skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tainter talks a lot about the Eastern Roman Empire and why it survived. He talks about how they were able to radically simplify their civilization to save it.

For example: they got rid of the entire centralized military bureaucracy and replaced it with the Theme system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(Byzantine_district)#Org... ) which was basically a sort of farmer's military club franchise where farmers where also in the military and bought their own weapons and also conducted civil affairs. This held off invading muslim hordes for hundreds of years. They also replaced the massive central administration with a very minimalist king and court. They basically did a massive corporate re-org and decentralization to save the empire. It's a pattern that not many civilizations have pulled off.
actually, didn't consider these things still had chemical munitions in them, crazy! http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26663643
I wondered about that, but since microwaves in air are 50% faster moving than the light through fiber it seemed correct.

Probably should have said "Light through fiber optics is slower than microwaves in air".
That's fair. I suppose genius is anybody with a unique insight that takes action - but that last part may require pre existing societal frameworks. Furthermore, my definition may be so broad as to render it meaningless.
>those studies are not 'science'. Have you heard of 'replication crisis'?

Just because there has been a replication crisis doesn't mean you can dismiss all scientific studies willy nilly.

Those are not some Deepak Chopra style BS, they are actual clinical studies (and I've just sent a sample, there are tons). And the "replication crisis" argument doesn't really hold up if independent studies reach similar conclusions (as is the case with a lot of these).

>People like you who blindly believe anything a supposed authority puts out there in the name of science are real curse to the gift of science.

I don't "blindly believe anything a supposed authority puts out there". I respect multiple teams working on a field and coming up with relevant results, and having their papers peer reviewed etc.

I don't use issues like the "replication crisis" to dismiss any study I don't like based on predetermined convictions.

Notice also how your links are irrelevant. We are not talking about Psychology studies but medical clinical studies. So whether "Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences" (as another paper says) is irrelevant, as we're not talking about soft sciences and humanities here.
Hey how's that new patio coming along?

The carpenter blew us away. They don't allow publication of a preprint, but it was just accepted into the Journal of Patio Support Design!! Which, I'm told, is the third most-prestigious journal in the business...

No I meant like can we have a barbecue?
I think that the correct answer is no. Current computers don't dream, they are like in cryogenic suspension, totally frozen. There is no activity. (Actually there is a difference between "sleep" and "hibernation" mode, but neither are dreaming states.)

Nobody know why we sleep. There are a lot of theories that go from unsupported to bushtit.

Anyway, my favorite theory is from Crick and Mitchison. It's probably wrong, but it's so nice that it deserve to be true at lest in an alien specie or something. It would be a sad universe if this theory were totally false. But, being nice is not enough to make it correct :(.

Someone made a special kind of neural network where this kind of "dreams" are useful for learning, but this networks are totally different from the networks in the brain.

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_learning
Sad face. Nix is the one package manager that looked portable enough and interesting enough to push as a “single” manager for pretty much any system.
Perhaps this is the right crowd to ask. I've been looking for a particular article on WW I for a couple decades now, but I haven't been able to find it online. It's an Encyclopedia Britannica article which I think is entitled "War", although that may not be exact. It's from one of the editions published in the 1930's, which would make it the 14th Edition. I owned the set in hard copy for a while, but had to give it away when I moved.

The article one of the most poignant things I've ever read. The tone was essentially "Finally we've figured out how nations can live together in peace and harmony, and never again will humans engage in a war of that magnitude". Crucially, this article was from one of the editions published after World War I, and shortly before World War II. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I've often wanted to reread that the article and ponder how applicable it is to the present. Does anyone happen to have a copy? The 11th Edition is available online from archive.org, but that's too early. And I presume it was revised quickly in any editions printed after World War Two.
High local concentrations could certainly be a problem, but it seems pretty easy to solve.

Just setup a pump to pull a ton of sea water into the plant and deposit back out off shore. Slowly inject the brine into the stream and it would be instantly diluted.
Perl's CPAN has tooling for diffing versions through the use of MetaCPAN (a top-notch site which every language should try to emulate). For example, here is a diff of the URI distribution:

https://metacpan.org/diff/file?target=ETHER%2FURI-1.71%2F&so...

This information is also available through an API for integration into command line tools.
Wow, rdegges that's very impressive! Congrats on your transformation.

I'm curious what your routine is like. If you don't mind, could you share how many days a week you train/rest as well as how many hours on a good/average day? Thanks.
The amount of water consumed by humans is a literal drop in the ocean, on the global scale, fear-mongering aside. I wouldn't worry about the impact of a handful of desalination plants.
> Nope. A functional language is one that makes it easy to write functional programs, by satisfying the conditions I gave above.

