skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i think is point being that if you use up all the water, you're going to have a hard time getting any more. Seems pretty easy to get more money
I thoroughly enjoyed his other book, "Anti-Fragile" and even more enjoy his twitter feed. He may be low on humility factor, but him calling out BS is refreshing, esp. the self-proclaimed vanguards of science whose work in science is filled with holes and/or is sparse.

Read some of the preview chapters, posted here and twitter feed. Fits very well with his writing style and over all theme. I look forward to read this book.
Traces of Ancient Mega-Tsunamis Discovered on Mars
If you are thinking conceptually about DIYing yours, a recent speech I gave may be of use, "Three guidelines for excellent resumes" https://www.weisisheng.cn/blog/2016/3/three-guidelines-for-e...

We are a professional resume editing, interview coaching and academic applications prep firm serving China. We can be found on Taobao, Weidian, Weibo and Wechat. Our clients are both Chinese looking to get into multinationals based in-country or applying to firms abroad and expats. Feel free to reach out. Best, V.
If you use Firefox or Iceweasel, you can disable most of those apis in about:config or user.js. For example, media.peerconnection.enabled = false, to disable WebRTC. dom.battery.enabled = false for battery, etc.
I don't understand your reasoning about this. It's obviously not a big deal that the technology might be a sham. Who cares about the investors losing money.

It's a huge problem that they provided bogus results to patients.

Here's a simple mechanism they could have used to develop their testing technology: While doing the pilot research on the new technology, build up an excellent lab practice using existing tech. Once the pilot tech is ready for wider testing, start using those delicious VC bucks to offer patients a trade; in exchange for a lower price on the excellent traditional testing, they allow you to use their sample to test the new tech against the existing tech.

So the moonshot doesn't requires exposing patients to any additional risk at all.
surely this introduces a precedent for defence lawyers too though?
"My client did not buy the drugs. My client's money bought the drugs. If my client has no standing in civil forfeiture then he also has no case to answer in criminal proceedings"
Right, but that only means you generate less revenue while selling at a loss.
Type-based aliasing in C
Some application want access to the battery info as they might want to disable some functionality in case your battery runs low. It would be smarter if instead of giving exact battery level it will get a callback once the battery runs low.
Yes, and the end clients many people have been using don't support end-to-end encryption. So, we haven't all been using a e2e encrypted system already. We've been using a system over which e2e can be layered, and very few have been layering that over it. And many using it in a way where even with an e2e protocol, it wouldn't be secure, since they are using an third-party, remotely provided client that can be changed without their notice (webmail).
That presentation makes a funny assumption that it's dynamic languages that do that. Haskell is nearly as far from dynamic as possible, with all the same advantages w.r.t. patterns.
Sadly, it seems that most of the java devs who created these monstrosities learned the wrong lessons.

As far as I can tell they seem to think total lines of code was the real issue (It couldn't be the Abstractions/Patterns, those are good!) and are now on a kick to move as many lines of code as possible to annotations. I call this "Annotation based programming" and any new problem starts with a google search since how any tool kit handles something is pure guesswork.
Immigrants: The Ultimate Entrepreneurs
I totally changed my habit and forgot about pressing Backspace to go back in Ubuntu Firefox. What have you done?? (thanks)
Problem, No Solution Taboo?
He is skeptical about the value of the "software patterns" movement and in a deeper sense critical of software in general.

He asks what standards we should have for software. In architecture, there is the Chartres and myriad other truly beautiful structures—what if we judge software by such standards?

I agree that it's a beautiful and powerful foreword.

To me, another key idea is software as a way of building. It implies that a computer system can be an inhabitable, ownable, sustainable thing made for supporting human life... like a shed, a tractor, a garden, a town...
I worked for the IRB in college and we cooked up some safety tips for doing hybrid research:

Dog hybrid probably trustworthy until act 3, but hyena hybrid trustworthy never. Don't let them find out about the pain implants, they'll remove them. If you make an anti-regression serum, don't let your grad student fall in love with the cat hybrid because he'll destroy the serum.

If you're going to do the experiment on an island (vs e.g. a biohazard facility), keep ships with helicopters circling so you can evac as needed. Carry EPIRBs and lots of radios.
All that work to get 150Wh per day? That's what, 20 cents worth of grid electricity?
I am going to ask about a really basic question: what is fingerprinting?

I had to dig around, from the paper is sounds like a stateless form of tracking.

