skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We should be clear here by what we mean by language.

It's perfectly possible and manageable to create cross-language VMs and to translate pretty accurately between languages. However, what breaks down, as you alluded to, is that people expect the standard libraries, and the libraries of others, to work interchangeably, and that is orders of magnitudes more complex (mostly because you are, by definition, working closer to the metal).

So, I need to ask, how much research is being done in giving the standard library as much consideration as the language? Do we have a grasp on what it would take to treat the stdlib as a "first class" citizen?
Here is how you can receive online payments in Cameroon
As much as this article wanders, with both hits (communication between professors & students = good!) and misses (nobody taught me how to write = bad!), it's covering some familiar territory to me and some friends.

A buddy wrote his MA in Education thesis about how, in short, technology assistance by way of spell check, auto correct, and social casual conversation degrading into emojis that long-form thinking and writing are certainly suspect for an incoming college generation. Attention span, composition, and rote discipline are assumed to be low for incoming Freshmen as a hypothesis (untested, though a consistent complaint it seems both by students and faculty, re: poor writing skills).

His methodology to improve was centered around slowing down the process, forcing attention to detail by using antiquated tools - difficult to use ones as well. A quill, then a pencil, then a ball-point, eventually a typewriter. The point being active, engaged thought is needed to avoid making mistakes, and in the case of the quill, a mistake requires a full re-write (in the course design). Quite the opposite of spitting out stream of consciousness, right?

Other reading on the subject that might be of interest is "The Performance of Self in Student Writing" by Thomas Newkirk[1], which I found to be an excellent, dense consideration of the ins and outs.

But as for this quote:

>It's no wonder that so many students struggle with writing: you're never really shown how to do it. Your practice is sporadic and undirected. You're expected to pick it up, basically, perhaps by reading, perhaps by winging an essay here and there. Which is like expecting a kid to pick up tennis by watching lots of Wimbledon and losing in the early rounds of the occasional junior tournament.

No, no, no, no. This is wrong. Reading and writing have a significant feedback loop. Practice makes better. To quote Mike Judge in character in Office Space, "What do you think of a person who only does the bare minimum?"[2] Writing, like playing an instrument, isn't something that just sort of falls into place by showing up to class, or doing the bare minimum.

It also takes a lot of drive (or weird love of punishment) to get through years and years of criticism which get thrown in by participating in the creative process. I say this as having been in my fair share of workshops over the years. Sometimes it's a hard go.

Also, this left a little something out:

>Which is funny because email has such obvious promise as a tool for writing, and sharing writing, and teaching writing.

It's also got a lot of potential to get people fired, with Reply All and/or sending things when in a emotional state when cooling down might be a more prudent pathway.

[1]Link to a review PDF: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/282/Performan...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg
Tor was sponsored by the USG to allow intelligence informants to not be uncovered. That is the "very specific use" it was originally envisioned for.

See: http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm
Re: most data scientists wouldn't change their home page based on 516 data points:

Out of curiosity, if you find that in 240 out of 261 small round blue cell tumors, your algorithm can make a better treatment decision than the pathologist, do you wait for more, or get the algorithm into trials ASAP?

Careful now. I didn't mention how long you might be waiting. This is a domain specific trick question.

Furthermore, we have an appeals process to address sentencing mistakes. It isn't easy, but if the risk scoring algorithm turns out to be materially wrong and contributes to a harsher sentence than warranted, that can be considered a factual error and the basis for resentencing.

It's almost as if our justice system is geared towards a reinforcement learning approach, due to the consequences of both action and inaction...
Annoyed at crypto, Brazilian judge orders mobile carriers to block WhatsApp
I tried this out, its pretty great!
So much easier than the old way.
I can't tell what you're actually replying to in my comment.

I'm talking specifically about using a different language, a different OS, a different deployment pipeline, new testing methods, new security constructs, new infrastructure orchestration methods, entirely new architectural paradigms, etc. etc. etc.

In fact using that as an example. Say it's a new programming language. You will absolutely waste more time dealing with the pain of doing things epically wrong, fighting with your tools, doing really crappy kinds of log-print debugging, etc. than you would taking 10-20% of your time up front learning some normal idioms and conventions for the language and learning to use richer tracing and debug tools to find problems and to instrument your prototypes.

Just because you sat down and started coding and debugging without having any idea what you were doing, but at least you were "doing", emphatically does not mean you are getting to a goal of minimally viable test, or prototype, or product faster. It just means you started typing sooner.
There are a few businesses built around that model: https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/, https://www.phacility.com/, etc. I attempted it once but quickly lost motivation because 90% of the initial work is marketing which I don't really feel passionate about (nor am I good at it).
A very non-PC joke from George Carlin springs to mind...
> Imagine the person hours required to do something like that, you'd have to hire professional persian carpet weavers or something.

