skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working on a web interface for a load of bit fiddling operations I do regularly. Mostly around converting data between formats, but also some basic crypto operations too.

It's not load balanced or anything, so be gentle :)

I know pretty much all of the stuff Bitbot can do you can also do with incantations of command line tools, but if you can't remember the commands or are just running on Windows then a web interface can be helpful.

Feedback welcome.

-- atix
There's an important difference between hardware and software. Hardware takes up space. It would probably be better to have a dedicated DSLR and a dedicated radio communication device that have a standard method of interoperability, if not for the fact that you'd have to carry them both around. You'd have better quality photos, and could take both wide-angle and zoomed shots, and you could swap out your camera to suit your needs, instead of always having the one camera soldered onto your phone.

Software takes up no space.
No it isn't added everywhere. Not to fruit, vegetables, raw cereals, dairy products, meat or fish. If you feel you have to buy food industry products (those that undergo some kind of processing) then don't most of them offer low sugar or sugar free options? Finally it comes down to industry meeting human preferences. Change those and the industry will change.

I agree it's often a problem but why not carry a lens to check the small print on the package.
Peter Watts's Blindsight - good fiction on the one hand, and exhaustively referenced on the other. (Watts is the only sf author I've run across whose novels include discussions and bibliographies of the research he used to inform and shape the narrative. In addition to earning him a new high score on the hardness scale, this seems counterintuitively to produce better stories, not worse ones.)
I don't think promoting your lifestyle to others is something that has any force, even if any of us were interested in evangelism. People pick up their everyday behaviour largely from what they perceive as normal, and mass media, which is filled with adverts and even the programming heavily decided by commercial factors, has enormous power to dictate what is normal. At the grass-roots, parents have a degree of power to set a concept of normality for their kids, but that's also strongly driven by peer-pressure which is in turn driven by mass media.
I get your point, but while I am a big advocate of typescript, I think that the topology of the javascript language is perfectly suited for front-end development.

There are a lot of impedance mismatches to deal with in the front end, (javascript to DOM, json to javascript, diversity of execution environments etc...), and I feel that when correctly used, dynamism the way javascript does it is a god-send.

All my core developments are in typescript, but in many situations it feels so magic to just do : myprop.undeclared = value and encapsulate the stuff in a knockout component written in typescript, while the situation would have caused a drama / major redesign in a back-end static language (C#, Java etc...). There are many valid scenarios (not resulting from a wrong OOP design) where this is very useful.

I'm actually amazed that people who designed Javascript got it so right. Static languages are great in the backend, typescript is great for the front-end and solved a real maintenance and Q&A issue by providing a level of typing and popularizing OOP in the front-end, but javacript is great for the web browser in general. Typescript is the piece that was missing, but this doesn't mean that javascript is broken, the elasticity of the language is a very powerful and elegant solution for the problems specific to the front-end.
I'd love to use this as an rng.
Fat was made the villain with faulty statistics.

Sugar, on the other hand, is very obviously bad for you. It causes type 2 diabetes, it causes caries, and it also suppresses the feeling of satiety. Reducing your sugar intake is the easiest way to get into better shape.

Exercise is important, but it won't undo all the damage. E.g. if you heavily drink and smoke, no amount of exercise will undo that. It's the same with sugar. Exercise won't undo all those insulin spikes.

It's true that we need glucose, but we need it at a slow and steady rate. We don't need it at a rate which causes a massive insulin response. If your body actively combats the amount of sugar in your bloodstream, you apparently overdid it.

Non-processed food without added sugars is a good way to get a little bit of sugar over the course of several hours. The absorption rate is delayed by fibers. That's why fruits are fine while juice isn't.

The big problem with avoiding processed food is that it's really inconvenient. Cooking, just like exercise, takes time and effort.
People also might care if most of their retirement rests with some large insitutional investor.

So if you invest with an active mutual fund, HFT is either a) detecting any large move the fund makes and pushes up the price of the asset before the trade completes or b) making you use a more costly service to complete the trade secretively to hide it from HFT detection.

Passive funds might trade less but their moves are so widely broadcast you don't really need algorithms to detect them.
The reason that an appeal to authority is a fallacy is that the deliverer of an argument is irrelevant to the validity of that argument.

If an expert makes an argument that is invalid (i.e. doesn't logically demonstrate the conclusion), we may still hold some faith in the argument, because perhaps the expert made some omissions or mistakes in presenting the argument. But we still ought to recognize that the conclusion has not actually been demonstrated as the logical implication of the premises.

Obviously the language I'm using in the previous paragraphs applies to formal logic. As with all formal fallacies, they are not so easy to discuss with precision when we're talking about informal arguments (like scientific papers and studies).
Couldn't this also be titled "Habits of high rational people", with mathematics simply being one application?