The audio example made sense:

1. the mic comes on, and it identifies a particular background noise.

2. I browse to another site, or a different page without a cookie.

3. The mic comes on again, matches the ambient noise and realizes I am the same person.

Is that what you mean? If this is the case, how can the "canvas fingerprinting" work since I had to browse to a new page and all the old pixels from the previous page are no longer there.

Anyway, if it is what I understand it to be, then it sounds very interesting. I bet some science fiction author wishes they had though to use it.
A better title: Your Brain is Not an IBM-Compatible PC with 64k of RAM
Product Hunt Shop: Buy Products Through Product Hunt
A Surge of Startups Is Changing Life in Utah
Building a Ruby on Rails App with Animatedgifme
I do similar talks for regular users* and I try to explain how to prioritize risks, and why they might not be focused on what's really important. Purchasing an anti-virus suite and identity theft protection and worrying about online banking are way overrated.

Strong consumer protections exist in many developed nations which limit your liability, it is the banks who stand to lose. No doubt it can be a hassle if your credit card number is stolen, But that card is the bank's property. You just report any fraudulent transactions and get a new card if necessary. The more important thing to protect is your private data, you can't get that privacy back.

Also, NoScript is awesome and I highly recommend people try it. It can be fiddly to get working at first but a surprisingly high percentage of websites work better without having to white-list anything. It also helps with privacy by blocking trackers like Google Analytics, especialy on sites like Troy's which lack a privacy policy and do not provide any warning at all about third-party trackers to site visitors. Pretty new site redesign, same lack of transparency as before.

* By 'regular users' I mean when I say "Try an ad-blocking extension with your browser, add it from the menu" and they say "What is the menu?" and we build their knowledge up from there... . It can be frustrating for all but I highly recommend it as it keeps you grounded and provides balance for the HN bubble I sometimes find myself in.
Until my aging mother can use NoScript and still understand why many websites just don't seem to work, it isn't covering the majority use cases.
How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.
burn...
I totally appreciate this. I really do.

My defence here is that the test matrix for the way it worked already existed.

And the change would have included some unit tests.

Further, neither the way it worked, or was changed to work, is an especially complex mechanism.

Developer explanations in the bug reports for both were not 'this is going to be hard to maintain', but instead were 'having this configurable will confuse users'.
By disabling specific APIs, you would make your browser even more identifiable.

It would only work if many users have disabled exactly the same APIs as you and all other non-disabled APIs don't provide any information useful for fingerprinting.
My brain is not a silicon-based processing unit with a von Neumann architecture. My brain, however, calculates, computes, stores, retrieves...

It's a computer more advanced by evolution than we've built through our understanding of science.
I've never seen a browser do this. It's not clear to me it's a good idea, considering how widely input fields are used behind the scenes. Websites can request that the browser ask before navigating away, but I don't think a browser could reasonably do this automatically without getting it wrong annoyingly often.
You are completely allowed to throw out your tests if you are doing this kind of exploratory programming.

Then, tests are simply your hypotheses.
I agree that much building is standardized and conventional. Architecture, for me, connotes a more ambitious attempt to build creatively and appropriately.

When I say "prescriptive" I suppose I'm referring to the propositional nature of patterns, like an engineer's rules of thumb. The contrast is not so much with individual genius and variation as with the maintenance and passing on of tacit knowledge, which is a mysterious process involving multiple senses and observational learning.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/tacit.pd...

That attitude might sound very conservative, but it's based on my own experience and not any preference for a particular technology or style. Alexander is too reductive and abstract; he's not properly in touch with actual sensory knowledge or craft skills. Or with economical industrial tech, e.g. the work of Lacaton & Vassal which uses cheap industrial building systems to create generous spaces.

I haven't read the book you mention. Informing myself about it now.
Food is a basic need for everyone too and we don't set the price artificially low because of that.

If the poor don't have enough money to buy the things they need, the correct thing to do is to give them money. Not artificially distort the prices of things. Doing the latter misaligns incentives and leads to inefficient allocation of resources.
Why do you think the IMU is expensive? I thought the gear vr and occulus were using the same chip. Care to shed some light?
Actually individual physicians who have treated patients have far far lower requirements, otherwise they would not be able to discuss cases with their colleagues and would have a chilling effect on practice of medicine. What the links show is that its considered acceptable even at level of millions of patients.
Assuming DNA matching has 99% certainity. Are you saying if I get DNA samples from 57 different people and match each of the 57 samples in all possible combination of pairs (so 57*56 tests), then there is 99% chance that I'll find 2 samples which will match?
Someone should do this experiment. I think it's very scary if this is true.
"The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. ...But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge. ...the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them. ...The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous...no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. ...The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world."