Apollo Guidance Computer (the computer of the Apollo Command Module) has 36K 16-bit words of core rope memory. That is about 0.5MB. There were at least ten such computers created. So, this much core rope memory was woven for the Apollo Command Module's computers alone. See a previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656282
I buy stuff with debit card linked to my bank account. My bank website lets me download a CSV dump of all transactions in the account in a given timespan (it automatically sets it to after the last time I did the download). I have a script to sanitize the CSV and a hledger ruleset that parses the CSV entries to hledger log and tags common receiver names like grocery stores or utility bill companies with the appropriate spending categories.

Work needed from me: Downloading the CSV once or twice a year, running the script, checking the output for anything that didn't get tagged by the existing rules and needs extra annotation.
The data is obvious online, in that many many people have to be explained that they're different languages, with a good part of those also stating that they gave up on Perl 5 since "Perl 6 is coming"; as well as in direct talks with companies as early as 5+ years ago already when many german companies told me they're delaying further investments in Perl 5, since "Perl 6 is coming".
Personally I find on-train connectivity to be very useful. And if you read the rest of the article, those features are really just in addition to the various other improvements, like wider doors and (of course) just having more trains in general.

I imagine the USB and WiFi were just a small, trivial add-on they planned since they're already blowing money on new train cars in the first place. It doesn't cost too much, makes your train ride a little nicer, and gets the MTA better press and reputation.

In the end I don't see any problem with it.
These calls are matters of degree. Although the original question was somewhat generic, Erdogan is pretty on-topic in a thread about Turkish politics. Throwing in Hitler, Trump, and Putin, on the other hand, makes it hopelessly generic and provocative to boot.
I think the commenters are jumping to conclusion that OPs profit = 1.1M - 100k. Most of these apps have a big running cost and the profit is not so much as one imagines. Otherwise, OP won't be gainfully employed.
It would be pretty unprecedented for the coup members to shoot down the sitting president's plane. They would almost certainly just prevent him from landing, or allow him to land and arrest him immediately.
Very cool document. I kind of got stuck at delta queries, though. How do you implement that? I can't find any reference to delta/removed queries on Mongo, Postgres, or MySQL. Do you just keep all records in the database and add a "removed" field? How would that solution work with user privacy & users truly wanting to remove data?
> There is no magical "smart client" that somehow knows that rel=comments means that the link leads to comments about the current resource and can figure out it should POST there to create a new comment. It has no idea what the hell a "comment" is.

Yes there is: that client is a human being. The point of REST and HATEOAS is to write something that works properly for humans, and to which general software can specifically be adapted.

That's part of why I loathe single page apps and JavaScript so much: HTTP & HTML already offer an incredible expressive range, and JavaScript just tramples over the forms and scaffolding they create.
So like $350,000/yr after the 30% cut from the app stores, and additional 40% cut from state and federal taxes?

yeah I'd keep my job too and look forward to those sweet tax deductions and getting all that extra social security withholding back
The big innovation seems to be trains with fewer seats and more standing space. That increases capacity, but few people get to sit down.

No platform edge doors, surprisingly. Many newer systems have those. But they require that the trains all have their doors in the same places, so you can't mix types of train sets.

Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app. (The MTA has an API with their train and bus position info, at least for the lines that have reporting gear.[1]) But those are cheap.

[1] http://datamine.mta.info/
Would be interested in this. Are you looking for a new customer?
> Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app.

If you happen to be at a station with cellular signal or wifi.
Aside from what the others said, the PATRIOT ACT (it's all an acronym) was based on an older bill that was not passed.

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

http://www.wnyc.org/story/whats-bill/
The majority never picks the best and markets do not optimize as much as some people think. Whether it's movies, arts, books, music, politicians, keyboards or programming languages, the most popular choices are practically never the best ones.

Which is probably why a technocracy in which every voter must pass a fact-based proficiency test before being allowed to vote might trump democracy. Not sure, just wanted to chime in with being cynical. :/
The value they add is easily measurable, but it's still quite difficult to tell whether their performance is due to individual merit or external factors.

For example, in any given year some traders are wildly successful (and reap huge bonuses) but year to year their performance is variable enough to be noise - it's not clear that really good traders really exist. Some are just bound to get lucky.

Similarly sales guys may appear great because their product sells itself, or terrible because of a downturn in the business cycle or sector.

