skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Instead of standardizing how to do that across all Unixen—something that would take just a single flag to the ld(1) command..."

Hmm. Yes. But what if they standardize on something you, or Kamp, don't like?

Here's an anecdote for you:

When I was working for IBM in the mid-90s, the AIX/RS6000/PowerPC C/C++ compiler folks (in Toronto?) were justifiably proud of the code their compiler generated. But it had one peculiarity. It generated machine code directly, without going through an assembler. Oh, it could generate an assembly listing with -S, but the output wasn't syntactically valid. It couldn't compile the generated assembly.

This was a strongly defended position. "Why would you want to?" they said, "It's really hard to write good assembly for a RISC machine. Not many can do it."

These are the people who are needed to standardize things.

Now, at the time, AIX had a ridiculously complicated (but very flexible and featuriferous) dance required to build shared libraries. Using libtool is easier. I can hear the counterargument now. "You want us to hamstring our users? To just guess what they what they want to do, behind a single flag? Are you crazy?"

Fortunately, now, after Linux switched from a.out to ELF, I have been able to use "gcc -shared" to build all of the shared objects I've needed to. So, yay!

But I understand Kamp doesn't like gcc....
Well, yeah, there's a reason I included the second paragraph -- it was intended to be directly applicable to the situation at hand, not just a general observation.
Breaking kneecaps is expensive though. You can't just set up a ring of roadblocks around a city that kneecaps everyone passing through as a matter of course.
Just because they say it doesn't mean it's good, or even acceptable.

"[O]n track to potentially eclipse..." sounds like the worst form of quarterly-report spin.
"Obfuscated APL"? Isn't that a pleonasm?
I've played with J a bit. I have yet to see any J code that can't be translated in a pretty straightforward way to idiomatic Python + Numpy.

Of course, it's pretty important to note that idiomatic Numpy is very different from idiomatic Python. For example, here's some idiomatic numpy:

gamma = arange(0,1, 1/1024.0)
x = np.outer(r(T-event_times[M+1:N]), gamma)
log_likelihood += M*log(gamma) + sum(log(1-x), axis=0)
return exp(log_likelihood)

Idiomatic python might be:

for i in range(0,1024):
log_likelihood[i] = M*log(gamma[i])
for j in range(M+1,N):
tmp = r(T-event_times[j])*gamma[i]
log_likelihood[i] += log(1-tmp)
likelihood[i] = exp(log_likelihood[i])
return likelihood
> A lot has been written about Trump’s mental state. But I’d really rather get inside the head of this anonymous staffer, whose job is to imitate Trump’s unique cadence (“Very sad!”), or to put a positive spin on it, to millions of followers. Is he a true believer, or just a cog in a political machine, mixing whatever mainstream appeal he can into the @realDonaldTrump concoction?

A large part of data analysis is avoiding bias. This article was written in an abrasive tone with the conclusion decided beforehand, and as a result, doesn't give a neutral perspective of the data. (I'm not a Trump supporter myself, but it's one of the reasons I am avoiding political data analysis if possible)

For example, as noted, there are only 3200 tweets pre-filter. Doing specific log-odd counts of 140 character tweets will lead to overfitting as I do not believe there is sufficient data. (Note how the most frequent words are not present in the log-odds chart)

The methodology is indeed clever, but it is hard for me to trust the results.
Very good question. As stated in the blog post (one line above that figure), we actually used a polar parametrization r=x·sinθ+y·cosθ than the slope-intercept version y=mx+b.

If we were to use y=mx+b, then the hough transform image would look like many straight lines intercepting at a few points, which makes most intuitive sense. The issue with this form is it gets ill-formed when the line becomes near vertical (m goes to infinity).

The polar parametrization r=x·sinθ+y·cosθ solves this problem, and in the hough space, the axes will be r and θ. A point in image space maps to a sinusoid in hough space, which is why the transformed image looks like that.
Plea bargains are pure coercion. The ability of a prosecutor to threaten you with almost arbitrarily severe punishment means that a plea bargain is a much better option than rolling the dice with a jury trial. Whether or not you committed the crime is irrelevant. You are looking at say 5 years with a plea bargain vs. either life or nothing without one, 10 years is simply the rational choice. Once you've accepted the plea bargain, by the way, you can't challenge the sentence if new evidence comes up.

What's perhaps more appalling is confessions made to police and prosecutors without an attorney present. The police and prosecutors can lie about the potential sentence, even threatening the suspect's life (we'll go death penalty!), drawing out a confession, and then be under no obligation to uphold their end of the "bargain".