RTWT.
Kickstarter campaign to design an anti-matter powered spacecraft
As others have said, the simple way would be to optimize for a time period. However, another way would be to monitor the site and watch the data patterns that emerge. using those data patterns, the ISPs will be able to have a better idea of how to game the test.
If you disable a unique combination of APIs that combination becomes your fingerprint.
For more info: https://medium.com/@rrhoover/the-product-hunt-shop-is-now-op...
I will quote the great philosopher of mind, Jerry Fodor:

1. The computational theory of mind is the only remotely plausible theory of mind.

2. A remotely plausible theory is better than none at all.

We know we literally process symbols because I can literally read a book, and I can literally write something down.
The title is misleading. This is an article about steel, not heavy metal as most people here expect. The subtitle is more informative: "The creation of stainless steel took equal parts metallurgy and perseverance". The father of modern metal is Iommi U+1F918
That's his whole point. It doesn't store or retrieve.
I can't help but wonder if I inhabit the same planet with campaign strategists.

We have a candidate that already have a problem with being perceived as calculating, cold and technocratic. This is just giving more fuel to the adversaries. For probably not that great benefit - the electorate does not appreciate too much being treated like a A/B subject.
Comparison of Deveo, GitLab, GitHub and BitBucket Issue Management
Does it work with a free MailChimp plan?
There are no ads on this app and it's free. It uses GPS to show amenities around you and location is not used if you explore by cities (rather than around/near you)
He has a very limited definition of a "computer". His description is how modern computers work. But that's not strictly what a computer could be.

When people compare a computer to a brain. They are not saying it's like a modern pc. They are saying it like a computer in a loose sense. A lot of people don't get that, they think were comparing to the thing on desk. A computer can mean lots of things with many different approaches.

For example
"computers do store exact copies of data" - They don't have to? Just our current implementation does.
Canvas fingerprinting uses differences in rendering e.g. of fonts. Output a text, hash resulting pixel values. Depending on exact version of the font(s) installed, anti-aliasing settings, default font sizes, operating system... you get slightly different results. So you don't rely on information stored on the device, but on repeatable behavior that differs between devices.
I agree with you. A PhD (then) student I know was supplied with a Comp Sci Masters student from the uni to help her set up a website for data collection across Europe. She complained to me that it didn't work and I had a look.

It was shocking. The standard was worse than that of a disinterested hobbyist - I wish I was exaggerating - and it didn't work at all. It actually counted as his final project (or whatever they were calling it) and they passed him. He now has a Masters.

Needless to say, I rewrote the entire thing for her and it worked and she's now a PhD and I'm a co-author on a published paper. I know an awful lot of PhDs, and it's clearly an overrated qualification, but Masters and degrees are barely worth the paper they're written on.

I don't even have a degree, so perhaps I would say that, but Google agrees… ;-)

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2...
Most times, but not always. But it's better now at remembering what you typed if you accidentally navigate back then hit forward. I imagine in some situations I could accidentally lose form or input focus, hit backspace, and then lose everything. This could be an app that manually captures key presses with JavaScript rather than a regular input.
It's infuriating trying to highlight anything in Outlook. Oh, you're dragging to select part of a word, or a huge long URI? Let me go ahead and automatically expand your selection to cover the entire token, with the trailing whitespace. Haha, you're trying to circumvent my helpfulness by setting the cursor and shift-right-arrowing? Haha, no soup for you! Break down and copy it into notepad instead!
The presentation is about dynamic languages, but the observation about design patterns being crutches for offsetting language deficiencies is in fact a general one.
I've never heard of #1 and nor do I see it in any other app (Win 10)
and for #2 I think that is how it is done on osx as well. I believe that a majority of google works off of macs so its likely that most of the chrome devs are on macs.
Nope, they actually thought about that. When you click on the url box the selection isn't replaced. So you can totally select an URL elsewhere, click on URL bar, press backspace to clear the bar, and middle-click-paste the selection.

On the other hand selecting the text in the URL bar in any other way (with mouse drag, triple click, or keyboard) will update the selection.
Alt-Left does the trick and isn't ambiguous with "delete a character."
Then how come that when I see your comment, my brain knows what letter each symbol represents, and knows what each word means, and can construe a meaning out of the sentence?
This bit bothered me, on Epstein's Information Processing metaphor:

> The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.

