skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Airline Boarding Pass: Improving Design and Usability
That supplies the background to the LWN piece, and doesn't in any way contradict its assertions that this was a serious problem that should not have been suppressed. That public attention is why it was mentioned at all in the October report.
Montezuma's Revenge, Castle Wolfenstein (not the shooter), and puzzle games in general have a problem of long term credit assignment and sparse reward. This "intrinsic reward" approach form the paper, based on pseudo counts seems to be one way to get an intermediate reward which helps the model learn toward an overall goal (winning/progress) which happens rarely. The previous best work had to pre-define the intrinsic rewards as I understand it [0], and DeepMind has been tracking this general problem for a while [1] along with a whole bunch of earlier work from the 70s/80s/90s (cited in the background of this new paper).

Credit assignment in a nutshell is "what actions helped me get reward"? For action games this is fairly easy - there are only a few moves between rewards. For puzzlers, something like left, up, right, up, left, left, left, left, up, up could get a reward. We can see there is a cycle in there which is probably not necessary, but maybe this was a much longer path than the ideal as well. Deciding which moves should get credit is a hard problem, but an important one. [2]

If you look at the results of the original DQN paper [3] you will see the games they fared best were ones where there were frequent rewards (e.g. Breakout). Things that are puzzle-like (such as Q-Bert) fared much worse versus human benchmarks, whereas action games like Breakout (which is fully observable given 4 frame context IIRC) were generally better than the human benchmark.

This paper seems to be a big step toward deep RL for more than just short term decisions and a huge jump towards goal oriented planning.

[0] Kulkarni et. al https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06057

[1] Mohamed, Rezende https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.08731.pdf

[2] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Reinforcement_learning#....

[3] Nature results are better but paywalled :/ NIPS paper here https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf . http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/abs/nature14... - Figure 3
But then the attacker would need to register a ton of packages that match other popular packages under their namespace which can set off some alarms. (I guess "solve" was a bit too strong of a word to use there...)

There could also be some other cool tricks you could apply (This is the first time you are installing a package from "Maintaner", would you like to continue?)
Meh.

It's a failure of liberal humanistic principles, but part of the problem is that this is democracy and law in action.
Just want to say:

Please don't breathe solder fumes.

That picture of everyone hunched over their PCB boards while soldering makes me cringe.

Use some form of protection via a fume extractor or face mask and when possible solder in a well-ventilated area.

I've met people who've completely destroyed their lungs and ended up with nasty lung cancer after years of day-to-day solder fume exposure.
They're common arguments, but the predicted falling skies don't happen very often in practice. Meanwhile, there is far less of a problem with barratry under loser pays than the US system seems to have.
WW3 ISIS,UR BULLETS HAVE LARD ON THEM ,DRESSINGS PIG PRODUCTS LOL
That's my point - you need legislative relief because any lock has a law-enforcement key.
The new ESSA law: Explained
Probably not because:

1) Farming chickens requires capital investment that might not be available to poorer families. Equilibrium can only be reached if the would-be-chicken-farmers have easy access to credit.

2) Chickens have inherent value; you can consume the eggs yourself as a substitute for other goods you were going to buy, and the meat as well.
In one of my games the computer castled while in check, so the rules engine needs a little bit of improvement...
Nim can add #line directives into the generated C source code which map back to the Nim code. GDB can use this information.
other minority groups may do well in part precisely because they are not black - they are not subject to the same prejudices and stereotypes. Minorities are not fungible entities, especially not in the US, where the primary social distinction is better characterized as "black v. nonblack", rather than he more common "black v white", which obscures a lot of very subtle social stratification. Additionally, recent immigrants do not suffer from a lot of the entrenched negative network effects hindering the black community. Being free of your underperforming network of kin in a society that labels you as 'other' rather than 'danger' is actually advantageous.
Version 1 UUIDs are server ID (MAC address) plus timestamp. Your overall proposal is already included in "UUIDs." They don't fit into 8 bytes, though, so if you want to squeeze them down you'd have to come up with your own scheme.

If you do use this scheme, be careful that your timestamp is sufficiently granular that it's not possible to generate two identical IDs in quick succession....
Perhaps. That is a good question that Bill should address in the analysis.

If the price goes down then the farmers eat more eggs (and chickens, if they want), which is still a good outcome.
I found pf's syntax to be much clearer and easier to write, so I chose OpenBSD for my home router.
It should probably also be worth mentioning that while the syntax is reminiscent of Python, much of Nim's semantics are derived from Modula-3. If you're familiar with Pascal-like languages, you'll find yourself right at home with Nim.

