skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I left my PhD position only a couple of months in, to take up a job offer at a startup half way across the planet. It was one of the toughest decisision I'd ever made, but I have no regrets. My rewards and experiences that came from that, have been without a doubt, incredible.

But I do still yearn for academia. A part-time PhD is something that I've thought about often, but I've found it a little tough to find anything substantial on how one goes about getting started. It was such a smooth transition the first time around, I had a fully-funded position lined up before I finished my Masters.

My educational background was in Physics. My Master's was in computational physics, but all my software knowledge was self-taught, from a young age.

I would love to research getting into a Computer Science PhD, but I don't know where to start. Especially given the time since I was in my Masters, 6 years ago now, and being a different field, is it viable? Realistically, should I be looking at a part time CS MSc beforehand?
Individual PyCharm is $90/73/51 for the first three years, $51/yr after. Corporate-purchased licenses are $200/159/119 with a $119 tail.

Doesn't change your point much, but it is cheaper than you indicated (even for corporate, if the subscription is continuously renewed).
In Bitcoin, almost all the people use the same script, so it's enough to review it. (I think the only problem is a small malleability.) And when a big problem is discovered almost all the people will change in a short time.

In Ethereum is more encourage to write smart weird custom contracts, so many people write a custom contract with only one pair of eyes to review it, so it's more probable to find errors.
This is great to hear. It must spread quickly to correct one of many bugs in the 2016 version of US laws.
They competed with modern bacteria and lost?
Online School Enriches Affiliated Companies If Not Its Students
> He seems to have completed it in 5-6 years, which is average for full-time PhD students, so my question is what got left out?

He did his PhD in the UK, where 3 years is the norm for full-time.

UK PhDs are shorter for a number of reasons.

First we specialise earlier - normally just three related subjects from age 16 - I specialised on computation, discrete maths and physics - and from your first day at university you will only study your major and no other subjects such as liberal arts requirements.

Secondly, US students are still doing classes and exams while they're a PhD student. In the UK you are expected to be researching from the first day of your PhD and you don't do any classes or exams which take away time from your research.

Thirdly, US students spend I believe a lot of time doing things like being a teaching assistant, which have nothing to do with their research. I only did a couple of hours of teaching during my whole PhD. It seems crazy to me to spend time doing work like grading undergraduates when you are supposed to be making perhaps the major research contribution of your life!

Finally, I think there's a culture in the UK that you are released from your PhD as soon as you can show you can do it. So if you publish three top tier papers in two years then what else is there to prove?
Use HTTPS: https://home.google.com/
Do you choose them in the home of a friend you're visiting?

Do you choose them in the office you work in?

Do you choose them in the store you're shopping in?

Do you choose them in the cafe you're talking in?

Do you choose them at the bus stop you're waiting in?

Do you choose them in the transit you're riding in?

Do you choose them in the car-share you're riding in?

That element of choice can close very quickly.

Sensors will and are turning up in light switches, lights, appliances, stereos, video and audio systems, advertising displays, and more.

Unless such devices are required, say, by law, to comply with some form of universal off switch.
Gear VR is only an additional $99. You have to have one of the select few phones it works with, but I don't think it's any more fair to count that in the cost of the setup than it is to count the PC in the cost of the desktop VR system, or the house in the cost of the roomscale VR system.
Moxie's essay is strong and djb's point is not: a "federated network" with a centrally controlled app that updates automatically might as well not be federated at all: at that point having multiple servers hardly matters. Who cares about running your own server if you can't run your own client?

Moxie has put into words what I've been thinking myself for a long time - the old federated protocols from the 1990s have been slowly dying off (with email being the main holdout, unless you count gmail). And the reason is that they just don't evolve. There's no incentive to evolve them, there's no organisational structure to evolve them, creating them takes huge effort AND they suffer from all sort of hidden ideological constraints that would prevent them from e.g. doing a partnership with Uber beause Uber is a corporation and an open protocol isn't. But users don't care about that.
That video was excruciating. Someone at Google thought it was funny? And why was the main actor doing an impersonation of Cam from Modern Family?

That aside, what is the point of this page? The small print says:

No Purchase Necessary. The opportunity to submit a name will begin at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (“PT”) on 18 May 2016 and end at 11:59 p.m. PT on 8 June 2016. This is solely intended to be for entertainment purposes; the name(s) that you submit will not be judged and there will be no prizes or compensation awarded to any participant.
Facebook launches interactive map for Live Video
Didn't Feynman win a Nobel Prize for showing that particles are always most likely to take the most efficient path?

Anyway, Occam's razor is about preferring theories, not physical laws. If two theories match a given set of observations, there is no objective reason to prefer one over the other. But it is easier to work with a simpler theory, so scientists prefer it out of self-interest.