Premise 1, in my reading, is not reasonable. It would be fallacious to assert that all computers are capable of "behaving intelligently", because we don't have a definition for intelligence, let alone a "universal" intelligence that would be consistent between things, or in any case how an individual thing's intelligence would be tested.

The syllogism is the core of the author's contrarian argument. If we can't prove Premise #1 from the preceding syllogism, then the core argument of this essay does seem to lose its legs.

Really, a single viewpoint/facet/argument about the brain-as-a-computer metaphor should undoubtedly be insufficient.

More useful would be a set of arguments that compare or contrast how a computer and a human brain work. We can use these to coalesce an understanding of how close the metaphor is to reality.

How do the two receive information? How do the two store information, recall information, delete information, update stored processes, etc? All of these perspectives begin to build a whole-picture of the relationship, which would seem more useful that trying to boil it down to a single statement.

I think the author needs to revisit his basic assumptions and walk through the argument again, because I don't think what's laid out in the essay actually supports his conclusions, so confidently espoused in the introduction.
> Web apps are definitely getting better, I haven't used an actual email client in 10 years

Oddly enough, just yesterday I started using an email client once more (emacs+gnus, for Gmail). It just felt so _nice_. And fast too!
How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design
I thought Alt+Left arrow and Alt+right arrow (or some variant) were universal?
Show HN: ImagePoke (Snapchat for postcards)
Yeah I can see how that would be annoying. I'm so rarely in X that I don't always appreciate some of the features it offers. Scrolling the window under the cursor though is one I always hope will find it's way into Windows.
If I've understood correctly when I read about this before, programs that overwrite before unlinking do not work for an SSD. The SSD probably will not write the data to the same location as the old file. Instead, use fstrim to have the disk reclaim all free space. After that it's supposed to be impossible to recover.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)
I'm not in CS but just writing software is not good enough. Software PhDs from my understanding would require stuff like developing a new provably-better algorithm, not just picking one off the shelf and applying it to a kernel driver, or developing CS theory in some way such as developing a new type system with useful properties not found in other type systems.

In my field you would have to develop new physical modelling, apply it to an industrially relevant experimental case and show that it is indeed an improvement. The tricky part is figuring out a new model that none of the thousands of smart people before you have come up with.
My buddy and I created ImagePoke over the course of a week as a side project. We're pretty new to web development, so we're learning a lot as we go.

The idea for ImagePoke is pretty simple:

1) Upload/Provide a URL for an image
2) Crop said image
3) Doodle on said image
4) Provide recipient address details
5) Provide payment ($3.00) via stripe
6) Doodled image arrives at recipient's address as a postcard in ~ 7 days

A Picture of the first two ImagePokes ever:

http://www.imgur.com/XRltBxH

We've got full "account" support (at the end of the process you can create an account that stores recipient addresses and payment methods), but this is optional.

Any suggestions/criticisms would be massively appreciated, as I said, we're both quite new at this..

Thanks!

- Tim
Sure! You need to create MailChimp account, and it works for the free plan too.
You guys are joking, right? Right?
Firefox still has Ctrl-Q to close the current window, which is right next to Ctrl-W to close the current tab on a English keyboard. This is the first extension I install: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...

Dumb.
I've had it happen. Put me very close to zeroed out, bank sent me a new card and processed the refund eventually but it took several days. Maybe laws are different here (UK).
> with the trailing whitespace.

Worst feature EVER. I can't begin count how many times I've had the following talk with users:

user: My password doesn't work

me: Did you copy it from Outlook?
Google takes right to be forgotten battle to France's highest court
> Web apps are definitely getting better, ... but they have a long way to go before they can replace dedicated clients entirely.

And yet, just yesterday there was a great discussion on Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, where entire operating systems are accessed and operated virtually through just the browser [0].

The current top comment indicates that while there are some setup hoops to jump through to use a specific OS, the performance itself "works very well" [1]. Does this not qualify as a web app replacing a client entirely?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11721466
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722141
Indeed it does. If not, how then can you, "recall" the names of your family upon seeing their faces? You've stored a representation of each face, you've stored their names, and you retrieve that information to maintain the relationship.
There's a difference between credit and debit here.

Stolen credit card = bank is missing money; bank is incentivized to retrieve money.

Stolen debit card = you are missing money; bank may choose to help somehow.