I'm not a mathematician and was miserable at math in school, but I apply these habits in the business world every day. They help me cut through a lot of crap that comes from other people's sloppy/lazy thinking.

>Anyone who has gone through an undergraduate math education has known a person (or been that person) to regularly point out that X statement is not precisely true in the very special case of Y that nobody intended to include as part of the discussion in the first place. It takes a lot of social maturity beyond the bare mathematical discourse to understand when this is appropriate and when it’s just annoying.

I don't disagree but would argue that the far more common problem is people - not just mathematicians, mind you - not considering definitions enough which ultimately leads to confusion and/or misunderstandings and consequently additional, unnecessary, cycles spent in discussion about "what do you really mean?"
You're clearly reading far too much into the parent. Do you have an emotional attachment to "soft" sciences that is causing you to be defensive in the face of no attack at all?
The blocked bugs are not security problems.
It is just not useful for anything. You can't tell your friends to install Firefox for a video call.
Actual title:

A spoonful of sugar: How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU
> a proof is a kind of computable function

It's weird to me to identify proofs with a computable function that generates the steps in a sequent calculus proof. Why would this be more fundamental than the steps themselves? Even in mathematical foundations where computable functions are very important (e.g. intensional type theories like CoC) we have proof terms that are not functions (e.g. existence proofs are of sigma type, not pi type).

> Trying to spell out what kind of computable functions they are is a big part of one of the main outstanding problems of mathematics known as the P v NP problem. In other words, you recognize these drawings as "proofs" when you are trained to see them but nobody really knows how to define a general procedure that will output all of the correct drawings correctly (using whatever symbolism or notation you prefer).

P vs NP has little to do with what computable functions we consider to be proofs, if we decide to go that route at all. All proposed general mathematical foundations (ZFC, ETCS, MLTT, various HoTTs) have polynomial proof checking[1], so yes a P=NP result will mean we can check the truth of a mathematical statement in polynomial time (in the size of the proof at least), but this magic algorithm will just spit out the same form of proof that the NP verifier takes as input. This has nothing to do with what we decide to consider the format of a proof to be.

> I mean: you encounter the overall idea of producing logical drawings that demonstrate mathematical truths in elementary school geometry and then try to make those concepts more precise (as David Hilbert did) all the way through to research level mathematical logic and even then, after learning concepts that take years to master, you will still never quite know how to answer the question posed in the title of the blog post.

For particular mathematical systems, this is very much a solved problem since we have verifiers for a variety of mathematical foundations including ZFC. If you mean "what does a proof for any suitable logical system look like", we would generally require that it be some class of input that can be put into a particular computable function that is the verifier, but there is no reason to require the proof itself to be a computable function.

[1]: Yes, there are type theories with undecidable type checking but at the proof-theoretic level we would generally require the evidence that our proof term type checks to be part of the proof of a statement so this doesn't make much of a difference here.
I will say that I'm my experience developers with a background in C# seem to love Typescript while developers with a background in Javascript seem to be slower to warm up (a lot slower).

In our office it seems like the JS folks are sensing that they should "get on board" with the clear enthusiasm from the C# folks but there is resistance (mostly muttered quietly to each other to avoid looking like they don't get something that seems so obvious to others).
Typescript does not infer union types for return types. You can explicitly annotate them just fine though.

I suppose the reasoning is that, when adding types to js, this is exactly the kind of bad behaviour you want to catch. But I'm not sure, perhaps there are just technical implications for not inferring union return types.
Would you care to elaborate on that? Googling "dr lustig fraud" brings up mostly what looks like fabricated "debunking" articles from things like "The Scam Report".
All that does is make it cheaper.
I'm no lawyer, and don't fully understand these things, but would that not also be illegal distribution?
Not just that. Mozilla is completely losing focus. They used to stand for "keeping the web open" and they've been doing a shit job of it lately.

* Messing up the marketing behind critical projects (Persona) and then shutting them down when their usage is too low for their taste.

* Axing Thunderbird, one of the last usable non-web-based email clients. I don't like nor use TB, but maintaining a decent email client cant be that hard for Mozilla, and it is important for the web.

* Putting a ton of money into Firefox OS, an atrociously bad and slow OS that had the worst mobile UX I've ever experienced. Then putting even more money into the Flame so that they can have a bad OS on dedicatedly-bad hardware.

* Constantly messing up feature development on Firefox with Hello, Pocket and more, all pointing to Mozilla clearly not understanding the Firefox userbase.

* In the mean time, Firefox is still far slower than chrome. Scrolling especially. Gmail and irccloud are unusable for me on Firefox. My own project hits Firefox's performance issues (compare seeking on this player in Chrome/Firefox: https://hsreplay.net/replay/vZEz7JoNnfgVo34HJUHhEF - Firefox is a solid 10x slower).