It's not insane to want a read on "how hard are you working" or "how skilled are you" that is independent of all the messy confounding variables of the market.
This is certainly another issue. There are many reasons why NYC rent is so high. But >50% of your rent going to property taxes may be the #1 most significant.
I've enjoyed a Vi-emulation keymapping that i made where the primary movement keys are on the home row:

https://github.com/bshanks/viperre

I also use the Colemak keyboard layout, so i made two versions of the mapping, one for QWERTY, one for Colemak. Which highlights the importance of text editors (and IDEs) needing to have completely configurable keybindings.
Interesting. But I feel like Racket is a better framework for quickly prototyping new languages.
New Study Finds Popular Fitness Trackers Still Put Users’ Security at Risk
If deanonymization would be based on size and patterns of TCP connections made to cloudfare server you should use BSD configuration flag to make them more random with net.inet.ip.random_id=1. But as long as we can't measure this... it's no proof and no defense.
> In many use cases, C++ might win the benchmark game, but the end user will not notice any difference in human time.

If the program runs on the user's machine, I'm pretty certain the users WILL notice the difference, memory wise.
Cost control becomes truly important when for some reason you unpredictably lose a good chunk of revenue. Happened to me, twice. Having a framework in place within which I could enter damage control mode ASAP to face that double-step staircase was quite literally a lifesaver.
https://hackerlists.com/ - The goal is to create awesome lists of hacking & programming related resources for people to reference. I've had a couple of lists do really well on social media so far [1][2], but I'm quickly learning that my knowledge limitations are preventing me from creating the quality of lists that I want the site to be known for. Therefore, I'm starting to put my energy into finding a freelance writer with a technical background that can write at the quality level I want for the site. But so far I've broken even in the first month.

[1] https://hackerlists.com/hacking-sites/

[2] https://hackerlists.com/free-machine-learning-books/
To add to the examples, Truffle currently has interpreters for unmanaged languages such as C/Fortran (with Sulong), dynamic languages such as Ruby and JS, statistics/math like R and functional like Clojure.
The interopability is done in a way that does not need a common representation or object layout.

> I wouldn't use Rust for the syntax; I'd use it because I want properties like complete memory safety, manual control over memory allocation, easy (and fast!) access to C libraries, and short startup time. These are all things that Truffle explicitly does not deliver.

Truffle itself does not do it, but it is possible to have a Truffle interpreter with these requirements.
Memory safety can be enforced at the frontend compiler level like Rust does I believe. Memory can be allocated directly with Unsafe or calling libc functions. GNFI [1] allows for fast calls to native libraries.
Startup can be improved radically with SubstrateVM, but it is currently closed-source. There are many ways to improve the JVM startup, but not necessarily convenient (but then you don't need to wait to compile your program either to start running it).

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2500832
Yes, you could. You'd implement a program to take C code and emit an equivalent Lisp program (i.e., parse C and emit the tree into Lisp), then compile the Lisp program. The annotations and care the parser/semantic analysis code uses will provide the semantics of C.

This will, however, not "play" like C without a great deal of work. You will be dragging an entire Lisp VM around and have to shake all of that out to actually produce something as lean as a C program at the end. You're probably best suited to take the Lisp compiler and build a "independant code" generator to generate binaries that don't rely on Lisp. But I'm waving my hands, you'd need to talk to the SBCL or CCL development teams there.
I'm not sure if using recovered heat from the subway system to generate electricity is economically feasible (probably not). In the end you'd have to eject the heat anyway, probably to the Hudson and East rivers.
Please don't be uncivil in HN comments, even when someone else is breaking the site rules.
> Also ban bums from sleeping on trains.

I think there's likely already a law against it, it's a matter of enforcement. And I for one have a hard time being mad at someone sleeping on a train at night during the winter time; shelters aren't fun places, they fill up and have stringent requirements, and for many of them, the alternative is freezing to death outside.
Inside the playlist factory (Spotify, Google and Apple music)
Did you even read the article? The trains have wider doors, flip up seats, and other features intended to fit more people and get people moving faster. It's literally the best they can do until they replace the outdated signaling on the tracks, which is an even more expensive project.
Traffic analysis is always a problem

Not always. High-latency mix networks with fixed message size and randomized transmission are very robust against traffic analysis.

The elephant in the room is, as usual, PEBKAC. The demand by users for low latency will always be the killer for anonymity networks.
Another assumption there is: Nasa had reliable software. From what stories I heard, I think that may not be true.
The big problem with using the hypertext Web as an example of REST is that there is a human operator literally driving that "engine of application state". Most API clients cannot afford to compute their state transitions on a network of 80 billion neurons.
Are you reinvesting the dividends or cashing them out?
> You should trust humans far, far less than you do.