Except you’ve still given no source for the conditions, condition -1 (“a functional language is a procedural language”) is wrong, and a language satisfying the conditions in no way makes it easier to write a functional program just by virtue of satisfying the conditions (because they can be satisfied entirely by removing features you don’t have to use). Maybe you meant “harder to write non-functional programs”.

> Second.

The last item in a list of three items is not the second item.
Hah. Love is unlimited. Time isn't. But I make do.
Dylan,

I'm a software engineer. Let's say I wanted to transition into security with the eventual goal of consulting for web / mobile application security.

1. Would going through the books you've recommended here and practicing a good path to get me to there?

2. Could you elaborate more on your second to last paragraph? Say I found a Rails vulnerability. How would I monetize that? I interpreted your statement as saying do lots of bug bounties or fewer not bug bounties.
Apple Is Said to Redesign Online Store App with Recommendations
> Technically, a proof communicated in spoken language is an informal proof, and this is how nearly all proofs in mathematics are conveyed.

That doesn't sound right. Nearly all proofs are communicated in a written formal language. That's completely different than spoken language.

Am I missing something?
Primitive Technology: Forge Blower
Amazon Sign-In OUTAGE Affects All Services and AWS
I concur this with a proposition of a system named as repeatability evaluation and digital tracking, or r.e.d.d.i.t., with the crowd-sourcing efforts.
Oh tenure. I get why it existed but it also seems so easy to abuse.

I think most of my great profs did not have tenure. Maybe 1 or 2 did.
> condition -1 (“a functional language is a procedural language”) is wrong

It's correct. In a procedural language, computations are structured as procedures that may call each other. In a functional language, that condition (plus three additional ones) hold.

> and a language satisfying the conditions in no way makes it easier to write a functional program just by virtue of satisfying the conditions

Removing pointer arithmetic makes it easier to write programs that don't contain memory errors. Removing spurious distinctions between memory blobs that hold the same value makes it easier to program with mathematical functions.

> (because they can be satisfied entirely by removing features you don’t have to use)

Removing features creates a different language. Often a nicer one!

> Maybe you meant “harder to write non-functional programs”.

Nope. That would exclude any general-purpose programming language. Lest you think otherwise: it's very easy to write imperative programs in Haskell and ML.

> The last item in a list of three items is not the second item.

Zeroth, first, second.
On the one hand, you are of course correct that the meanings of words are defined by usage.

On the other hand, that observation entirely misses Alan Kay's point.
I disagree about Rust (I assume you mean rigidity) you just need to learn how to work with it's vtable's through &Traits and/or enums. In terms of speed and foot shots, it definitely beats C.

I think Rust is the greatest programming language of our generation.

But regardless (and I meant irony, not pony in the original post), not everyone will agree with me, so everyone will want their own language. What we need is a general purpose packaging tool (I like cargo, but apt-get could serve equally well) which could support any language.
So once again I try to interpret OP:

I think it's clear that this is a paradox in the field of logic - but only there. Few people not trained and/or thinking of "logic" (that math thing) will find this sentence paradoxical, more like "useless/meaningless". Normal people use paradox more for things like the "French paradox" (the French are health despite eating "unhealthily"). Which isn't a paradox in any logical sense, and even on a human level I myself see the paradox more in the fact that some people see a paradox at all instead of just admitting that what they think is true about nutritional science just isn't (that French phenomenon can be shown to be true in statistics, it's not just imagination).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Outflow gives an overview of the environmental problems in desal outflow:

> Desalination processes produce large quantities of brine, possibly at above ambient temperature, and contain residues of pretreatment and cleaning chemicals, their reaction byproducts and heavy metals due to corrosion.[45] Chemical pretreatment and cleaning are a necessity in most desalination plants, which typically includes prevention of biofouling, scaling, foaming and corrosion in thermal plants, and of biofouling, suspended solids and scale deposits in membrane plants.[46]

> To limit the environmental impact of returning the brine to the ocean, ...

> Brine is denser than seawater and therefore sinks to the ocean bottom and can damage the ecosystem. Careful reintroduction can minimize this problem. Typical ocean conditions allow for rapid dilution, thereby minimizing harm.

What's an example of not typical?

Here's an article which points out that the Arabian Gulf is shallow, with low circulation rates and high evaporation rates which make it naturally saltier. That, combined with the damming of freshwater and increasing number of desal plants places a limit on to how much it can be use as a water source: http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/environment/desalina...
I'm not sure, but I think that the collapse/normal state is saved in the server. If you reopen the story from another window/browser/computer, I think you'll get that comment in the same state collapse/normal. I think that this is saved for a week to keep the total save space small.

