skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The fit and finish of linux desktops, especially KDE, are nowhere near as good as the Mac

I beg to differ, but only with the "especially KDE" part. KDE is a different beast than most other modern desktop environments, in that it does not try to mimic OS X style in any way.

KDE was started way back when with a goal of replicating a Windows-like UI, with a Start-menu like launcher and a Start-bar like task bar with applets.

It may not be to your tastes, but the fit and finish of KDE3, 4 and now 5 is excellent. Integrated application sets (K[Anything]) with integration into a centralized control/config panel for shortcuts, MIME type handling, ...

The only problem with this is that other popular applications do not bind this tightly to KDE (understandable from application developers - KDE is not the only game in town).

Previously, GTK applications in particular acted and looked like they were from '93 when run outside of GTK-centric desktop environments (XFCE, Gnome). However, Qt has developed a GTK2 and 3 engine that uses Qt and Qt themes under the hood, largely solving that problem when properly configured (try any stable OpenSuse release, for instance).
They say it's public domain so it is, indeed, license-free. AFAIK, the public domain dedication makes the rest of the section chaff.
I view it as much of facebook usage is at work or other public places where people don't want sound. :-)
On PC I've always associated it with not being able to full screen a video and bad play/pause/rewind/FF controls.
As someone who did a lot of embedded development, I wouldn't exactly call it "more interesting". More like "that shit needs to die already".

The biggest problem with those is, that modern compilers don't support it. Well, that is open-source compilers. IAR will happily sell you a license of their IDE for 2.4k$/seat. There is sdcc, but it's no comparison to a modern gcc or the commercial offerings.

Unfortunately you're right though, 8051 processors are cheap and abundant. Chip makers use it as the go to architecture for any simple embedded processing requirements. It's slowly changing though, but ARM licensing costs are still much higher. Let's hope that in a decade or so they'll use RISC-V instead.
Angular 2 Bundling with Rollup
BBC Micro:bit computer now available to all for £13
Not a fb user, but I partially agree with you here, in that you should already send this information to all your fb friends, so they can learn that their "social expectations" are not backed by what facebook gives away about them to tech-savvy users.
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup
YubiKey NEO switches to proprietary OpenPGP implementation
Also you wont be able to access .onion sites.
Exactly -- the latest major release is Darwin 15 (corresponding to OS X El Capitan / 10.11). I'd love to see this (or a similar) project succeed and remain relevant, but it just seems to be falling further and further behind the official releases.

(To be clear, I know there are good reasons for this, and I'm not trying to imply that a lot of work hasn't gone into what has been released ... but I can't help but wonder if there's no longer any hope of it catching up with (semi-closed) Darwin.)
If you start with blaming "linux" for installing problems you should at least mention the distribution used. There are like 100 or more different installers out there and a good portion does suck indeed with non default configurations.
Significant discussion, including comments and replies from the man himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742

A few extra comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459225

There have been other submissions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=megaprocessor&sort=byDate&date...
Loved the book, motivated me to cut out a lot of distractions in my daily work life, as well as take control in adjusting websites more to my needs (Writing small, custom tamper monkey javascript snippets to edit views of, for example, Facebook)

Just a small addendum, the book is called "Deep Work", not "Deep Focus"
Most followed Twitter account has been hacked
Agreed, the computing landscape would be so much more colourful if the Amiga won the day.

The BBC did a fun retelling of the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn a few years ago. Worth a watch if you haven't already seen it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
PayPal to halt operations in Turkey after losing license
> Of course any tax is a loss to the party who pays it.

that's not true if you count the thing the tax is paying for - social services, or medicare, etc. There's economies of scale that you cannot easily achieve. A high LVT might encourage better land use, and thus, spur an economy to newer hights, which could vastly offset the individual "loss" on that tax (despite the fact that said individual may not feel like they've gained anything).
Liblfds 7.1.0 release
"liblfds" is a lock-free data structure, written in C.

Release 7.1.0, six months work, has been published.

Lock-free data structures are process, thread and interrupt safe (i.e. the same data structure instance can be safely used across processes, threads and both inside and outside of interrupt handlers), never sleep (and so are safe for kernel use when sleeping is not permitted), operate without context switches, cannot fail (no need to handle error cases, as there are none), perform and scale literally orders of magnitude better than locking data structures, and liblfds itself is implemented such that it performs no allocations (and so can be used with the stack, heap or shared memory) and compiles not just on a freestanding C89 implementation, but on a bare C89 implementation.

One of the new features is a benchmark programme, which directly and fairly compares the lock-free liblfds data structures with their locking counterparts, and can emit gnuplots.

