ineffective".
I'm not familiar with unblock-us. Would a VPN service work, or have they figured out how to block those too? I would imagine that to do that, they'd have to keep lists of IP addresses associated with the VPN services they want to block.
> practically it will render som unpleasant surprises.

You take for granted that Dropbox hasn't considered these issues. Why?
I worked on a massively threaded signal processing application a few years ago. We manually set all of our thread affinities due to the issues raised in this article. We were also using the real-time kernel and round robin scheduler, though, so we had other considerations as well.
I'd argue that all code should be fairly defensive.
Security flaws in the end are just bugs. And defensive programming helps reduce bugs.
As for toy projects - you never know when your futzing around becomes a full blown product.

Obviously, security is always a tradeoff. I'm not suggesting you implement 2 factor authentication for your wedding invite website. But it does always help to consider:
1. How can this code break, if someone accidentally misuses it?
2. How can this code break, if someones intentionally misuses it?

Very often, thinking about #2 can help resolve a lot of things overlooked in #1.
Thanks, both great points!
Well unless it is abandoned - you're pushing it right now. And who is this targeting? For me as a "techie" the softpedia doesn't really instil any confidence and actually kind of makes it look cheap.

Actually, I think for older software it is fine for some reason. But in this case it looks strange.
Dropbox has actually had Selective Sync for years. The whole part about the metadata being cached locally and a seamless experience at file system level is new though.

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4456
They were common, and they still happen, rarely. Game of Thrones got in trouble for one last year: http://time.com/70829/game-of-thrones-rape/

edit: http://www.ifc.com/2011/09/straw-dogs-sex-the-remake-of-a-ra...
I am obligated to post a link to BazQux[0], which completely nails the RSS reading experience that Google Reader once had. It's absolutely worth the $20/yr subscription.

I am still amazed that it doesn't seem to get any discussion or attention whenever these "favorite RSS reader" threads come up.

[0]: https://bazqux.com
"Here are eight cases cited in the report where the C.I.A. made the case that its tactics thwarted plots and led to the capture of terrorists, and how the committee's report undercut those accounts."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-tor...

Full report:

http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/senate-inte...

Torture is illegal under the Eight Amendment. The Supreme Court has affirmed this multiple times.

If we're going to go against legal precedent as well as international convention, the burden of proof for torture's effectiveness is on torture advocates. The evidence provided does not stand up to scrutiny.
Transgender Teen Suspended for Using “Wrong” Bathroom
I know nothing about Elixir but I found this curious "You can also see an extra tiny optimization performed by the regex engine — notice that the final string uses the ampersand from the original string, rather than from the replacement string".
OK, but why does it need 4 pointers instead of 3 with the beginning slice length incremented (7 bytes)?
> A word loaded to mean 'undeserved advantage'.

"Undeserving" is not part of any definition of privilege I've ever seen, not even the dictionary definition. I think that's just your personal bias against a meaning that isn't the same that others are intending.
It's okay if it's not worth it for you, but do you think there could be any significantly sized group of people that it could be worth it for? If so, perhaps there is good reason for Singapore to have this approach. The alternative is trying to force everyone in the world to live the way you want to.

You don't have to want to live in Singapore, but you should accept that other people might want to.
A couple of usability questions that don't appear to have been addressed in the video:

- on a Mac, if I press the spacebar to show the quick preview and start navigating down the list, will this trigger downloading of all the files?

- how are older files cached? Do we simply unselect devices to remove them locally? At least with Selective Sync, I can remove files eating up my hard drive (very important on devices with 128GB SSDs/HDs or less). It's much clearer in terms of what's on disk and how to manage it with Selective Sync. With Project Infinite, I'm wondering how one would remove files locally without fully deleting the file across the Dropbox folder for every other team member.
My link [2] actually has a video of Ariely talking about this stuff.
My entire Prepress department does. Granted, we use DAM systems instead of cloud storage, but some are over the wire. Some assets can easily reach 10GB or more (each).
Nest was $3.2B (https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2014/0113.html) not "just" a (1) billion.
Actually, whenever Singapore is mentioned, you see that from the ignorant plus more thorough responses citing brutal oppression with actual case studies that floats to the top. Just like now. Then you see a bunch of Singapore promoters, sometimes in Singapore, that show up to start talking about minor points, safe streets, and how they have plenty of mindless activities like restaurants and gyms. They will always ignore the worst stuff or act like it doesn't matter.

Whereas I know dissenters in Singapore tip-toeing around trying to improve the status quo. They talk of how people nearly drop dead during the mandatory P.E.. They tell me the propaganda they hear all year about Singapore in school and how seeing other country's strengths contradicts it as adults. Many end up zealots, though, for whatever regime changed everything a long time ago. They mention they have no safety against government and they fear disappearing if they threaten their regime. They usually know plenty instances of corruption but media seems to suppress it. All of them have been in menial jobs working unpaid overtime with deceitful salespeople and such like we see in America. Worst, there seems to be little innovation due to follow the leader mentality outside of a few startup havens.

All in all, sounds like a terrible place to live for people with bright minds, wanting to purse diverse activities that are meaningful, or trying to improve country's future. I never read Gibson but have experienced that kind of thing in U.S.'s most corrupt & high-police areas. Always trying to lock-up minorities or dissenters ("trouble-makers") for "greater good." Funny thing is, I actually live in and around a murder capital here with more safety and control over my life thanks to my few rights than my Singaporean friends have. Security against thugs is so easy I've taught it in hour seminars. Securing your future against corrupt governments with unlimited power, widespread surveillance, and media complicity is impossible.

I wouldn't operate in Singapore unless I cut a protection deal with the government to sort of let me be me without consequences. Not sure of odds of that. So, I stay out of it despite its safety, hardworking people, and cheap labor that corporations love.
The "reasonable argument" for privilege isn't that you grew up rich or whatever, but rather that there are negative assumptions made about others that are not made about you. For example, one of my best friends is a doctor, who moved into hospital administration, and from there into financial advising and investing. He's very wealthy and successful. And if he's pulled over by the cops, he has to worry that they'll assume he stole his nice car. He has to deal with people crossing the street to avoid walking by him, or clutching their bags with fear in their eyes. Why? Because he's black.

Not having people assume you're a violent thug because of the color of your skin is privilege.

My wife is a high-level expert in e-commerce, and has been a professional analyst in the field for 15 years. I've watched men carefully explain to her how credit card processing works as if she was an idiot, gently correcting her when she disagrees or contradicts them.

Not getting mansplained about your own area of expertise is privilege.

Does this help?
The feature it's pretty convenient, but knowing that they don't provide proper encryption and that the US government and/or Dropbox employees can access to my data it's a no-go. Also I don't like to pay for Condoleezza Rice salary. http://www.drop-dropbox.com/