skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once in the distant, distant past, I had a contract job. Full-time, they paid me for 40 hours a week, but usually I'd have an hour or two of down time each day. Like, 2pm rolls around, and I've actually finished everything that needed to be done for the schedule, so hey, I've got some time.

I started taking online IQ tests. I looked around for the really hard ones, and found that they fall into a couple of categories. Some focused on obscure vocabulary, featuring lists of hundreds of words that I, a native speaker with a pretty good vocabulary, had never seen. Others tested spatial awareness, logic, whatever.

What I discovered, after taking a few of these tests (I skipped the vocab ones; what's the point of learnin' fancy words no one else knows?), is that you get better at them, and fast. I only took maybe 2 or 3 a day, a couple times a week, but it didn't take more than a week to start testing a lot higher.

It got kinda boring once I started seeing that kind of improvement, so I stopped. I'm curious what it'd be like to try again, though.
I don't know that men don't have origin stories. I knew I was 'truly destined' to be a chemist when I fell asleep on my ochem book before I got to the NMR section, and went to the exam the next day, bombed everything, except the NMR part, which I deduced entirely from first principles. Before that, in high school, I wanted to become a chemist when my hip chemistry teacher showed us how to use the water tube to put out a fire (guess I also wanted to be a fireman).
https://github.com/TheNewNormal/kube-solo-osx and https://github.com/TheNewNormal/kube-cluster-osx
Hi Alan,

You've been involved in visual programming environments like GRAIL and Etoys for kids. What do you think of the current state of visual programming for both kids and adults?
PreScheme was a LISP to replace C for low-level programming. Used manual, memory management instead of GC. Very fast and efficient.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.3.4...

Formally verified plus a Scheme48 interpreter as part of VLISP project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme

ATS has no garbage collector that I'm aware of. I've seen it used in device drivers and 8-bit MCU's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language)

LinearML is GC-less, functional, parallel programming.

https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML

So, functional languages neither require GC's nor infinite memory. Two also combined low-level efficiency with easy, formal verification vs C programs. So, that's higher mapping of idea to code, high efficiency, and better safety all at once.

"You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip"

I believe I just did with PreScheme. Microsoft goes further to straight-up use a theorem prover to do x86 coding.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pd...
Obligatory link to gwern's experimentation and research on nootropics:

https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics
This sample is completely free for both non-commercial and commercial use. Do whatever you can.
Legislating Vulnerability Disclosure Programs into State-Level Government
"What Fools these Mortals be!" Puck meant that we are easy to fool. In fact we like to be fooled -- we pay lots of money to be fooled!

One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups. This is quite different than what most schools think they are supposed to be about -- but the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" in K-5.
Great tips Simon, Thank you - I really appreciate your words. I think you have summarised my marketing mistakes really well and given me a lot to think about.

By the way, I have checked out StaffSquared a while back and think it is brilliant. Your app inspired me in a lot of ways to create HR Partner. I've also seen you interact on a few HR or software oriented blogs/forums (as well as here) and think that is a great way to raise awareness of a business.

Thanks for your inspiration and advice.
The principle of charity, I suppose, and more fool I for applying it to political speech in the United States in 2016.
I monitor a solar panel installation using a Raspberry Pi that is connected to the inverter. That way I can check how much energy has been generated on every day/so far.

The company, which set-up the whole thing, also ran a couple of simulations beforehand and I am positively surprised that the installation actually produces more energy than predicted.

The whole project is live at http://solarpi.tafkas.net
>we are a nation of immigrants, and we know that immigrants built this country

More precisely, our nation was built by pioneers. When they arrived in the US they had nearly no welfare programs to draw from. You can have a country with open immigration, and you can have a country with generous welfare, but you can't have both.

http://cis.org/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-Native-Households
The 'otherness' in this regard is specifically with respect to religion/race/nationality, making the Nazi comparison even more apt.

Just saying "the other political side will be terrible for our country" is not fascism, because yes, everybody does that.
> If most people solve a problem by going from: A -> B -> C

> 'Smart' people will consistently go straight to: A -> C

Cutting out intermediate steps in a chain of analysis is more typical of people with applicable, domain-specific expertise than general smarts. Being smart isn't the same as being an expert.

General smarts is reflected more in a reduction in the average number of dead-end side paths pursued before making the connection from A -> B and again before making the one from B -> C.
What do you think about 4GLs - do you think they still hold any promise and/or represent a solution to today's language woes?
> You cannot "examine the code" without executing it, partially or in full, with some input or intermediate values or (symbolically) with all of them.