Eyecand^HResults can be found here (scroll down a little to "Benchmarks');

http://www.liblfds.org
Just like the 48-bit addressing mode of the x86-64 chips most people reading this are using along with the storage of useful information in bits 48-64 (JS engines!).
Tor is not enough to ensure even mediocre privacy. Just proxying everything through Tor would give people a very false sense of security (and break UDP amongst others).

There are VMs that do that but still wouldn't recommend that to someone that doesn't understand tor and networking. Even inside such a VM you'd still use Torbrowser.

It combines Tor and app-level security/privacy measures in an accessible way.
The github repository of the hack: https://github.com/Morhaus/facebook-sixth-sense
Don't get me wrong... I was tongue in cheek joking. But you can't get too worked up because this is how it is.

If it makes you feel better, probably the same thing happens on most planets that develop "intelligent" life: Life takes a very long time to develop & it develops through competition & evolution. During this time, natural stores of energy build up -- it is nature's method of keeping a balance - without it there would be no life.

Then finally the "intelligent" life pops out. They discover the stores of energy under the ground. They start burning it -- thinking there is no consequence, and they wind up undoing millions of years of careful balancing.

What happens next, we don't know. Probably nothing good.

Perhaps this is why when we peer into the sky, we do not hear any signs of life. Perhaps these bursts of intelligent life are incredibly short blips.
All I remember is the spammy nag screens every time it was updated: "Why not buy Quicktime Pro?" and Apple's hideous brushed steel UI which often didn't quiet render correctly.
Well, I can do bread that is edible,
alcohol that make your drunk without poisoning you
music that people can sing
repair bikes fairly well

But ... I get rejected for every job I ask : I don't have diplomas. The bread I see on average are at best and as good as mine, my alcohol is cheaper than market and tasting better, my reparations are clean... but I don't have diplomas and the conforming education...

So I am looking back at coding, and I still hope I will find whatever is not a modern job intoxicated with all the current hype in IT or financial or web agency or startup spirit.

Wish me luck, it is tough but I am still going and as long as I can I will try.
Community Companies
In many jurisdictions there is no concept of public domain, and thus declaring your work as public domain has no effect in many parts of the world.

The author granted a license for all Creative Commons licenses, which includes CC-Zero (public domain where that's possible, the closest possible equivalent everywhere else). That's the real part that makes the rest of the section unnessesary.
Angular 2 Learning Resources
The article was very clever and interesting (also the trip down memory lane, I remember this being possible in MSN Messenger!) but the console warning was a first for me, it's even nicely localized. Do more websites do this?
A somehow similar hack I want to do when I have the time:

When you have a WhatsApp Web tab opened, it keeps a socket connection opened that gives you information such as your phone battery level.

I really want an icon on the Chrome toolbar showing me that charge level.
Apple sued by Caltech for allegedly infringing Wi-Fi patents
Just nitpicking, but in real mode it is at least conceivable to implement arbitrary pointer arithmetic (at some significant performance hit) because segments are spaced evenly every 16 bytes.

The real killer is arbitrary segmentation, where software can say this segment start here and that segment starts there, like, say, the x86 protected mode. Is the OS going to expose absolute segment addresses to the C language to allow some "defensive programming" like checking if a pointer really points to the array you think it does? Hell no, you write your damn code correctly ;)
This is why implementation defined behavior exists.

Undefined behavior though?
Intel invents the concept of mega-tasking to sell new 10-core CPUs
Regarding the warning, a nice StackOverflow question with an answer for a Facebook engineer on the topic:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21692646/how-does-faceboo...
Mobile ad blocking rose 90 percent last year
TrackMeNot (http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/) uses this technique to protect against web search tracking.

In general, privacy by obfuscation is an idea that privacy researchers have been considering. Other than TrackMeNot, however, I haven't seen many real-world applications.
>probably no more than 20,000 (I have some friends -- and have knowledge of some -- who have read quite a bit more).

can you please verify that number? Assuming reading for that past 50 years, that is over a book/day (or 3 books / 4 days reading for 75 years). I'm a slow reader and generally enjoy taking my time reading, but that would be quite the volume.
Easily? It took 4 billion years and multiple global extinction events, and it has only happened once. Flight, the eye, air breathing all evolved multiple times independently, within distantly related evolutionary lines. Intelligence is rare in nature, in spite of its advantages, probably because it is a very distant jump from local maxima.
Yes, "Facebook™ Chat Privacy" Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-chat-priv...
Hackers Stole 65M Passwords from Tumblr, New Analysis Reveals
Lies, damned lies, and political billboards
But by that line of reasoning, shouldn't we never hit dead ends in AI research at all -- why has AI progress been so difficult, then? Wouldn't any field of research with many dimensions of variation never get stuck on its path towards its ultimate goals, ever?