(and, on a side note, Go has a little Wirth in it too: it was concepted as "C meets Oberon", but what it borrowed from Oberon was its simplicity, and it hasn't kept nearly as many Wirthian quirks as Nim)
The acts may not be "illegal" but they are unjust and immoral.
Electron is probably fast enough for my purposes, just I wouldn't call using for an embedded device easy. You need to have x running for it. It doesn't support chromium ozone and KMS yet. Also it has a pretty big footprint. I'm targeting the RPI compute module so I don't have a ton to work with.
Is this booming Northwest land a paradise or disaster waiting to happen?
True, but then long protracted explanations don't necessarily do a better job, they are prone to missing the forest for the trees. The beauty of the short bullet point is that it makes the practitioner think, sort of like a zen koan. It will be utterly useless to someone who hasn't already put in the practice to be on the brink of enlightenment already, but then again, what other way is there to truly learn?
GitHub Dark – New Update | New Code Editor, New Scrollbar and More
Yes, it is. It's still also her being a douche.
Google Inbox's Smart Reply System [pdf]
>Oh, so if I have a card in someone else's name, you'll charge it, thus causing someone who doesn't even know about it to lose?

From what I understand the technology is for seizing money from prepaid cards. For other cards it just looks up information about the account. Thats how it helps with identity theft.
Ask HN: What practical modern programming languages should I try to pick up?
I know this is a boring question, but I am ready to add another language to the resume and would like to know what people think are the most practical and interesting of the up and coming programming languages.

I don't have any requirements other than that it be a language that you feel is swiftly approaching broader acceptance in the software community. Also Go, Rust, and Scala are already on my short list, but I would love to hear which of them people think I should start with. I am not super interested in javascript or anything built on it but am open to having my mind changed.

Thanks for humoring me.
what's the correlation?
The goal with something like this is to build a series of deterrents, such that you have to be smarter and more capable (and therefore more able to interpret a warning) as you get closer to the real threat.
I'm 30- and I always start with the data first as well. Linus said good programmers always think data first, and that resonated a lot with me when I first started coding. As I got further along, I realized how true it was that application logic often follows the data model.

Treating data as an afterthought is a great way to have to be re-defining your application logic every time you re-define your data because you forgot something.
In theory, I like the idea that the winner's legal fees are just another item in play when the judge decides how to award damages.

In effect, this is exactly what happens in most loser-pays systems. Loser-pays usually doesn't mean literally that the winner automatically gets all of their fees paid, no matter how abusive their practices during the case or how disproportionate their expenses. More often it means that the judge can award those fees and there is some sort of presumption in favour of the winner of the case not losing out financially.
Is Nixon nowhere to be found?
Amount of jail time doesn't really benefit donors, but amount of damages and who pays does.
Nice starter list. Here's more, off the top of my head:

- failure to lock rows with pessimistic locking
- failure to consider optimistic locking when viable
- data sets within a table (undernormalization)
- too much duplicate app code that should be stored procedure
- overuse of stored procedures that should be in app code
- appending with insert
- appending to datasets with variable length
- "smart" keys that can never be changed without rewriting
- underuse of indexing to slow read performance
- overuse of indexing to slow update performance
- records too big for good hashing (undernormalization)
- columns with different typed data (when DBMS allows)
- columns with different logical data (app driven)
- enhancing by inserting columns instead of appending
- poor or missing audits
- poor or missing security
- poor or missing archiving
I don't see why he should apologize for discovering that the water was clogged drain water.
I'm sure they're going to use that bullshit legal reasoning that because the money committed the crime, the money itself can be held responsible and seized, and money doesn't have 4th amendment protections because it's not a person.
I'd love to see what progress you make with this
Notice in the video how they're not feeding the chickens by letting them forage. They're always feeding them grain.
I said "initiated by developers", particularly with the post-Github ecosystem in mind. In Linux, obviously, there are many GPL projects, that's not a surprise. I'm talking about what license most developers choose who aren't working on the linux userland (or kernel). There are whole communities where liberal is the default license choice (Haskell, Erlang, Apache, BSDs, Golang).
I just finished the pod, it is the LAST story they tell (at 1:10 mark). http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/

Marc had an old boss "that was so important" he used 2 emails. One for the whole company, another for private emails... haha.
That was a concern of mine too. It seems hard to guess how that might play out in practice though without a lot more information. For example, I wonder how localized the market effects might be. That is, how much do local populations sell chickens to one another, and how much does that affect market equilibrium.
Ask HN: Managed Basic IT for Small Businesses?
I have been working in technology industry for the last 15 years as a software developer. As you know, the shops who can afford software developers, they will have a dedicated technology team to manage the desktops, OS updates, permissions etc.

I have a very dear friend and they have a family business (rental properties). When they started, they had no employees and his father could work on laptop and get the business going.

Now they have grown big enough to have several employees and their reliance on technology has increased dramatically.
Luckily, their main software is SaaS based so they don't have to worry about it.