It is entirely possible to break a stream of text down into symbols and examine the relationship of those symbols without evaluating (i.e. executing) them. It is not really necessary or possible to know their meaning/definition at all, only their "shape" or the "part of speech" that they represent.

In the simplest form, static analyzers are a set of heuristic pattern matchers that a stream of text is sent through. It might get fancy and build an AST first, but that still does not constitute execution or evaluation in the technical sense.
I would rather do a rent to buy imho, leasing will probably ham string you into buying it after the lease is up.
It's possible that you are building something that nobody wants. How long is it going to take you to decide that you have failed (if you do)? Do you have enough money to get that far and still recover (find a new job before you are bankrupt)?
Hi Alan,

What is your view on Literate Programming and why it hasn't taken off (yet)?
Κόπα Αμέρικα: Μια ανάσα από τον τελικό η Αργεντινή
I've written and talked a lot on these subjects, so let me suggest you look at the Viewpoints website, YouTube, there's a TED talk, etc.
Ask HN: What Cool New Technologies Are You Interested in Trying Out?
I brainstorming ideas for a hackathon at work and looking for ideas of cool new technologies to experiment with.

So... what new tech would you want to experiment with for 3 days?
Show HN: Gone is your mobile sidekick for handling all your daily tasks
Fortran is still in widespread use in scientific and numeric computing. It's far from "dead".
The total disregard that journalists have shown for facts in this saga should be a red flag that they're equally full of it when it comes to reporting on things that we aren't so knowledgeable about.
Everyone should get fluent in "real science" and many other things come along very nicely with this -- including the kinds of programming that will really help most people.
>I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.

Being in Mensa doesn't really "get" you anything, so there's little incentive to train for an IQ test in the same way there are to use the same amount of time to train for other more materially valuable things, like a license or a skill.

Even if you have a number that they would accept you for, that doesn't even mean you would want to be in a back-patting social group.
The only problem with "stop-the-world" GC's on hardware not built for them. There's "pauseless" collectors out there where that either doesn't happen or happens so fast you don't experience it. Some do microseconds. One was in a Scheme machine where they put it into the memory subsystem. So, the program just allocated, deleted, whatever with a parallel, hardware GC managing pages in the background.

Many things one can do in GC's. The only one I know with mainstream success is Azul's:

http://www.azulsystems.com/sites/default/files/images/c4_pap...

https://www.azul.com/products/zing/

Note: No affiliation with them. Their Azul systems and pauseless GC were simply the best stuff I found researching Java & GC hardware. Assuming they match marketing claims. ;)
> Please don't downvote without explanation,

Downvotes exist to improve the signal to noise ratio on HN: please do, generally, downvote without explanation. If something is productive and worth discussing, that's a sign that its not worth a downvote.
Sure, likely a fabrication, but it's being used as a way to explain the schools of thought, not as an actual source of anything.
I'd be interested to see what you think of the CoreOS "step by step" guide that we've honed over the past few months, trying to strike a balance of explaining the background while keeping it as brief as possible:

https://coreos.com/kubernetes/docs/latest/getting-started.ht...
Roundup of new releases in Docker 1.12
"Criticizing reasonably" takes much longer than praise -- and my reactions to this question are "critical"
> Django's user model uses a pretty straight forward and good approach[1]

You forgot to post the link.
Repeatedly solving a simple puzzle only makes you good at repeatedly solving a simple puzzle.

s/simple/irrelevant/g

a.k.a programming interviews
The services are behind the firewall, unreachable from the internet, and only accept requests from the gateway, and from each other. The gateway strips your SSL (which I'm sure you are using :)), authenticates the request against its local security token store, then adds a bunch of headers: request id for tracing purposes, user IP for logging purposes, user id for authorizing access to various resources, etc.

The service only accepts the request, it doesn't care where the request came from because it implicitly trust the environment to be protected from direct, unauthenticated calls. Request has the user id in it, so the service knows which data is being accessed.

This way we have separated concerns of security from that of state management. This is what I'm arguing for - security without unnecessary public-facing crypto, and separation of authentication from authorization. The problem public-facing crypto is that there are tons of obscure of attacks on it - manipulating individual bits and sending it to the victim often yields information. New exploits come to light every now and again. I was caught with my pants around my ankles when padding oracle attack against signed cookies came out of the clear blue sky: http://robertheaton.com/2013/07/29/padding-oracle-attack/

Now, to keep the session state you have three options:

- Do the same thing you do with JWT: send the data to the user and accept it back. You know the user has been authenticated already, he can only harm his own resources. When services call each other they pass the session state along with the call, same as JWT again.

