skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are surrounded by some amount of randomness, but quite a bit of complexity and chaotic/nonlinear behavior that can look like randomness but does in fact contain information.

A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.

Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.

E.g. : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6844/abs/412331a0...

I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.

(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)
Interesting. I didn't know about that limit.

I suppose you can take it a bit further by batching requests (says up to 100 changes per request) but that would complicate distributed apps where the requests aren't coming from one coordinator.
I did a little judo when I was young (only 3 years IIRC, from 6 to 9) and it saved my life many many times, falling from horses, bikes, motorbikes, anything really, at reasonable speeds and with almost no protection.

When falling from something that's moving, you will continue to move when you hit the ground; to limit hurting yourself you need to roll and not skid. The way to do that is to put yourself into a ball, and to do it by instinct (as of course you don't have time to think about it).
Thanks! The problem with more compact designs is decreased wheelbase, which affects stability at speed. We've prototyped some, though.
"In Search for Cures" I ate two Big Macs today.
The Best ECommerce Platforms for Your Business
Fighting Cancer by Understanding PD-L1
> ... most of the stuff I did back at university ...

I would place that kind of programming in a different class. Small, "one-shot" problems probably don't need a lot of planning.

That's the experimental / exploratory class of problems where you're not interested in the correctness of the process but results. AKA risk reduction.

For the other classes where there is "The Process" of validation, testing and approvals, a little planning up front saves some churn on the back end.

I have the same concern about iterative development. Seems like a lot of teams jump right into a coding sprint/iteration/cycle w/o a plan.
Off-topic, but I've always felt like "silver bullet" isn't a very good metaphor to use because we keep using it sarcastically, as above. Wasn't the silver bullet the only way to stop a werewolf? Or does the phrase come from somewhere else?

Anyway maybe something like magic bean or some other "looks useful but turned out not to be" metaphor would be better, not sure which one though.
Legislation and regulation are necessary, and they tend to help to keep the really big boys in check, but how can you actually tell if a company is actively engaged in compiling profiles on you or not? I can ask my browser to pass the Do-Not-Track header indicating my objection that practice, but why would a company specialised in tracking users respect that header?

I have tried to convince the Dutch banks I use (ING and ABN AMRO, i.e., big banks) to stop employing tracking beacons and third party tracking services on their secured internet banking environments, but the responses I get range from 'yeah we need those to improve your customer experience' to 'you are welcome to block these trackers yourself' (I already do, thank you very much).
Android Wear 2.0 Developer Preview
As someone who has written code to detect bots, exactly this. We don't care about fingerprinting the user, we care about fingerprinting to verify the user agent you claim to be.
When somebody says humans don't compute, I like this picture :

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/computer_w...

Let's call it "ipython before computers", or "excel before computers" if you must.
Bc iptables would run locally on each server. So you would access localhost:8000 which iptables would auto load balance to the nodes consul had. There is no central iptables server
Orderly JSON looks very similar to protocolbuffer
Deploying Content Security Policy on Square Cash
They could switch to brakes that drain energy. That's a lot more work I'm sure, and maybe they needed an MVP. But for version 2 I'd think they'd make it a priority.

I think this board is really cool but until they fix this I'm not in the market.
It's a mix. I do get those same positive interactions too. Especially when I skate by parks with families. Lots of former skater dads want a spin!

I think the negative situations just stand out more.
Speaking as a former ICPC competitor/coach, I think the aspect that most directly translated to professional software development was getting practice at quickly writing and reviewing code for performance and correctness.

A bit of background about ICPC, for those who don't know: It's a team competition. You have 3 contestants on a team, but only one computer on which to write, test and submit your code. Most of the work of solving a problem is usually done in your brain or on paper, so typically, one person will be coding at a time while the other two think about problems and get ready to rotate to the keyboard.

But although the primary scoring criterion is number of problems solved, you also get penalized for time taken and incorrect attempts. So it's really important to be able to glance over someone else's shoulder and notice things like "oh, there's an off-by-one error in that loop condition" or "you forgot about such-and-such an edge case".
Wire doesn't even encrypt chats and images, only calls.
Eero x Product Hunt
This is the absolute best long read I've seen on the Colorado River and California water rights.

Interestingly, many forms of water conservation for agriculture actually have a negative impact. If farmers keep the same allocation but use it more efficiently, they're able to grow more, and there's less runoff so less groundwater recharge and less return to the river.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...
About time! I've been seriously annoyed a number of times when doing text/data entry (on this very site!) where somehow I removed focus from the input, and then tried to erase some text, only to find it going back a page, and my input is gone when I browse back forward (this problem is exacerbated by inputs that don't exist until Javascript creates them from some page event).