The bottom line is that 95% of people in our prisons did not have a trial before a jury of their peers. Some of these people are very likely innocent, but because of the nature of plea bargains, they cannot challenge their sentences.
IDFA Sends All Zeros on iOS 10 Devices
The rental records of several specific adult video places in the DC area were probably foremost in the minds of that bill's sponsors. Going forward, they realized they would need to be more circumspect, and internet allowed them to pretend that they were. (Of course, they can't hide their peccadilloes from the state intelligence apparatus but most of them are wholly owned by that entity for other, actually-evil reasons anyway.) Kathleen Kane in Pennsylvania has claimed that her current troubles stem from a similar motivation on the part of her disgruntled employees.
I think the problem might be that users of ad blockers have traditionally been a little more passive - possibly 99% never provide input about an ad, and 1% contribute.

Facebook ads are targeted, so not all users will see the same image at the same time, so the largest crowd sourcing benefits would be gone - as opposed to a div id.
the hacker actively exploited a flaw in the ethereum system to steal money from unwi{tt,ll}ing users. saying that that was okay because the platonic nature of smart contracts allowed it is saying that the means justified the ends, which does not work either.
I agree. But I think the reason that laypeople don't have a good sense of what is required is that we wall them off from the software so that they have little sense for how the existing stuff is constructed.

I do think that other people in the organization usually have a better sense of needs. And so if they could have a better understanding of the materials, they could do a better job of managing requirements than an engineer who looks at code all day, and is typically not observing the customers.

Your advice about UNIX is good. I try not to write modules larger than a few hundred lines of code. Anything bigger than that gets split into fully isolated modules with well defined interfaces.

Also: I'm sad you're sad. And I'm sad because I feel my tools isolate me from the people I would like to be working closely with. But I'm very optimistic about solving this problem. I think all of the building blocks are there to solve it, we just haven't made a concerted effort as a community because we're mostly under the impression that it's impossible for non-coders to understand code.
ZeroDB (YC S16) Provides Security for Enterprise Big Data in the Cloud
> Breaking kneecaps is expensive though. You can't just set up a ring of roadblocks around a city that kneecaps everyone passing through as a matter of course.

Once you establish the willingness to break kneecaps, the number of kneecaps you actually need to break is fairly small.
I hope this will provide an impetus for the community to organize and stop this.
How is using features and functions in an unexpected way not hacking?
Well, except that is the only way forward for new Windows applications, even classical Win32 is being coerced into it via Project Centipede.
The problem with deep learning and language understanding is that the task is ill-defined end-to-end. For speech, image understanding, and translation, you can come up with large datasets of x->y and have deep learning learn a complex function to approximate the mapping. We don't have that luxury in language understanding, at least not yet.
Why not simply simulate the body (or indeed multiple bodies) in a virtual world?

Easier to build, parallelize, extend, maintain. Possibly somewhat safer too.
If one can enjoy a multi-decade career without making any changes, why worry about making changes?
Until very recently 99.99% of conversations where completely private and society functioned just fine. Even with crypto everywhere the governments have far more access to what people say and do than they had for thousands of years.

People with power pretend if they just had more power everything would be better. But, reality is if everything on a computer where private not much would change.
>
The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them.

Then this debacle has been a spectacular failure on that front, and given the fact that no system can be perfectly secure, this will happen again in the future.
I know exactly what you are talking about. I'm just really afraid of what the knock-on effects are going to be of starting kids out in walled gardens. I wouldn't be an engineer today if it wasn't for the fact that it was possible for me to play with various languages, or start distro hopping in high school with a 433Mhz PC. These walled gardens make it easy to keep everything working, but come at a high cost of actually learning what the device does.
Russia, Iran, Rwanda... Let's assume the latter is a vector, not the target. (The attacker is sophisticated enough that we can assume Rwanda itself is of little interest). Rwanda also has fairly close ties to Russia, which strengthens the vector hypothesis.

Russia+Iran suggests a western actor. Their biggest shared interest is Syria, I'd think. And look, the Syrian conflict is on since March '11, and the activity according to Kaspersky reaches back to June '11. I'd say that's quite close.

Neither the US nor Europe were that deeply invested in Syria. There is, however, one small middle-east country that has quite an interest in the entire region, and also isn't friends with Iran or Russia. And it just so happens that Israel is somewhat of a close affiliation of Rwanda.

None of that is in any way conclusive, but it certainly is probable.
Interesting, thanks. 1988 is a while back, but it's far more relevant than the people citing the Fourth Amendment!

That's actually a pretty solid win for privacy, although it doesn't alleviate my sense that the government stance is "we can read everything as long as we don't tell anyone about it". The last I heard about library records was the Patriot Act opening them to government investigation, but things may have changed since them.

Still, this one is news to me, I appreciate it.
The worst part of APL (I learned it in college) was dictating programs to colleagues.
1. When will someone build a tool like this and then open up the measurements data? A speed-measuring tool would be infinitely more useful if we could investigate the results beyond just our one device for one test. A question I really want to be able to answer: which ISP offers the fastest service in my area? fast.com and speedtest.net could easily answer this question if they made the data available.