Couldn't different objective functions be structurally more difficult than others to optimize? No matter how high-dimensional the search-space, trying to create a gaming laptop in the middle ages would have been a pretty frustrating experience.
I remember around the time of Power 4 IBM gave us a presentation which basically stated that with regards to the speculative execution of instructions it was fast enough to just try all paths as it fast enough to not show an impact.
Ride sharing, vehicle accidents, and crime
Well, this is not surprising because, basically, it is LEGO without the interlock-studs :)
Most promising tech startups 2016
Rule based systems have to get ergonomic; intelligent systems by definition are not stupid -- I.e. if the behavior of the system is unacceptable you need to be able to patch it quickly not add another 150 million training examples.

The #1 threat to a.I. right now is kaggleism, that is, training data is more valuable than talent, algorithms and all that.
How well does the post-recession world scale?
Most people have headsets.
I know of various third-party IM clients which allow you to do this. Been a long-time user of Trillian myself, for which this was one of the cooler features back in the day. Allowed you to be notified of people typing, regardless of having an open conversation, and set up whether you wanted to send typing notifications always, only after having sent a initial message, or never. Was pretty cool to be able to say "Hi!" to someone just when they were about to message you. Most of my friends never figured how I did that, since their official clients never supported it so they didn't even know it could be a thing.

Haven't got Facebook myself, but I know Trillian fully supports Facebook chat and I suppose many other (free/open source) IM clients do as well. Such multi-network clients are in my experience great for slowly moving people away from pretty much any network, since they pretty much remove the distinction between them. I just add my friends and let the software figure out how exactly it gets the message to them. :)
Just do it. Seriously, moving away from fb is important, but it won't be seen as such as long as people like you don't flat out refuse to use the crap. It's worked out extremely well personally, drastically cutting down on social noise, thus getting distracted less. Somehow, people who actually wanted to stay in touch, managed to over different channels (of which there's a fuckton; signal being my goto solution).
I would really enjoy more such in-depth explanations about major websites.

A bit like this guy's series on game engines: http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/
Considering that Tor Browser users would also on the whole want to probably filter ads to improve their already slow latency, I'm hoping the Tor and µBlock devs can get together and standardise µBlock on all Tor Browsers with a preselected list of filters, which should reduce the ability to fingerprint by analysing the downloads of ads, at least within the set of all Tor Browser users.
I specialized in NLP as well (did a PhD and wrote some papers about it), but could not find any job here where I live, so I reinvented myself as full-stack web developer. But web dev is a freaking never-ending never-stable world, so I'm quite sure that pretty soon I'll move back to NLP or general AI..
Suzanne Corkin, Who Helped Pinpoint Nature of Memory, Dies at 79
When I see this beautiful art, it makes me want to play with Voxeljs. Sadly I'm a developer, so what I make would not turn out so pretty.
Snapchat lawsuit put on hold
Is there an easy overview page to see packages which are failing to build on Mac, maybe even with a link to the failing build output?
Now that the Raspberry Pi 3 has built-in Bluetooth the micro:bit is a really nice compliment to it for projects that want to use the LED matrix display, remote sensors, or the provided accelerometer/compass.

We definitely see the two platforms working hand in hand nicely for some interesting projects!

We're one of the launch re-sellers who are offering pre-order with shipping in late June: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/microbit
That makes logical sense, thanks.
The robot hand that learns from its mistakes
Marketing vs. Growth Hacking
Dude... just print stuff in booklet style
These days, I only watch TV (usually through Amazon Prime) on my iPad while using the treadmill or stationary bike. That consumes enough of my attention—and makes it enough of a pain to use my hands—that it prevents the urge to do a third activity while watching. (Plus it's healthy!)
Oh, definitely. I was replying specifically to this line:

> The overall benefit to society is good, but to the individual, a LVT is going to (at least, in the short term) be a loss.