When using a laptop with a sensitive touchpad, this can get really bad.
[The page load was painfully slow for me.]

The game appears to be sponsored by Deutsch Telekom (T-mobile).

The video explainer is here: http://www.seaheroquest.com/en/what-is-dementia

The goal is to research how people navigate and to use that data to understand dementia.
Ah Inferno!

Did anyone make any headway porting/redoing the browser plugin to Mozilla? There were some mumblings about GSoC for that not that long ago.
Which doesn't help in the most common case (for me): editing down a URL that's way too long on sites that love to jam absolutely everything they can think of into a query string, extending the URL many screen widths out to the right.
How are two sites sharing this fingerprint information in a way that says "yup, this is the same guy?" Like is there some sot of cabal of evil advertising companies running a bunch of sites, or what?
Great title! That's how you get clicks :-)
I posted this in reply to another comment, but it's the best long read on the Colorado River, and water in the West, in general, that I've ever seen. It's well worth your time if you haven't read it and you want to understand byzantine water rights rules.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...
Some guys were talking about buying out TSLA and placing Musk at the helm. Honestly anybody else. Somebody else deserves a chance. The idea that this guy is the BEST candidate for CEO of the largest company in the world is preposterous.
Sounds good, although I have something of a weight problem as well and so I bet it would struggle with me. Maybe this can be the reward I promise myself if I manage to actually lose weight. Thanks!
The Priming Effect – Your Thoughts, Friends, Environment = Future You
Well, Apple purposely killed Apple Events making them impossible to be sent from sandboxed apps. While I'm not a fan of JavaScript as a language, it has the advantage to be commonly known and I think if it gets more used for app scripting it can be powerful. Sketch seems to be moving from CocoaScript to JS…
> Now, looking at a device like this, I automatically compare it to something like a tractor or plow. It demands constant connectivity to Google HQ... it's full of secret code... it requires, for its basic paradigm, a private company's acquisition of staggering amounts of surveillance... and so on.

As someone who used to write code for snowplows, they're also becoming quite centralized. Location, plow settings, salt per mile/km usage and other values are tracked in real time from the municipal office. Municipalities are increasingly strapped for cash, so performing real-time data analysis on their services can save them quite a bit of money in the long run.
Why I don't care about productivity
Qwiki 0.3 (build 7) has been released for open testing
A while back while looking for solution to this, someone told me a way to map splat-Q to "invert video," which is a great way of training yourself out of hittig splat-Q.
The article recommends going to Fake Name Generator (tm) to get a random online identity. The page is not encrypted and looks very, very fishy.

That page recommends going to Social Security Number Registry. Again, an unencrypted totally scammy looking page. If you enter a random name and select a random state, it will 'verify' that your identity has been stolen. Then, if you click on 'Validate', you can enter your SSN (unencrypted, of course).

I don't even know how to code, and this is a news site for hackers? This tripe makes it to the top of the front page?
Or just let the user decide at the start of a private session. Firefox already does this with tracking protection. If Mozilla decides to improve tracking protection at the cost of usability (such as hiding you preferred language), than offering that as a toggle-able option on that page might be sufficient to empower the user to decide for on his own.
EEOC report on diversity in tech
I'm quite the opposite opinion and use Backspace to go back extensively, because it means that I can browse the web with one hand on my laptop with trackpoint.

If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.

P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this Lenovo was among the first things I did). But still, they really should make this an option...
This was my personal pet peeve for a while. I even half-assed a spec language called RELAX JSON that I bet Bray would like. [0]

But then I realized that what I had made up was very similar to type definitions in TypeScript!

Especially if you use `interface` and not `class`, TypeScript gives you a lot of flexilibity in specifying data structures. You get optional values, typed arrays, typed but mixed arrays, references to other named types that you define yourself, and so on. Really, it's all you need and more. The only downside is that you can spec stuff that you can't put in JSON, such as Date objects. As a schema language, that is a bit weird. But just don't spec it like that! :-D

I'll post some examples in a reply when I'm back behind a computer.

[0]https://github.com/eteeselink/relax-json
Deadliest school massacre remembered 89 years later
Resistive dissipation like trains.
Nice! I'll try that for sure. I'll be improving it over the next few weeks but wanted to get this out for the deadline!
Pagination, Infinite-Scrolling and Load-More Buttons
Totally got what you mean as a Chinese. I wish we had more truly skilled explorers than overwhelming number of ladder climbers.
The tyranny of the vocal minority.