2. I think tests like this that rely on a built-out network and well-placed CDNs and such are probably junk. A more useful test would be against a handful of download targets that aren't optimized, and then average the results. This is particularly true for Netflix. Case in point: fast.com says I download at 78Mbps, but speedtest.net has me down around 57. I'm only paying for 30.
>especially the Bible Belt voting bloc (for lack of more nuanced regional targeting)

It's not just them. Take a look at what reddit has to say about "the Bible Belt voting bloc"

People in in homogenous cultures are quick to write off those outside it. The "flyover state trailer trash" who live among like individuals have a hard time recognizing the legitimacy of opinions held by "suburban millennials" but the latter group has just as hard a time recognizing the legitimacy of any opinion held by the former.

There was a news story about compus carry at state schools in Texas (IIRC) on reddit a few days ago. It was a perfect example of this. Tons of people saying that the sky is falling with occasional locals saying that the law change just makes the status quo legal.

People have a very, very hard time objectively considering things that aren't common in their societal niche aren't.
You're acting like the typical use for adblockers is targetted -- it's not. People browse the web with always-on adblock. Your site is likely not the one that tipped them over the edge, either.
How the Iranian Government Hacks Dissidents
I did try Joylent. I managed to drink one "meal" but couldn't go through the second one. It's the most disgusting thing I have ever encountered.

I eat a lot of things many people would consider unsavory, including snails, oysters, cheese, etc., things way past their expiration date, and very bad (cheap) Chinese food. But this, no.

I had bought 40 bags of the stuff that sit unused in my cupboard.

Maybe Soylent is way different, I don't know, I didn't try it. But a small pill would be fantastic.
That reminded my of this blog article by Scott Aaronson: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Yes you can write bugs in any paradigm, but some designs are just empirically worse than others when it comes to helping people write correct code.

IUnknown is a classic case of something that looks simple but in fact a correct implementation is not at all trivial, yet COM developers were expected to get it right by hand again and again. COM itself didn't help with it at all, so the ecosystem was very dependent on IDE generated code and (eventually) ATL and other standard libraries.

None of the things you highlight were good ideas, in my view, although probably the best you can do in C.
There is a cost to gathering up the money left on the table. That's the whole point.
Open Source Software.
From the proposed law:

“Digital currency” means any digital representation of value that can be digitally traded and is used to facilitate the sale, purchase, and exchange of goods, services, or other digital representations of value among its users. Digital currency does not include fiat currency, e-money, or currency value of which was fixed by its issuer to the value of a fiat currency.
> the hacker actively exploited a flaw in the ethereum system

This is not the case. There was not a bug in the Ethereum "system", it was a bug in the Slock.it smart contract code ONLY.

The smart contract code behaved exactly as written. There is nothing to interpret. Those who invested in that smart contract invested in it as written, and failed to have it properly vetted. Think of the fraud that is possible with poorly vetted contracts... It's absurd to think that rewinding the tape is any sort of legitimate remedy for code bugs in smart contracts.
Some meat from page 30 about the definition of "digital currency business" for the purposes of this act...

(d) “Digital currency business” means the business of offering or providing the service of storing, transmitting, exchanging, or issuing digital currency. “Digital currency business” does not include the following:

(1) Transmission of digital currency where the transaction is undertaken for non financial purposes and does not involve the transfer of more than a nominal amount of digital currency necessary to complete the transaction.

(2) Online games or gaming platforms that use digital currency that (A) have no market or application outside of those games or gaming platforms, (B) cannot be converted into, or redeemed for, fiat currency or digital currency, and (C) are not redeemable for real-world goods, services, discounts, or purchases.

(3) Customer affinity or rewards programs that use digital currency that can be redeemed for goods, services, or for purchases with the issuer or other designated merchants, but cannot be converted into, or redeemed for, fiat currency or digital currency that is not part of the customer af nity or rewards program.

(4) Issuance of a credit card voucher, letter of credit, or any value that is redeemable only by the issuer for goods and services provided by the issuer or its affiliate, except to the extent required by applicable law to be redeemable in cash for its cash value.

(5) A person or entity developing, distributing, or servicing digital currency network software.

(6) A person or entity contributing software, connectivity, or computing power to a digital currency network.

(7) A person or entity providing data storage or cybersecurity services for an enrolled digital currency business, if the data storage or cybersecurity services do not store digital currency.
First of all, a lot of carpenters do in fact work on side projects in their free time. My dad certainly does.

We need to recognize that programming is a creative craft and the norm for those is to do it as a hobby.

Most musicians, including "professional" ones, play for fun as well. As do dancers, poets, writers, artists, etc.

Do you think most academics leave "work," go home and never think about their research again?