For an authoritative answer, you can ask the mods: hn@ycombinator.com
Right to sue? This is civil contract law. Anybody has the right to try to sue anyone. If the claimant can convince a judge the software should be considered under the contract of the original GPL license, they could order it be complied with. Why? Because the GPL assigns rights to the recipient and user of the software. To not comply puts users at demonstrable loss.

And I don't see what's so strange about a court ordering the disclosure of source code. Loads of civil court rulings reassign property.
Because it remembers your preference about the page, which is presumably too big to fit into a cookie for abritrary N pages.

(Also keeping it in a cookie would introduce other issues like it not working if you change computers/browsers.)
Being able to potentially export out to JMeter format (or generate Gatling Scala scenarios) would be awesome, because the JMeter GUI is so horribly awful.
Uber Hasn't Had an Effect on Drunken-Driving Deaths, Study Finds
A very good piece.

But it reminds me of an irony of science communication. Landis is right that "Life is not made of protoplasm" but it is nonetheless true that modern science has found the Élan vital (vital impetus) that naturalistic writers often claim doesn't exist.

That impetus is free energy -- what Schrödinger called "negative entropy". The melancholy is that life is not made of the Élan vital, but consumes it. And it seems there is only a finite amount.
What do I love about JS? Oh, jeez...

-idiomatic higher-order functions

-relatively small (at least, until ES6)

-"this" (I kind of have a love/hate relationship with it, really)

-very little odd about the syntax (for a C-like language, everything is pretty much what you expect it to be, save some of the OO stuff, and the obvious elephant in the room that is ==).

-prototypical inheritance

-really easy serialization

-builtin regex support

-first-class functions that are equivalent to lambdas (you'd be surprised how many languages don't have this: It's pretty much just JS in the mainstream language space, AFAIK)

-A vibrant community, that, while not always exactly on target, is always doing somthing new and interesting, and constantly iterating on ideas.

-As of ES7, TCO.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty wrong with JS: I'd say more than is wrong with Python, and less than is wrong with Perl, and there are some quite nasty pitfalls, but it's not a horrible language by any stretch, and certainly not deserving of its reputation as a hacky, bastardized byproduct of Brendan Eich's sleep-deprived brain.

Now if you want to see a REALLY stomach-churning scripting language, have a look at QuakeC. Carmack, I stand in awe of your brilliance, and I understand the necessity of hyper-optimization at the time, but are you sure you didn't contact some horrifying elder god to write this for you?
No, it doesn't make sense. I seriously doubt anyone who can't see why that is the case though would ever see or acknowledge the problem. I am not going to tell you the reason, you need to work it out yourself.
> For Swift 4, the primary goals are to deliver on the
> promise of source stability from 3.0 on, and to provide
> ABI stability for the standard library.

Hm, does this imply that only the stdlib will have the benefit of a stable ABI? IOW, that it won't be possible to distribute compiled artifacts built with different versions of the compiler and expect them to link properly?
oops I think you commented the wrong thread
Exactly how ridiculous would it be to create the flux needed to use this to modulate our star? Or what about some other star? Could it be used as a means of communication? Sure, other means are easier but this would be visible even to a very low tech civilization and people who had nothing better to do used to watch the stars a lot.

I'm guessing we're several orders of magnitude away from the kind of flux that could do that sort of thing, but I have to wonder...
Firstly, poor analogy—English is a much superior language to Esperanto in terms information density over seconds per syllable in addition to being more expressive (it's easier to talk about a wide variety of topics and abstractions). Possibly more importantly than that, it takes a lot of people to make a spoken language useful for doing business but far far fewer for a computer language.

> instead of bemoaning the entirely rational decisions made by millions of junior and senior developers

I think people are bemoaning the stupid shit and not the entirely rational decisions. JS makes the former a bit easy.

> Python community was dissatisfied with JS and created Coffeescript

Nitpicking, but the first CoffeeScript compiler was written in Ruby and the language was largely inspired by Ruby.

> the Java community got class syntax added to ES6

Huh that's a new one

pretty sure that's not just the Java community, given that JS developers have been independently inventing class libraries (starting with Prototype, if not earlier) for ages.

> I'm sure Haskell has plenty of really cool things to bring to the table, but I've never heard of any of them

Underscore, lazy.js, other popular JavaScript libraries have some Haskellisms; LiveScript is a fork of CoffeeScript that used to be moderately popular and very Haskelly; React takes a lot of ideas from Haskell; immutable.js is quite Haskellian….