However, they still need to worry about desktops/laptops used by employees, making sure the OS is up-to-date, that it's not infected by virus/ransom ware etc, backups etc.

They are still not at a point where they need a full time person.

I looked up and found providers like http://www.redeye.tech/ and http://www.geeksonsite.com/
They look reasonable. I am wondering what other small businesses in similar situation are doing?

By nature, these IT providers will have full access on the machines, how does one ensure that they don't misuse the access to gain privileged information?
That's a genuinely brilliant idea!

The ramifications on corp to corp lawsuits would be amazing.
Morning Editor’s Note: Apps for Everyone and IPOs for No One
So, since it has become overused to the point of losing meaning,

"broken" is now broken.

This is unexpectedly fun.
I found the images advice unnecessarily black and white. Of course there are cases where storing images or documents is the right move. few reasons i can think of: 1. you can leverage the same auth scheme as the rest of your data 2. audit trail 3. transactional support for image CRUD operations 4. leveraging replication features already offered by your DB 5. blobs can be searchable if the database supports full text search, super useful to search document contents.
Edit: shortened some points
GCC supports some special pragmas that Nim puts in the generated code. It then transparently maps the Nim source to the compiled instructions. This is exactly like JS sourcemaps for languages that compile to JavaScript. I haven't tried it that much, but it seems to work pretty well.

To be honest, I never managed to get familiar with many debuggers in a fashion that I could use them productively, except for Microsoft's Visual Studio tools (VC++, good ol' VB6 :-)). I know enough GDB to survive, and from what I've seen Nim works there almost just as well as plain C code.

There was a special debugger for Nim that worked by inserting instrumentation code during compilation, but that seems to have been deprecated.
TLDW - Patent troll sues Xplane creator after he migrated his app to the Google play store. They claim they own the general idea of the Google play store. Law firms create these cases for billable hours for their lawyers and some of their parent judges in Texas. Patent trolls and law firms in the end want to receive a settlement by targeting app creators and not Google themselves who are well equipped to defend themselves, http://www.thepatentscam.com/ .
> There are however databases with first party support for image storage, which is useful because now you can store the image and metadata about the image together (as well re-using existing solutions like replication, authentication, etc).

It also keeps them coherent, if you store images on a filesystem but metadata in a database, since they don't share transactional contexts you will eventually end up in an inconsistent state ("dead" files without metadata, or live metadata missing the corresponding image data).
CentOS 7 (and probably some other distributions) contain firewalld which is much easier to configure than iptables. You can easily setup NAT, open and forward ports, so most of typical router tasks are very easy. Though if you encounter untypical task, you have to learn iptables, of course.
Sure - that's how most places usually hire their first product manager, if they're not just promoting from within. Honestly, that's how most early-stage startups hire pretty much anybody.

If the company continues to succeed in spite of itself, eventually that guy (it's almost always a guy) gets sacked and they bring on someone who's at least managed a team of product managers elsewhere. The new person almost always has a hiring process similar to the one in the post, having either figured it out from experience or from reading one of the many articles very very very similar to this one.
Oh yes! We ran into precisely this problem when we had a number of machines that mostly run independently, that needed to communicate with a central server. Integer ID's don't work well for that, and especially in light of the fact that Mysql reuses them in certain circumstances. I couldn't do anything about Mysql being on the machines, but used Postgres on the server, of course.

The second generation of machines, where I did have a say in things, used UUID's and Postgres.
golang is great, i use it to do 3 things thus far: restful api server (net/http, gorilla mux), dynamic web server (net/http, amber, sql), and websocket server (net/http, gorilla websocket, redigo/redis). the libraries are well implemented, the syntax is beautiful imho, and i'm able to quickly write code similar to interpreted languages like ruby, python, but scale much higher. i used to do lamp, then shifted to python tornado, ruby sinatra, nodejs/expressjs, but find golang to just be more compact and fast. my sinatra environment required rbenv, gems, and i just wasn't impressed with it.

what i like the most about golang is that the end result is a binary where my production server doesn't need to have any dependencies except for the ability to run elf binaries. i like having this option, but in reality the binary size gets pretty unwieldy for upload, so i actually end up doing a pull on the source code, compiling and starting up.

package management has not been a problem for me.

i do find html template packages to be a bit deficient, amber, ace, there are ports of haml and jade, but they all seem pretty half baked. i had to have a lot of hacks in my code to get this stuff working.

also sucks that there isn't a standard orm, but i can hang and keep up with raw sql.

the language expressiveness is not as convenient as say ruby, but it's pretty close.
What Seattle Can Do to Make Light Rail Happen Years Faster
It is incredibly mercenary isn't it? Does the device just send the request off to a call center where the ERAD folks do the actual bank account drains? How are they able to justify such a huge commission? Who in the government negotiated this? Did they get a nice cushy job in the ERAD group after they retired from government work?
> Certainly this doesn't prevent a malicious author from posting a legitimate package and then changing the contents to be malicious, but that can be somewhat solved by turning off automatic updates.