It's a race to the bottom.
I felt this pain when working with JSON APIs. I ended up writing my own literate JSON spec tool that looked like JSON but was in fact Python:

{"name": str, "age": int, "groups": [str]}

The template has the same 'shape' as the expected JSON, making it very easy for humans to grok.

We put all these specs into a file that acted both as documentation and as the actual Python code we used as templates to validate the real JSON. The doc was always accurate ;)

It turned into a full-blown dynamic type checking thing for Python, but it's still most useful for checking JSON APIs at runtime: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan/1.0.8

If you validate the JSON with an obiwan template, you can avoid having to type-check it as you parse it.

Obiwan syntax would be easy to use in other languages, but we never needed to try.
The idea that anyone simply LEAVES THE HOSE RUNNING while washing their car, or uses a fountain that constantly pours fresh water, simply astounds me
I've taken hard falls on concrete before. It's not fun per se, but it's way better than reacting by posting an arm and having said arm break. Road rash + bruises > pins in arm.
There was a Firefox patch posted just last week to make Linux's backspace key behave like Windows and OS X:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986982#c6
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438
I've lost HN comment data 10-15 minutes into a reply by using a laptop with an overly sensitive touchpad. Multiple times. Not something I particularly enjoy, and that's just a single input field.
What about things like axes in XPath?
Laws are usually written as a reaction to excess. But excess is measured as a distance between two points, and both are able to move: actions can be more extreme, and our judgements can be more or less harsh.

I think things could change quite dramatically if there was a moral panic around it. A few more scandals - something personal that the voting public can really relate to, rather than something vague and distant and somewhat comforting to some people, like mass surveillance.
Actually, Jerry Brown has been very prudent about both spending AND water.
OK, we changed the title from "The Father of Modern Metal", which threw the thread out of whack. (It's amazing how sensitive these things are.) Let's discuss the article now.
I was studying Neural Networks in grad school (advisor was statistician from Bell Labs) at Rutgers and took a bunch of classes with Jerry, so I had these debates on a daily basis.

Unless you summarize Chemero's critique, though, I can't really respond to it.

Fodor didn't claim that connectionist models couldn't encode symbolic manipulation, just that the pertinent activity from the perspective of "thought" is symbolic manipulation. So he (I believe) would have said, maybe the connectionist can explain it or maybe he can't and who cares.

He did care that "concepts" were not statistical entities. They were "atomic" and basically tokens for the language of thought. So, Jerry argued, the concept of "Lion" could not be complex i.e. composed of cat, claws, teeth etc.
It's great to learn about the process. Sounds amazing. I agree that JS syntax is not a selling point, from what I read the approachability of a wider audience is. However I agree that care should be taken not to fall to easily in stripping away most of the ML interesting things and end up with everything looking the same. Go, Rust, Swift, JS it's all about the same. For different languages their "user interface" is extremely similar. I think that with your proposals you have shown a great suitability to discover the balance between being different and being accesible, I don't think they have to be opposed as many language designers seem to be convinced.
If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be bad for business though.
I dunno... I'm not Rob Pike, but I could basically describe computing from the quantum level to the solar system dynamics and electromagnetic influences of a robotic interplanetary craft.

Then again, I've been coding for ~25 years, am an avid amateur astronomer, and have a degree in physics, so maybe the moral here is that some things just just take more time to master, beyond those first 6 weeks in a coding camp learning how to put together your first jQuery.

:-)
Only LPs have true access to fund returns but there are a lot of examples of falsehoods being claimed by Taleb et al;

http://www.businessinsider.com/wait-before-you-invest-in-nas...

Plus the fact that he started an new fund in 2009 that essentially was relying on hyperinflation to make their returns;

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124380234786770027#mod=testMod
This was done deliberately after lots of user uproar - it used to auto select the contents of the URL bar AND set the primary selection. This meant that anytime you did anything with the URL bar, it would wipe your primary selection, which was pretty annoying.

What Linux users wanted was for it to behave normally - i.e. not auto select, but set primary selection if you selected something in the URL. The auto select was apparently non-negotiable, so we ended up with the current compromise.

It does set the primary selection if you manually select some/all of the URL though.
Wow that sure is beautiful, and what luck! Does anyone know what the red flash was right in the middle, just above the water?
Anecdotes don't make data, but I'm 36 and recently bought a regular old skateboard so I could keep up with my kids on scooters/bikes. I get some strange looks from other parents and my friends give me some shit but it's all in good fun (they're secretly jealous I think!).