Put another way, if there is no way to distinguish between a LUCA and continuous abiogenesis that looks exactly like a LUCA, then there's no reason to care that continuous abiogenesis might be occuring.

But if you believe there is a way to prove that continuous abiogenesis is occuring, then by all means conduct the observation and publish it.
Someone tell me a bot I should try to become convinced bots are the next big thing.
Agreed.

Hangouts didn't catch on because it was delivered as a group video calling service that then also did (or perhaps became about?) text, even becoming the default SMS app on Android.

It also hasn't caught on because it is overly complex. With any other video calling service you call a person and they have a conversation with you - of you initiate a group conference and off you go.

Hangout needs you to invite someone, but then what - you're still having this video broadcast by yourself? Actually, is it a broadcast? Can other people just join in? Apparently they could depending on your settings (in the past), but not this seems to have been separated to 'Hangouts On Air'? Who knows, I don't see why I should bother looking into it when there are clearer options available.

I love me some Google, so don't misunderstand me, and Duo is a big step in the right direction for the average users experience compared to Hangouts.
It definitely is.. I have a newish Samsung smart TV and the streaming quality was always garbage. I got an Apple TV and HBO and Netflix consistently stream at their highest bitrates via the same 150mbps internet connection.
It's kind of disheartening to see how much negativity gets heaped towards VR on HN lately.
There is also his "Why is Life the Way it Is?" talk he held last year at the Royal Institution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLcWfecmZhE
I posted a comment above. But I did the same thing in the US. It took me 8 years. I had an adviser that would not compromise on quality of publications and expected me to publish in good conferences/journals.

Now, I don't have hundreds or thousands of citations to my work. But they are there and increasing even for papers I published 8 years ago.
Finance industry creates 4% of jobs and takes 25% of profits
I think thats mostly an illusion, and the costs for that "last mile" of quality is huge.

Think of it this way, if the software works for 99.9% of people, that's still 800k people that can experience undesired behavior. You hear "everyone has this problem!" but in aggregate, its not. Yet 800k is still a lot of people! Yet its 0.1% of iOS devices sold!

In short, what you are asking for is easy to say with words, but in reality its pretty hard to do, even if you have "more money than a nation" or whatever comparison people are using.
Fortunately for him, the society of the Federation isn't driven by greed and personal profit seeking anymore, so they can focus on doing things the right way - like making the starship computer process voice recognition instead of sending it God knows where via subspace.
Don't these contracts existing in a market? If one contract is flawed won't customers flock to another competing one? This would create an incentive for quality control.

Or is the proposed problem that these flaws are unavoidable or too costly to prevent? I could see the high-investment cost being a deterrent for developers to adopt the platform. In general the contract code should be as simple as possible and memory safe.

Either way, the sample reference in the article is not very useful. This is a bad time to be looking for quality as this is extremely early and very much in the experimental stage of the idea. It will, of course, deserve scrutiny when it gets more mature though.
> WhatsApp makes a lot of sacrifices to have encryption by default, like no backup of messages

Small clarification: WhatsApp actually does seem to have a backup feature, at least on my Android phone. I was prompted by the application to enable it just this morning.
From what I've seen in the news, it was just a chain of poor business decisions made by the company when they decided to expand and dumped a bunch of cash into side projects that had to essentially be written off eventually.
Yes, I'm aware of that hypothesis. But everywhere, forever?

It can also be we'll never know, as the life on Earth apparently existed for so long, billions of years, since the times the whole Earth was completely different than we know now (from the life's point of view).

Which is also fascinating, as on the Universe level we can actually observe the glow of the Big Bang, which happened much earlier.
Kerry Meets Egypt’s Leader, and Where Are Reporters? Corralled at the Airport
Banks no longer have prop trading desks as a result of the Volcker rule.
It's probably why they have their own memory.
I don't understand the cultural reference and I'll assume it's irrelevant, but the Oracle vs Google saga made me very very cautious when it comes to clean room reimplementations of public bits, and if I were to earn money with such a library, I'm afraid I'd need more than Moxie's tweet.
I don't understand. I don't know Paul that well, but I'd consider him a friend. Are you critical of him? Would he roughly agree with your take?
Project management basics for freelance designers
It was also a reaction to corruption amongst officers walking a fixed beat. Community policing is all well and good, under you realize that having only a handful of officers dedicated to a small area is a breading ground for corruption and cover-up. Using vehicles means that stations can be larger, more centralized/supervised, with officers rotated amongst different areas. But I doubt any former officer writing a book would have mentioned such things.
From the Decryptocat post:

The bug that lasted 347 days was the confusion between a string and an array of integers. This made the ECC private keys ridiculously small because they passed a string of decimal digits into a function expecting an array of 17, 15 bit integers. Each character was considered an element in the array. So each of those "15 bit integers" were only the values 0 to 9 (3.32 bits). Also the least significant 3 bits are zeroed giving you a key space of 210^16 (2^54.15).*