The nice thing about investing land tax value well is that this increases land value. (Eg a train station increases property values nearby.) Thus public infrastructure investment can pay for itself in terms of new taxes---without blunting any economic incentives.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem
So this is about something better than Yahoo?
A Scala.js Facade for the MEAN Stack (MongoDB ExpressJS AngularJS Node.js)
Microsoft Is Dead Serious About Machine Learning
How Universities Can Make Most Out of Their Patent Assets
2M in active and reserve military. 99.9% accuracy. 2000 people falsely accused. Profit!
LinkedIn, the Cable Company
It's tricky: an open ecosystem often wins, but there are certain abuses that cannot be eradicated in an open system, and if your system becomes open you will not be able to make a profit from it.
Turkey officially designates Gulen religious group as terrorists
Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7982410
Not necessary if you disable JS, which you absolutely should do if you care about privacy while using Tor.
I have finished a few projects as an external contractor for companies in the financial sector and many would be surprised how paranoid these companies are about the source code.

Aside from the (sometimes insane) checks they have in place I've also had to sign a NDA.

I doubt that the creator of this plugin had bad intentions, but using this plugin could cause some programmers to be dragged in front of a court.

I believe the warning should be more visible.
How a 19th Century Math Genius Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
R.I.P. Page Rank. Long Live SB Rank
The post mentions only the C standard; I wonder what POSIX says about it.

And there are also the platform ABIs, which specify how a pointer is passed between functions. If you're in a platform in which the ABI doesn't allow arbitrarily setting unused bits, even a "security-conscious implementation" will have to leave them alone, since a pointer can be passed to a function written in a different language. This also means that the "map the same object at multiple virtual addresses" trick, in which the implementation flips bits within the pointer knowing there is always a valid alias mapping to it, is broken: suppose two pointers to within the same object are passed (perhaps at separate times) to code written in another language. From the point of view of the other language, they might not be pointing to the same object, even if they should (for instance an array and an element within it, the function might want to compute the offset).

I also wonder how well does the "map the same object at multiple virtual addresses" trick work in architectures with VIVT caches, where both the index and the tag are virtual addresses. In these architectures, if you write through one mapping and want to access the same memory through another mapping, you have to flush the cache, otherwise you will have hard-to-debug problems if both mappings are in the cache at the same time.
So, does the boot sector load to 0000:7C00 or to 07C0:0000 or to 03A0:4200, or what? :)
> "And when I research a topic, I find I consume information similarly. When I think about say the environment, I tend to have many tiny questions popping up, and get them answered. This is akin to having a private teacher who has answers to all of a kids' questions, versus a school teacher who has got 60 minutes to cover standardised material in a linear fashion."

This may or may not work for you, but I find it helps to write notes on paper whilst I read, especially non-fiction. That way, I can capture what I was curious about or found interesting whilst still continuing to read. If I then find myself stuck, I can then go back to the notes I made earlier for a starting point to dig into the subject further. Not sure if this would work for fiction, but maybe it'd help with letting go of needing to know and letting your imagination take over.
Adversarial Autoencoders
Digital Wars: Your Marketing Awakens
Another one from Vlambeer, and a personal favourite:

'Juice it or lose it'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
It's one of the most common laptop brands. Specs are easily looked up, and even without looking it up this tells people it's a relatively new laptop, so specs are probably at least half decent.
The papers from MonetDB/x100 have a lot of interesting info. Here's one to start with: http://www.vldb.org/conf/1999/P5.pdf
>Also, if the anti-Rails sentiment has reached an all time high (has it?), it would be because Rails adoption itself has reached an all time high.

I really doubt that:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ruby%20on%20rails
> The venn diagram of people caring about web best practices and people running adblockers is a circle, so there's no reason for ad networks to change anything.

More likely concentric circles.
Advice is plural not "advices."
When Movements Backfire: Violence Against Women and Online Harassment
Have faith in yourself! You can go a long way with generative art, which boils down to applying algorithms to build interesting pictures. Building an really good generative artwork requires a lot of work, but the techniques are those of the developer.
Who knew there would be a silent film[1] renaissance in 2016?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film
Well, if they introduced some "special feature" that's available only when you install a certain plugin, I am sure millions of people will do it just because they can get the "special feature."
What is it that would make contracts suitable in one language but not in another.
http://wiki.osdev.org/MBR_%28x86%29

"This is usually 0x0000:0x7c00 (CS = 0, offset address 0x7c00). However, some BIOSes load to 0x7c0:0x0000 (CS = 0x07c0, offset address 0) -- which resolves to the same physical address, but can cause problems."
To be fair, I forgot I got a new PC between the first time I used Atom and when I switched over to it.

However, I did try opening an 11 MB (JSON) file and it did indeed feel sluggish.
This is more from a lawyer's perspective than an engineering perspective.

The gap between "works in the lab" and "real product" is pretty big and I think the real problem is getting across that, not getting license fees from those who cross the chasm.

If Stanford is beating the others it is because it encourages graduate students to walk out with the technology, build a company, and pay fees back to Stanford.