I think you're just not looking.

> all the Haskell community wants do is talk about how JavaScript sucks

You can drive a go cart on the highway, and you can keep modding your go cart, but at some point you might want to not be driving a fucking go cart on the highway.
> What a naked money grab.

Whereas high frequency trading is what, exactly?

It'd be one thing if the radio tower were needed to serve a useful purpose, but why should they be able to impose it on a community to shave a couple milliseconds off of latency so financiers can play stock market games?

Maybe I'm not well educated on the issue, but is HFT not just a gigantic zero-sum arms race where the participants would all love to stop wasting money on it except they're worried that someone else would one-up them by half a millisecond?
Snails don't compute phi.
From a safety and structural engineering standpoint, I'd assume that the goal of fireproofing isn't to make buildings that can withstand a fire, but to make buildings that can resist a fire for enough time until the building is evacuated and the fire department arrives.

Hence the reason why fireproofing is rated in hours, at least in the US.
The term "War of attrition" came from WWI because after the first three months of hostilities, everyone realized that the only way one side would win, is for all the people on the other side to be dead. Or for the United States to join the conflict.

The Kaiser wasn't a bloodthristy genocidal maniac, and an unconditional surrender from the Entente would not have been the only outcome of an early peace. War reparations, and, as per most European wars, small territorial/colonial concessions would have been the far more likely outcome.

What really was at stake was national pride. For the ruling class, that was one thing that they would not surrender. The common man should not have given a rat's ass about.
I very much doubt the CCCP was involved.
Yea, that's the key imo. Just because our bodies were able to deal with it does not mean it is optimal.

I think our current understanding of medicine and human biology is quite limited, so there may be tons of these little quirks - non obvious things that are actually amazing for us. But, i'm sure there will also be tons of things that are not directly related to what we did to survive thousands of years ago.
Hey Christopher,

1. Yes, working through those books would get you to a position at any of the best consulting firms for security. As Thomas will tell you, they used to ship some of the books I mentioned to candidates to prepare them for interviews at Matasano :). Those books will teach you everything you can learn from books alone; the rest is just up to practice.

2. If you find a Rails vulnerability, the most straightforward path to monetizing it is reporting it directly to the Rails core dev team and registering for a CVE number recognizing you as the researcher. Once the vulnerability is patched, report the fact that you found it and it was patched to Hackerone's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. The IBB program rewards researchers for reporting serious flaws in major software used around the internet.

Your interpretation is correct. I use "bug bounties" colloquially to mean web application vulnerabilities, but technically Hackerone's IBB is a bug bounty.

The point is that web application vulnerabilities are worth less as a general rule than vulnerabilities that impact a plurality of websites, due to things like vulnerability half life.

Hope that helps!
Also, structural steel is sprayed with fiber or cement-based fireproofing.
example.com just seems to point to localhost for me. Weird...
Geoffrey Landis , the writer of the subject article, may be known to some HN readers as a science fiction author. One of his SF stories, and one of my favorites in recent times, is available for free on the web. See "The Long Chase", available here:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-long-chase/
Setting Up My iOS Only Environment
Potential security considerations identified by the authors of HSTS are manyfold [1]. The most obvious is (14.6) 'Bootstrap MITM Vulnerability' states that since a non-preloaded site's initial contact will be through a non-secure channel, a man-in-the-middle can tamper with the response and never set a HSTS policy, or set an intentionally misconfigured HSTS policy. Preload is designed to mitigate against this, but preloading every single website is... difficult.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-14
> Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s.

How much of that price drop is due to lower energy prices? How sustainable is the power source?

Even with significant efficiency improvements (3X), shifting from local freshwater sources to desalination would have a massive energy requirements.[1] For such a bold claim ("the Desalination Era is Here"), this article has a rather lightweight examination of the environmental impacts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumptio...
Can Artificial Intelligences Suffer from Mental Illness?
Wow quite intriguing and exciting that swift 4 may have a rust inspired memory model!

Can definitely see the use case for swift expand a bit with this in its wings.
Not easy. You have to consider the energy cost of pumping tons of sea water around.
Shameless plug:

I feel like I have those pretty often, with the most recent being yesterday: https://github.com/nkantar/GHT.vim
The amazon issues appear to affect amazon video streaming, too.
Plenty of reasons. Mostly corruption, embezzlement, lack of expertise in what to do with affluent & rules abour what can be discharged to the river (which is polluted anyway) but bureaucracy

The entire city doesn't look like this or lack sewage. Its just some hotspots.

I have lived in Delhi for couple of years before moving back to Bangalore. Delhi truly is the asshole of India.