Perhaps you could make this safer by adding an automatic check for how much the package has changed since the last version? And at least warn the user when they want to update?
This is total, corrupt bullshit. How the fuck is a traffic cop supposed to ascertain the origin of the money in your accounts, let alone if it was from the "the commission of a crime?"
It is not specified what they mean by "chicken" (age and breed and sex) but $5 seems like really expensive.

I know that you can buy baby chicks from an incubator for egg laying purposes for like 3 euro or less in rural western Europe. Breeds meant to be harvested for their meat cost even less.
When there are arbitrars of is/isn't cyberpunk, what has it become?

Or what does an appeal to authority mean in the context of cyberpunk?
> I have no idea how you could provide that data in a secure way.

Just sign the signals with RSA. This depends on keeping the private key out of hostile hands, or allow key revocation and generation. But it's possible in theory.
That happens a lot on HN and it is frustrating. It's clear that people have just the barest of experiences with a topic and then speak with authority, to the detriment of others. I try not to comment on things I don't know about and if I do, then I make it clear that I am extrapolating and don't try to come off like an expert because I can google a topic.
maybe I'm missing something, what will the chickens eat? "whatever they find on the ground" is not exactly a strategy for growth, especially if everybody is raising chickens, you can pretty much expect the availability of edible stuff to reach zero in villages. not saying this doesnt work, but it's still an energy in/out problem right, where is the new source of energy?
The COO is on linkdin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-beckerman-37819514
I have a feeling DeepMind AI will specialize in playing video games
Amplitude raises $15M Series B
James Randi needs to help this guy...
This is all half of a much larger problem, which is package identification. Perl 6 specced out[1] quite a bit of a future system to handle a lot of this, and I believe a lot of it is now implemented. A few things you need to consider:

- Maintainership can change over time.

- Multiple people may trade off releasing a package, but it's still the same package.

- There may be multiple repos (consider you may want to run a local company repo for non-redistributable modules).

I imagine in the end, one of the better approaches to the installation name typo problem might be to scan the code for what packages are required (utilizing as much specific information as possible), and confirming that exists as a local package that can be installed or offering to install it. Package installers should be able to take a source file or files, and install modules listed within. This won't solve all cases (dynamically determined and loaded modules may be a problem still), but it will solve quite a bit of them.

1: http://design.perl6.org/S11.html#Versioning
Feral flocks of chickens?

Possibly, it costs more to feed the chickens than the chickens provide in economic benefit?

Avian influenza spreads like wild through chicken populations and from thence to poor families?
So, we need BIOS support for Bluetooth. :-)
Singapore prepares to block internet access on government computers
In order of severity:

1. Family ends up homeless because there is no legal framework to raise small anymals in urban environments, and the flock is framed as "unruly pets" by abusive landlord/neighbours. Family ends up worse than how they started without help.

2. Family receives the flock, but not any training/resources to tend them properly. Chickens die of illness, malnourishment, or get killed by urban predators (i.e. semi-feral cats). Purpose of the program is defeated.

3. Family just eats the chickens right away, which would be a relief from their situation, but still defeats the purpose of the program.

[Edit: I posted this prior reading the article, and assumed this would be about helping the urban American poor, not the Global poor. I simply could not imagine rural poor people in 3rd world countries not knowing chickens are a good source of income/food. They may still forego the option if they lack other resources to raise the chickens.

So, you may say I stand corrected. Thanks for your polite feedback]
10 Horrifying First Person Games Like Outlast
Why would you say it's 'unamerican'? Your police force does similar things in almost every state don't they?
Alright, thanks everyone! Mystery solved! :)
And once you've got over these initial issues you can move on to the Mistakes People Who've Figured Out a Thing or Two About Databases Make:

- storing their images externally, but forgetting to apply a consistent backup strategy to their image data

- Database is getting big, query returns lots of records, so just adding pagination. Forgetting that the user really doesn't actually want to page through results at all. The correct answer was probably to add proper faceted filters and full text search.

- using UUID keys everywhere, then making the mistake of mixing up UUID keys from one table with UUIDs from another one.

- Using nullable columns as a tool for schema change, but not deciding what it actually means for a particular column in a row to contain a NULL.

- Thinking that they will get away with just storing a chunk of structured data like an array in a particular column value because from the application point of view it's really just one blob of data anyway. In general I give a structured datatype like that two days before someone is writing a query that digs into the inner structure of it.
Did you even watch the video? He says it right on there.