- Keep the session data in the centralized session store. Which kid of defeats the purpose of eliminating the centralized session store. :) There are many ways to make that scale well for throughput, e.g. once you know the user id you can trivially shard the session store, but I'm not sure about the latency from accessing yet another machine. This needs to be tested though, perhaps it's negligible. But let's keep that out for now, given the scope of the article.

- Keep the session store at the gateway. When the service replies to the request, part of the payload is the new (additional) session data. The gateway strips that part and keeps it to itself. The next time gateway calls a service for the same user it passes the session data along. The service does not need to know anything about the gateway - it receives a request with user id and session state, then returns the result with new/updated session state. The nice thing is that the users never see the session state (shorter url, less data on the wire, lower chance of malformed data), and yet microservices never have to know where it came from. When services call each other they can attach the state along with it. It may get tricky having to pass the sate back and forth along the call chain of various services, but it's the same problem you would have with JWT anyways. The complexity is why I would circle back to sharded session state storage.

Hopefully this answers all of your questions, let me know if it doesn't? It's an interesting conversation, thanks for that.
Interesting people, even as students, leave trails in various ways
This article overstates the problem quite a bit by saying, for example, "Only non-Turing-complete languages support formal reasoning and verification".

The point of Turing's result and related theorems is not that you can't reason formally about programs, or understand or predict what they do, or prove that they are correct. It's that no automated method is powerful enough to decide nontrivial properties for every program; there are always programs for which the decision procedure will either say it doesn't know, or be wrong (or the decision procedure will take an infinite amount of time).

However, there are automated methods that can decide nontrivial properties for many programs, and the existence of programs where a given property can't be decided doesn't mean that the answers, when they exist, have to be wrong.

We do have specific programs in Turing-complete languages whose behavior or whose correctness to a specification is proven, and formal methods that can be applicable to them.

I think the article's conclusion might still be right, though: having environments where you can't always determine correctness may be playing with fire, so it may be a better choice to avoid that kind of risk entirely. But that doesn't mean that, given a program, we're always going to be completely in the dark about what the program does!
Huh, me too. I'd just assumed that was normal; been this way for as long as I can remember (years); tho I have had random short bouts (<30nin) of tinnitus more frequently over past few months.
There are good reasons you can't waive away certain rights, especially seen in the areas of employment and rent.
Yeah this is just second hand information from those who went to the toppest of law schools, who are naturally rather insecure about themselves and are surprisingly condescending.
Google's geographer-in-chief
Convert PDF to TIFF Using Bradley Algorithm and Add Page Number as Stamp Object
This new release of Aspose.Pdf for .NET 11.6.0 supports PDF to TIFF conversion using Bradley algorithm. It has been supporting the feature to convert PDF to TIF using LZW compression and then with the use of AForge, Binarization can be applied. The PageNumberStamp class offers the feature to add Page Number information as stamp object inside PDF document. There have been specific improvements regarding PDF to PDF/A, PDF to HTML, XPS to PDF, PDF to XPS, HTML to PDF and Image placement/manipulation in PDF document.
A nuclear engineer once told me that you could eat more plutonium than you could caffeine, because the caffeine would instantly kill you, but the half life of plutonium was much longer and it would pass in and out of you before anything actually happened.
That's odd, a month ago I read a statement from Opera that they had the most power efficient browser. Which is the most powerefficient? http://www.windowscentral.com/opera-adds-power-saving-mode-i...
Work Rules: Principles
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. The main reason I keep adding features and improving current ones is because, usually when I DO get a reply from someone who ceases to use our system, they usually say "Oh, I thought your system was great, but I really needed something that would do X".

In a lot of cases, "X" was something that I was either already planning to add later, or else would only take a small tweak to accomplish, so I go ahead and do it.

But in almost all cases, when I reach out to the same user (I track all feature requests against users) to get their feedback, a lot of them don't come back anyhow, so I am not sure if they missing feature was just an easy excuse for them, or perhaps they have found something else out there that does have that feature already?!?
"They literally know nothing"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/...

And for anybody having doubts about Wright:

https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-pro...

https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nak...
PowerPC gains an Android 4.4 port with Big Endian support
Because when they do want it, there will be several competitors offering it and from experience I know they will most likely choose the name they recognize from my prior brand awareness campaigns, and do little other research.
The item 3 is very impressive. Anyone knows if the other major browsers test for such thing?
This does not answer either "it's simple" or "here's why."
I agree.