So to recap: Axing critical projects in a market they understand, so that they can spend the money on futile projects in a market they don't understand. Introducing controversial new features in Firefox while the browser is still far slower than Chrome, losing what's left of their market share. And this is just the big stuff, I could go on for another 10 paragraphs.

Mozilla is heading into a mountain. They need to seriously rethink their structure and priorities if they want to avoid a crash.

Edit/PS: Most of these issues are structural. Pocket's functionality is useful in a web browser. A truly-free mobile OS/smartphone is also something we need. And foss communications are extremely important to the web, which is currently locked in to hangouts/messenger. But Mozilla is messing all these up at every corner; underestimating costs, underestimating effort, misunderstanding (being disconnected from) their userbase, not marketing anything properly and giving up too easily.
> The book is not editorialized, it is just an collection of events.

I'm not sure how you regard these as mutually exclusive. Are the events that go into the collection not chosen? Might they not be chosen with an eye toward suggesting conclusions which the one doing the choosing isn't quite bold enough to espouse outright, preferring instead to be able to say "well, that's just your interpretation" in reply to whatever criticism may come?
> The precision you hold yourself to through a rigorous approach to a problem is also very valuable and is the reason I think calculus is very important.

What property concerning precision does calculus have that doesn't hold for any topic in mathematics?
Mexico was sued because they effectively installed a tariff, not just because the law affected the profits of multinationals. They had agreed not to install such tariffs.

The impacts of trade are complex and I don't think we need to run headlong towards laws favoring large corporations, but it's a little over the top to say that it is obvious evil to agree to treat foreign companies equally to native companies. In many situations, trade will benefit everyone. It's not evil to enable and encourage that trade.
Well for one, Firefox Hello works with a centralized signaling server running proprietary code. Not appealing to the contingent of Firefox users who use it because it's the most in-line with free software ideals of the popular browsers.
If not security, what are the reasons for Mozilla bugs to go private?
Ask HN: What was your “Why didn't I stop doing this sooner?” moment?
We are hearing a lot of good habits to take, but I think the reverse - things to stop doing - should be actually a lot more interesting!
Yep. Three words:

Black flag weather
Anyone have an argument (or the argument Tainter provides) for whether the "trick" that a civilization exploits has to be (1) singular, (2) original, or (3) not exploitable by contemporary civilizations?

And who wants to chime in their two cents about what the USA's "trick" is in maintaining its global pre-eminence?
Enlighten me. Otherwise I'll file this under "baseless ad hominem", as I found him rather instructive till now.
> It's still sad it can't be relied upon per language spec. :/

There is a @tailrec annotation which ensures that a method was optimized. It probably needs to be updated to understand Scala-Native's new abilities, but the infrastructure is there!
> Those type annotations are the tests,

Disagree slightly. Type annotations are logical propositions and the compiler proves them for you.

That is to say: Tests can only prove the presence of bugs, not absence. Types prove the absence of (type-related) bugs. They essentially give you theoretically perfect test coverage (modulo bugs in the compiler).
das it gmane
2nd paragraph.
The divorce rate peaked in the 80s and has been declining ever since in the States.

Here's the last 15 years, but can't find the full data set right now: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm
>a privilege, not a right

One of the most statist phrases ever.
Design Doesn’t Scale
>myprop.unDeclared = value and encapsulate the stuff in a knockout component written in typescript

And when I need to read this code later on and figure out what the shape of myprop is what do I do ? When I come across a function in a different file that touches that "unDeclared" property how the hell do I figure out what type it is, where it was assigned, etc. How do I find all references to that if "unDeclared" is a common word or is used on multiple types as a property name ?

JavaScript is just a nightmare to maintain - sure it might be easier to bang out the code initially - but good luck finding someone who will maintain that stuff once the author moves on. Hell - good luck coming back to your code base a year later and finding your way around that. From my experience most of non-trivial JS ends up being write only.
In my opinion, this is basically every commercial or advertising I've ever seen. Emotional arguments damage my ability to make good decisions.

Unfortunately, I can't sue.
His “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment.
There's a lot written on astrology as well. Volume doesn't mean it's true.

I wasn't able to find anything in PubMed on the causal connection as you describe, though I did find papers like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3684604/ on "Archaea and Fungi of the Human Gut Microbiome: Correlations with Diet and Bacterial Residents" which describes the correlation.

> Methanobrevibacter and Candida were positively associated with diets high in carbohydrates, but negatively with diets high in amino acids, protein, and fatty acids. A previous study emphasized that bacterial population structure was associated primarily with long-term diet, but high Candida abundance was most strongly associated with the recent consumption of carbohydrates. Methobrevibacter abundance was associated with both long term and recent consumption of carbohydrates.