I would definitely ride a boosted board if I could justify the $1500.
I'm not sure temps have been that far above average this spring, but we've had a lot of late season rain which fell on the snowpack and accelerated melt. So, it's not great, but it IS additional precip.....
I still think C/C++ needs to be in the mix there somewhere(or even better, assembly). Even if you don't write them day-to-day knowing how pointers and memory works can be invaluable.
This is the best/worst product testimonial ever.
if the battery can be recharged on the move(e.g. you're on a slow down slope, or just leveraging your body weight on the board, use these natural forces to recharge the battery), then it could be "revolutionary"
YES YES YES YES! I just read the title and the first line of the post but this is super exciting!
OK, we'll use your suggestion above.
With Time Warner, there is an absolutely impenetrable firewall between customer service and backend/upstream network engineering. Rolling a truck appears to be the absolute ceiling on what a call center employee can do.
I would guesstimate that 75%+ of the "value" of my PhD came from casually interacting with smart people (classmates, postdocs, profs) working on related topics.

These same people go to conferences, but they are busy there--they have talks to see, posters to visit, and friends/collaborators/funders to catch up with. In contrast, when you're "around", it's possible to muse and mull things over with the grad student waiting for her turn in the darkroom or the postdoc brewing coffee. "Hey, did you see this paper?" or "How do we know that <X>, anyway?"

I'd worry that a part-time student would miss out on a lot of these opportunities; by definition, they're around only part-time and most of that time is "business time."
I totally missed linking the article, thanks for linking it. I quoted a part that quotes the law, but the actual law is normally too cryptic. I'll link newspaper and law in the future as I agree it's important for some people.
Browser caches are extremely unreliable and pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

On some mobile platforms the browser cache can be replaced entirely by some heavy pages!

Plus, even if we assumed "cached forever" actually worked for a significant amount of time, it still doesn't solve the problem that I am hoping to solve. I know many websites use the Roboto font. By installing it I no longer need to ever download that font again. It doesn't matter if it's the first time i'm seeing the site, if they use a CDN, if they link to the bold/light/regular version or their own packed font, etc...

I understand that it's a privacy issue, but I'm hoping there is a way to solve that privacy issue without removing that feature.
I can confirm. Itmo normally has at least 3 equivalent teams at any time that compete against each other during the regional stage. There are also specialized study groups and slight preferences (exam and schedule-wise) for those who are serious about competing in team contests.
...which is just HTML then.
I don't know how many books there are on those topics. A lot of the data structures in higher level competitive programming problems have pretty niche uses. It might be best to look at papers instead. Here's one on the Fenwick/Binary Indexed Tree:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=503...
I found one (windows based) a while back, but cannot for the life of me remember the name... really liked it. It was similar to XML Notepad from MS, but for JSON. Unfortunately the name of it was NOT "JSON Notepad" which would have made it far easier to find again. :-(

Something that would also be nice, if anyone comes up with such a beast would be the ability to edit a multi-record json file... effectively each line is a single JSON, and an LF at the end of each line/record. I've used this structure a few times. Given that JSON will typically encode special characters allowing for single-line representation by default, it's worked really well, especially combined with gzip as a stream for archiving data.

If anyone knows what that program was, would love to find it again.
The perils of federated protocols (2016)
Duplicating my comment below for the the sake of visibility, the OED defines "animal" as:

a. A living organism which feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and a nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli; any living creature, including man.

b. In ordinary or non-technical use: any such living organism other than a human being.

In a technical context, such as a scientific journal, I expect that "animal" would include humans. In the headline of a science-focused mainstream media article, I think it's ambiguous. Given that the context, I think it's clear they're using the non-technical definition of the word.
> Yet you don't see anyone changing those.

Except for (guess who?) Chromium...

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=255
Bootcamps vs. College
With your internal IP I can guess the brand of your router, determine if you are a home user or on a corp network, guess how many other machines might be on your network.

I can also assume that your router lives at .1 or .254 or similar, and use your browser to pivot and brute force the password while you browse cat pictures.
Space Invaders: A Burglar’s Guide to the City
Even stupider are sites that require exactly N characters. Also, they usually pick small N for that as well.
Or use @font-face and detect calls to a remote URL — which happens when the named local font is missing:

@font-face {
font-family: "Roboto";
src: local("Roboto"), url("https://example.com/user-does-not-have-roboto") format("woff2");
}