From one of your previous comments:

> [...] If you really believe you have an integer factorization method, simply factor a few large numbers that are currently believed to be hard: RSA-230, RSA-232, RSA-240 and RSA-250 should do. People really will listen then. [...]
I used to sleep about 5 hours a night well into my 50s, but then started to get respiratory infections, especially brought on by plane travel. After many years, my sleep habits were examined and I was told to get at least 8 or more hours a night. This is hard, so I usually make up with an afternoon map. This has cured the infections but has cut down the number of active hours each day.
I'm a little shocked at how many Trump supporters are in this thread. Is Trump popular in the startup scene?
Sure, but I wasn't offering an opinion, rather a link :)
What are the advantages of bcrypt compared to SHA based hashes with unique salts?
I used Atom for 3 months over New Year's on a 4 GB 2015 MBA.

I had no issues whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, Atom seems to really struggle on my Windows laptop, it's often incredibly choppy. It actually runs better in a Linux VM than natively on Windows.
Wondering About the Iranian Social Media Apps? Here Is Your Answer
Domestic and International migration trends in US
yeah, that was my thought too. now we have an interesting new pollutant.
Replicating Douglas Lenat's Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron Win? (2013)
Smalltalk and some other languages have all three -- easy to do if the system is a "certain way".
We built cloud HSM; EnigmaLink to show it off - give us hard feedback! Please.
> I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.

Mensa accepts a number of tests which are somewhat correlated with IQ but not traditional IQ tests, and for which there is significant research showing training benefits (including a number of the standardized college, graduate, and professional school entrance exams.)
> plain text editors

I don't think that's a fair assessment given the what is now minimum expectations around syntax highlighting, syntax/grammar validation, autocomplete, etc. We're no longer dealing with "plain text".
In contrast to popular fiction, my concerns don't lie in a conspiring super AI. Rather, we should take countermeasures against suffering from a thousand cuts. Flash crashes in financial markets are a precursor to other sytemic risks ahead. Maybe this is a distinction that helps to appreciate safety for AI more.
1. Yes for the most part. The exceptions are also interesting.

2. Haven't seen anything above threshold yet
For those who don't know, this long article was announced by LRB exactly at the time Wright successfully fooled BBC (1) (2) O'Hagan had actually spent a lot of time with Wright, believing he'll be able to report about historically important moment and person. I'm glad O'Hagan kept the courage to finish it and publish it for it surely gives some insight on how the scam developed, even if he doesn't understand the details of it, he can report on the human side. May 2016 it was:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/05/02/josh-stupple/satoshi-ba...

"Andrew O’Hagan has had exclusive access to Craig Wright for the last six months. His forthcoming piece in the LRB will look at the myth of Satoshi and the journey of the man who claims to be him."

1) How Wright never proved anything: https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-pro...

2) In detail: https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nak...
> There is no reason to be using anything less than [Argon2, bcrypt or scrypt] and continued use is in my mind negligence.

PBKDF2 is fine too.
We built cloud HSM; EnigmaLink to show it off – give us hard feedback Please
We blog like crazy mofo's.

Educate yourself and your consumer all at the same time, and do it daily for two years straight. You can't not have some level of results if your writing is decent or better.

Combined with excellent technology, it's a nice win-win.
The Chinese government has been committing industrial theft on a large scale for years. This is well-documented but somehow China has gotten away with it.
I lost all faith in the media a long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

I remember watching this happen as a teenager via two sources of information: BBSes and the early Internet, and the mainstream media.

The mainstream media told me Weaver was a child abusing neo-Nazi cult leader who was stockpiling weapons to conduct terrorist attacks or overthrow the government or something.

The non-mainstream media told me he was a reclusive survivalist eccentric that may or may not have harbored some white supremacist beliefs (goofy or offensive beliefs are not a crime) who was being taken down dramatically in a frantic attempt by said government officials to cover their rear ends for a botched entrapment attempt.

History proved the former to be all lies and the latter to be largely the truth.

I never really trusted the news again. Stuff like this just proves my teenaged loss of faith was right. Newspapers and TV media are just "some guy's blog."

That is not to say I trust the "alt" media either. It's media too and over time I've seen it become more and more full of crap as money has come into the equation. Now it seems like mostly a sales channel for dodgy "natural" pharmaceuticals and populist political propaganda.

As Mulder would say: "trust no one." :)
And to think people used to say emacs stood for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
I thought vasectomies were reversible? If only we could get that gel they have in India.
There are some good old sci-fi stories about your last question.

People in my process are optimists. People in my position who spend a lot of time trying to improve education are realists.
There are tricks there too. If you just lookup in the database, I could find out how much time it took to retrieve the strings, this will leak the session id over time. Databases don't do constant-time data retrieval. You would have to come up with a way to retrieve the session token from the database at constant time, or at least time that does not betray the session id.
Show HN: Offline-docs, formatted node_modules/**/README.md for offline usage
Most S. American Monkeys are color blind and no one knows why