When they fixed that bug the commit message was: "Fix private key format to match curve25518-donna. THIS BREAKS COMPATIBILITY WITH PREVIOUS CRYPTOCAT VERSIONS." Even though this does not break compatibility at all. I don't know if they knew what they fixed and just wanted to slide this under the radar or they legitimately believe that. Both are scary one is violating their principles "Cryptocat is developed under a principle of radical transparency" and the other is just incompetence. There is a blog post by them saying this is inaccurate. Apparently they have too many serious bugs to keep straight. That they don't know which one breaks compatibility. The other error in the change log for version 2.0.42 is a bug where the counter in AES-CTR is reused. This means the first 32 bytes of your messages are easy to decipher with no effort at all. Which breaks compatibility, but everywhere they mention compatibility they say key generation.
Thanks, forbes isn't fond of Ghostery.
> Liquidity means the price is stable not that trades will go through.* Stable prices prevent HFT traders from making money.

No, liquidity means there's limit orders sitting on the market. That is quite literally all liquidity is.

> Stable prices prevent HFT traders from making money.

No they don't, stable prices are good for market makers as it reduces the risk of flipping the spread. You can sit there all day long without prices moving a lick and make bank buying at the bid and selling at the ask getting pad the spread for providing liquidity; this is what HFT's want to do. Directional movement, aka volatility, increases the risk for market makers, aka HFTs as it forces them to predict a direction and makes their trades more risky. Yes, some strategies work better with volatility, but market making is the least risky when price doesn't move at all because you're not making your money from the volatility but from the pocketing the spread over and over.
Thanks for the tip. In this case the JS is performing a very important function, helping us to measure distances to multiple pops, so it is better to stay in. I will forward your point about the domain, but I think there is a reason for that particular domain.
The Hangouts mobile app is also incredibly buggy.
> It's all about data locality.

That's kind of what Movidius says, too, about its Myriad 2 VPU, which is kind of a GPU (SIMD-VLIW) with larger amounts of local memory combined with hardware accelerators.
A Guide to Job Hunting and Tech Interviews
Well that's right, but at one point you're bound to heroku service. Your app will be so deeply configured to work with heroku that migration will take you a lot of time.

With AWS at least you pay cents and then dollars when you scale. Heroku you pay dollars and then thousands.

Working with VPS seems so much better. Hire a freelancing Dev-ops guy to make your provisioning script then when you scale hire an employee for that. VPS change pricing... Change the VPS. Most of them has APIs so scaling can be configured programmatically and monitoring you can use service as new relic.
That's exactly why I wrote "anything in the code itself". Yes, they made a mass commit adding that attribution to every file 9 days ago to conclude a messy lawsuit. That doesn't make the two codebases themselves appear any more related in isolation.

If there's GPL violation and code was copied, there should be some traces of that. Is it truly so unreasonable to ask what those traces were?
But why does this make research on quantum cryptography worthless? Building a system that delivers the full promise of quantum encryption and addresses the weaknesses of the system is the very goal of such research. Classical encryption schemes would never have gotten to the point they are today without this kind of research funding, so why don't we grant this to quantum cryptography as well? And if the method is so fundamentally flawed as some people want to make us believe, why are several dozen research organizations around the world pursuing it?

And why is it a bad thing to talk about applications that seem far-fetched today, like "quantum credit cards"? Blockchain-based currencies were probably also a pretty far-fetched concept 20 years ago, but today they have a fixed place in the currency eco-system.
Seriously? Oracle? Maybe this cultural reference will be clearer:

https://frinkiac.com/gif/S07E18/362795/366966/IExvb2sgb3V0IE...

This is FUD.
Because good enough IMUs and optical systems for positional tracking are hella expensive compared to where in the market this thing is targeted.

There'd need to be either:

- a very expensive IMU in the controller, talking $300-500
- a camera and hefty CPU in the controller,
- a camera and dedicated image processing CPU on the headset

Vive positional tracking works because you control the environment. Oculus positional tracking works because you're already running on a hefty PC. You don't have either of those advantages on mobile, so you're left with either IMU sensor integration or SLAM, both of which are more expensive than $100 to do well and leave processing time for graphics.
What's the point of the test? Watch a video for 10 or more minutes. Same thing.
I'm thinking my nexus will be my last Android device, not decided yet what I want to replace it with but dumb phone is looking likely, I'm either at home, the office or somewhere I can use my laptop so don't really have the need for a tablet, I might been able to google the odd thing now and again when out and about but that's a once or twice a week thing for me.