How do you know it's Candida and not Methanobrevibacter?
Don't eat and you forgot a fundamental part of it: tell everyone else you meet that you're fasting.
Yes, exactly this. I so have to second the edit. It's exactly the same for me. I'm way more tempted to delete the app instead of buying it. Only using it for an hour and so far it has annoyed me way more than it helped me.
Mozilla's leadership has become a sad thing to watch. This whole wannabe product first lean startup nonsense just gets worse and worse. I was one of the few Firefox OS users but at this point, I'm using Chrome and Android. It's not the end of the world but it's just sad to see an organization that has historically done so many good things be torn down by awful executive leadership.

Every member of the Steering Committee should issue a public apology and resign for gross incompetence.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
About 6 weeks ago I stopped ingesting sugar, to the extent that is practically possible. No candy & cakes, no sweet drinks and very diligent reading of labels on the non-obvious stuff. I do eat fruit but not processed into juice.

Dropped 4 kg, everything tastes better, no energy drop at 4pm and the cravings disappeared within first two days. Friends report similar results.

This was also much easier than my previous attempts at "cutting down" sugar.
<not a lawyer/> but, any reason that trump couldn't be charged with 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(7): "threat to obtain or reveal confidential info"

Seems if he was a normal pleb and openly put an ad in craigslist to ask for a 3rd party to hack someone, that he'd have the FBI knocking at his door.
> This doesn't stop everyone from making grand, confident claims about static vs. dynamic typing. Such studies as there are don't support these claims, but the studies are weak in so many ways that it's easy to dismiss the ones you don't like and stick to your previous opinion, so that's what we all do.

> For these reasons, the debate is pure tribalism and cargo cult. We should stop pretending that our views have any objective support and just talk about them in terms of taste. That's unsatisfying to the technical mind, though, so none of us will!

Excellent points[1] and I think I'm mostly justified in saying that I personally have begun prefacing any discussion of these things by a disclaimer to the effect of "well, the evidence is very sparse and it's a woefully understudied area...". I think of it as a kind of 'professional maturity' these days. Or maybe it's just 'old man syndrome' :).

Of course it's not like actually doing these types of studies is easy or cheap, so... here we are, I guess :)

[1] Even though I disagree with your position on type checking. Static FOREVER, baby! :p
Hard to believe this is something more than 'wannabe business PR' plus movie PR.

China female/male ratio is heavily unbalanced. There is a LOT men on market for women to choose. Also almost no foreign woman marry chinese man, on the contrary to the chinese women marrying a lot of foreigners.

1+2 means china is a market where men are at bad position and women has plenty of fish to choose from. Opposite situation which would create such services as described in the article.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China

According to 2012 figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s sex ratio at birth (the number of boys born for every 100 girls) was as high as 118.
Do you have a shred of evidence to suggest that they did? I mean, I realize that's a higher bar to clear than throwing around shitty implications and trying for the "well there really aren't any good guys here" schtick, but you're really going to have to come up with at least a little bit of substance if you want to be taken seriously here.
When I enter into a business contract, I have a lawyer review the documents before I sign them. When I download an app or signup for a web service, I don't–but the legal documents that I'm signing are no less complex in those cases. It's unreasonable to expect a serious understanding of these contracts on the part of the user, and it's unreasonable to expect them to hire a lawyer to be sure they're OK with what they're agreeing to. The costs, multiplied across all customers, would be prohibitive. For mass market services like this, there should be a better way.
Why not? Someone might write a compiler. And I expect that if WebAssembly becomes the primary source for browser runtimes, browser vendors will probably try to compile Javascript to WebAssembly first. It does not make sense to have two engines or two interpreters for a single WebAssembly engine.
Not that sure about that. For every vagina there has to be corresponding dick for the whole cheating thing to work. So I guess cheaters are roughly equal between sexes.
As faces de um safadão
Mars Gullies Likely Not Formed by Liquid Water
Space is going to be an issue for virtual reality
His first novel is Mars Landing (I have not read it myself). He lists his SF bibliography on his website [1]. It consists mostly of short stories which appeared in various magazines, but a couple of stories are available free on the web [2], [3].

[1] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/G_Bibliography.html

[2] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/time_prime.htp

[3] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/interlude.htp
Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) are something I've never actually seen used anywhere.

Adobe Flash: why isn't it dead yet?

Pocket is retarded, and it's icon is a non-sequiteur, with no clear purpose. It's a non-obvious add-on that found it's way into the default build probably due to funding.

And chatting and video calls with a browser extension alway felt very Netscape Navigator to me.
LCD backlight diffusers have a cool method of accounting for light distribution. Basically the diffuse etching is a grid of circles, and the circles are larger where there is less light. Like printer dithering.
Yes, but IIRC it doesn't work for mutually recursive methods or dynamic(!) tail calls.