I have no problem with people who somehow decided to program despite not enjoying it enough to do it in their free time. But they shouldn't attack those of us who do for daring to spend our free time in a pleasurable way. And they should accept that there's a simple reality that those of us who enjoy it are going to spend more time at it and thus level up more quickly.
>The DAO contract was neither hacked nor broken.

Broken, is an interesting choice of words, because by your very definition the DAO could never be broken it simply is whatever the code says it is, thus could never be broken.

However, as much as some people want to claim the DAO as executed is exactly what investors contracted for, it is not. The creators of the DOA solicited investment based on marketing material in plain language that was entirely inconsistent with the code of the DAO. Under the law one can't market and solicit investment based on representations that are untrue...that is fraud and but for the false representations many/if not all investors would not have invested. Moreover, it is generally not enough to include a little disclaimer at the end of the marketing material acknowledging the marketing may not be accurate and that the investors are investing at their own risk and in the DAO "as-is".
Please open source the app so that it can be hacked by users and distributed outside of the official channels. I avoid running proprietary software on my phone, in particular I do not have Google Play, so the superbook looks a lot less interesting to me if it requires a closed source app to work smoothly.
For. Let me try to clarify, I'm not saying that everyone who goes to AA, or even everyone that AA helps is one personality type. Also when I say "big ego" I don't necessarily mean an externally facing ego in the popular sense, but rather the way the person relates to themselves and how they justify things in their own mind.

What I'm saying is AA is uniquely suited to this personality type in a way that no other program is.
Client-to-server encryption with central message routing [..]

will be abused by the NSA and anyone else that can get their hands on access. And no amount of politicking is going to change that, as it hasn't changed anything about their blatant disregard of the law thus far. BTW, 'anyone else that can get their hands on access' will include foreign nations and criminals.

[..] can easily be given a backdoor [..]

that magically does manage to stay out of the hands of foreign nations and criminals, where all other backdoors thus far have been discovered and abused?

These arguments have a huge track record against them and I downvoted you for either acting wilfully ignorant.
> Hopefully, the potential equity upside attracts employees who think their work contributions can boost the value of the company (and hence their stock options) rather than mercenaries who just want a paycheck.

It's hard to believe companies genuinely want this when offering 0.025% of common stock to your early engineering hires has become common practice.
>The postmortems published by Google, Amazon, and Azure (as well as postmortems internal to the company I work for) are nearly always due to some type of change (code or configuration) being rolled out

When you have a really large distributed system that's primarily running on metal, smaller-scale copies of the whole system per developer or even a single companywide staging environment that mirrors production are really hard, and they don't always exist.

Developers work on their components in isolation by mocking out the rest of the system, hopefully there's a thorough code review, and then "integration testing" happens by flipping a feature flag and watching the logs/metrics in production. You might design the feature flagging so it initially only hits test accounts, but some things (like service communication layers, Puppet configs, router configs) don't work that way.

The cost of outages resulting from the lack of a staging environment may well be less than re-architecting production (100% automation, no snowflakes, and probably some kind of IaaS) to allow for disposable dev/test environments which would exhibit the same bugs.
Except the vocabulary is smarter. This only highlights the point that human hate for each other is orthogonal to apparent reasons behind it.
We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines with multiple throwaway accounts.
Sociopaths and the TOR project
Crypto is just bringing back real-life privacy options into digital space.

IRL, two people could go to some quiet place and have a private talk. If they feel suspicious, they might have checked the place for not being bugged (hard, but possible).

In the Internet, the default communication mode was public, which was exploited by NSA and other surveillance organizations. But now, thanks to usable crypto, two or more people can also have a private conversation, and if suspicious, they can check for not being MITMed (also hard, but possible).

Therefore, crypto brings nothing new to expectations of privacy, and the entire premise of this article is wrong.

Nice try, NSA.
A third possible position would be the government stating "we need transparency everywhere, including for ourselves"--I would be that people would be much more accepting of transparency when government is totally transparent in return. For many reasons, governments are reluctant to take this position.
For example, when they visit, there are no interstitial pages, boxes covering the page when a user mouses out of the viewport, autoplaying audio/video, or any of that other obscene nonsense.
Testing for speed is great and all but is there an app or something that can monitor my Mac's end-to-end connectivity to an internet source? Like, I feel like my connectivity is spotty but am not sure if it's Wifi, Comcast or other.
Dead obvious: there is a certain bit of ironic humor when you pair random anime girls that are shy or whatever in their original series with complementary nazi symbols.

As for why people use them as their avatar--it's self sustaining at this point. Anime industry people used twitter, anime enthusiasts used twitter, 4chan is, or at least started off as, a Japanese culture website, and the above meme got tangled in and "shitposting" began.

Hilarious that they'd put so much thought into it--I thought it would be fairly obvious once you notice it.