I've come to resent carrying a phone all the time, I rarely answer it and resent that "I tried ringing but you didn't answer!" whine you get as though it's beyond incredulous that you would ever not answer the phone.
Do the developers have less interest in design patterns?
All of the comparable tools are practically locked into nVidia gpus/CUDA. TensorFlow is rapidly reaching performance parity on that hardware [1] and can now be run on this so it's actually sort of the least locked in framework.

[1] It has been climbing the charts at https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks for example.
Turning Old iPhones into Thousands and Thousands of Surveillance Cameras
Or you could file bug reports with uBlock and Privacy Badger. There's nothing wrong with the Fastly site.
Can Reading Make You Happier?
We've changed the URL from http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2016/04/20/n... to a local newspaper report.
The more social media someone uses, more likely they suffer from depression
Why use an ANKY in the title? Using an ANKY(Acronym no one knows yet) is bad writing, makes readers feel dumb, etc. Google JUST NOW invented that acronym, sticking it in the title like just another word we should understand is absolutely ridiculous.
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Google's Allo runs on the same encryption tech that powers WhatsApp
See the other comment: there is a lot of data that isn't accessed for years at a time, so you're essentially spinning disks for years to save a few seconds of spin up time.

I think he's right - energy is too cheap for this to be a commercially relevant factor to you, but if the true cost of energy was factored in (climate change, the human cost s of the relatively dangerous mining and oil drilling industries, local pollution, etc) then I think that would tip the balance.

Oh well. OK, final suggestion, maybe do it and spin it as a public relations win? :)
"To conclude a messy lawsuit"? They're the ones who filed the lawsuit!
Victory: A Sliver of Light to Be Shed on Patent Case
What If Facebook Gave Us an Opposing-Viewpoints Button?
The only thing protecting you from the CIA are nukes.
So what you need as a hacker is some really good zero-days and some excellent viruses - leashed to your survival.
If that would be done by a lot of people, backing each other up, keeping the digital backbone of society as hostage, something like a justice system could be restored.
OA title image was taken in the Micrarium at the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL. Open to the public and well worth a visit should you happen to live in London. The whole place has a decidedly steam-punk feel with skeletons, brass instruments, and handwritten labels.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology/about/collections/objec...

Now, I shall have to get the book. I've not read much about biology and energy since finding Schroedinger's What is life in the library at school.
> it's impossible to deploy GPUs at scale, let alone ASICs

A bit old but cf. DE Shaw and Anton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)
That client is not at all reliable above about 30Mbps, and the dev just closes all issues about it.
Turbulent times for Formula 1 engines result in unprecedented efficiency gains
I meant ring LWE is not the same problem as SVP. Perhaps I have misunderstood the algorithm but I do not see any lattices in the description of ring LWE. The fact that it's equivalent in hardness doesn't, to my mind, imply it's "lattice based".
That is true. Also, Goldman Sachs is so experienced with conflicts of interest that they are just very good at handling them. You see Goldman Sachs experiences so many conflicts of interest all the time that they have obtained expertise in handling these conflicts that people like me and you cannot even imagine.

The modern Goldman banker is a unique creature with a conscience that is so complex and evolved that he can earnestly and passionately defend two positions that would seem to me and you completely opposite.

... Ok I have stopped laughing now and I am starting to get angry so I might as well get back to work ...
I have a similar view but for different reasons (though I do own an S7 - but for different reasons[0]).

I still want to be like Tony Stark, or captain Picard. I want the cool future stuff. But I came to two realizations - a) it's always cooler in the movies than in real life, but b) even taking that into account, our future sucks compared to theirs. In the movies I like, technology was about empowering people. They were tools. Today, more and more the products are nice looking but barely functional, and sport the minimum subset of features that can be sold to the lowest common denominator.

So take Google Now. Does it recognize voice? Yes, quite well I'd say. Would it be a problem for Google to let you hook up your own actions and data sources to the system, so that you could make yourself a Star Trek environment with a spare tablet attached to a wall? No, it wouldn't. It's an obvious feature. A feature which they - and pretty much everyone else - refuses to provide. Why? Because fuck useful. Lowest common denominator doesn't need that.

[0] - I'm tired of buying shitty hardware. When I change the phone, I prefer to shell out for a top-of-the-line model to be 100% sure it will work fast and stay ahead of the bloat. I learned it the hard way with my first smartphone, which was barely powerful enough to lift its own OS - and trying to connect it to Internet always ended up with having to pull out the battery. I was stuck with it for a couple of years. A smartphone is something I use quite a lot every day, and even little frustrations accumulate.
Could we please not have spammy titles like this? I'd rather not Hacker News turn into Buzzfeed for developers.
Koloab works pretty well if you are okay with activesync. It doesn't do MAPI.
It's easier to imagine that engineers might someday come up with a practical robot chauffeur than to imagine that US federal politics will ever un-bork itself to the extent that reintroducing usable passenger train service might become possible. It's just that much of a mess.