Which is why I don't trust the people picking the algorithm. You still have human bias, but now they are easier to hide behind complicated algorithms and unreliable data.

edit: removed original editing error

edit2: You say I should trust the algorithm, but y9u seem to be going out of your way to ignore that the algorithm itself has to be created by someone. You haven't reduced the amount of bias; trusting an algorithm simply codifies the author's bias.
These attacks require observation of entry and exit.
Have you been to San Francisco?
Where do you live that $350,000/yr isn't enough to live on?
Agree on abortion. Ireland had to have a referendum as it was a constitutional issue. I'm not saying Ireland is Amsterdam, just a very different place to 20 years ago.
I was thinking that myself. If they had started with a modern Lisp implementation, they would be worlds ahead. :-/
The point of Tor-browser is to make all signatures the same, when screensize.
How is that any different from other machines used in court? From transcripts/recordings, to forensic tests like DNA machines and algorithms.

But in the worst case, you can print the algorithm out on paper. They are generally simple linear models or decision trees. You could easily verify the output by hand, albeit a bit tediously.

In the case of more complicated models like random forests or ensembles, you can generate lots of artificial data, and then train a simpler model to approximate its output as best as possible. Then you can print out that model.

In the old days, they printed out actuarial tables. Big tables that you would look up your case, and find the recommended output.

>Try and anonymise that, and you end up in a situation where those who can act regretful over the phone/without being soon have an advantage over those that can't.

That's exactly the problem. People vastly overestimate how well they can read facial expressions. I recall studies that officers couldn't tell liars from nonliars better than chance, but they believed they could.
Going Serverless with Snap CI, Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, and Swagger
> BASIC is a good demonstration of why the platonic ideal language is wrong

That's often my point when people bring up arguments against a language that seems a bit more complex (Perl), or for language simplicity (Python). Some complexity falls into a sliding scale where there is more cognitive load while learning, but it pays of in the every day usage. The siple example of an extreme end of this is APL. If you can internalize and understand the extremely concise and powerful syntax and semantics of the language (I haven't), you can do amazing things very quickly[1].

Now, doing amazing things very quickly isn't the only metric by which we judge a language, but it is a useful metric, and it's probably worth having a language on that end of the spectrum in your tool set.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
CTO of Cozy Cloud Frank Rousseau Removed from Duty by Board
That's because this is a speculation; e.g. "this obvious opportunity is not the proof" is admitted in the text itself. As mentioned, the requirement is the ability to correlate two different traffic signals: from your computer to Tor, and from Tor to the exit. So, the agency trying to trace you needs to be listening at both of those points. Their approach is simply to have one of those be the ISPs (presumably this ranges into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers) of US citizens (foreign ISPs would seem much harder to monitor), and the other being the CloudFlare servers (only maybe hundreds or thousands of machines needed to log this?).

Actually, watching the entrance and exit nodes in this fashion is probably more expensive than simply hosting your own entrance and exit nodes. It would be within the NSA's power to, say, host or monitor 500 of the 1000ish exit nodes by now, collecting 50% of the exit traffic at almost no real cost. Entrance traffic is harder as the network is larger, but if you hosted (or, again, captured the traffic to) another 2k non-exit relays you might be able to capture 10-20% of the entrance traffic. The basic points I'm making here are: (1) that there are way fewer relay nodes to monitor than there are ISPs, if you would prefer surveillance; and (2) you are not restricted to surveillance or even to your own nation--there's literally nothing stopping the NSA from purchasing VPSes in the Netherlands and Germany and Sweden and running Tor on them, and it'll seem like a very geographically diverse set when you're looking at it with Vidalia.

Combined together the NSA can maybe deanonymize about 5-10% of the Tor traffic to the Internet right now with a much cheaper method, and this is where it gets interesting: the Tor default is to have 3 hops, which means that in addition to correlating traffic patterns you get to correlate on the IP address of the hop in the middle, even if that hop is not colluding with you. So even in the face of network jitter you have a 32-bit identifier which links together packets above and beyond simple network traffic into or out of Tor. And you only need to operate a few thousand computers to do it -- far fewer than you'd need to monitor the US ISPs in general.

You can also try to watch specific popular exits like Cloudflare, but doing this removes this awesome IP address that you get for the middle hop, and you still need either a relay node or else to be tapping a given user's IP, to try to deanonymize them.
The JavaScript VM is a lot more complicated than a compiler, it's a compiler, an interpreter, and a whole heap of hacks to squeeze maximal performance out of it.

That there's a problem processing whitespace isn't a reflection on the team not knowing their stuff, it's a problem that will be corrected. It's likely something that was never benchmarked and proven to be an issue before, or if it was an issue it was a low-priority one.
If the pound remains weak, then even with tariffs, UK exports to the EU could be cheaper than they were pre-Brexit, no concessions needed.

I concede to greater minds than mine, but those minds are estimating something in the range of a 2-3% impact in the long term, nothing drastic. I'm unclear about the reasoning behind the doom-and-gloom.