skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Ends justifies the means is just a fancy way of saying that the cost/benefit analysis is favorable to the decider.

I think it's more accurately defined as the decider acknowledging that the costs are not something he/she would typically approve of, but the desired or touted ends are so worthwhile for everyone (as determined by the decider on behalf of everone) that it's worth doing.

In other words, an un-democratic greater good argument. It turns out that there was majority consensus among ETH miners to do a hard fork, but only after the Ethereum maintainers signaled their bias by researching and writing the hard fork code.
I don't think the author pursued the passivity angle far enough. Internet trolls get off on the idea of their victims being helpless to retaliate. What image could be more appealing to them than of cartoon characters whose properties of childlike innocence, pliancy, and weakness are taken to an extreme? If they could use hentai avatars they would, but that would be too obvious so they settle for moe instead.
It's so surreal to see Brendan Gregg discussing Linux tools.

It's like watching Iron Man wielding Thor's hammer.

Which is not to compare Brendan to Iron Man, but it's as weird as that would be.
> I find it hard to believe gaming capability would be a major motivator in the PC market.

One of the most frequently cited reasons I hear about for why home users and enthusiasts are not using Linux is availability of games. It's true that this does not speak of the entire market, but it's not an insignificant part. It is also a market segment that is more realistic to dislodge than, e.g. corporate use.

> the majority is not really well equipped for high end gaming[0][1].

But "gaming" != "high-end gaming"...
It is from Breaking Bad, the caption is a joke.
The screenshot is from Breaking Bad. In the scene two scientists overengineer a perfect cup of coffee. The screenshot's inclusion in the article is a (poor) attempt at a joke.
The law does actually have ways of extracting cash from people even when it can't locate the cash in question. It's harder, and less effective, but overall it works more than it doesn't.
"print (SECRET_KEY)" works just fine on Python 2.x with no special magic.
The Fourth and Roe are relevant, although I would argue that gay marriage and Miranda are essentially unrelated. In the US, "no government in the bedroom" privacy and non-self-incrimination don't really carry over into "don't read my mail" style privacy. They might bound prosecution, but not surveillance.

More broadly, what I meant was that digital privacy, security, and ownership have been a consistently losing battle. The interpretation of how legal protections (the Fourth included) apply to computers has skewed towards state power in virtually every case, and victories on digital issues are almost all a result of technological activism rather than pure political work.
> yet if you're on a pure Soylent diet... Soylent's marketing puts... people at serious long-term health risk.

Even Rosa Labs doesn't recommend a pure Soylent diet. I liked Soylentconor's comment on reddit the other day, pointing out that the right way to look at Soylent is that it's "just food"[1]

I'm obviously not arguing Soylent is perfect, but it's almost certainly better than what most people eat most of the time, and humanity got here subsisting on, on average, much worse.

> Eat your fruits and vegetables or, statistically speaking, your cardiovascular system will eventually suffer.

You seem awfully certain given that you can't say what "relatively unknown [but] conclusively beneficial" things Soylent is missing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/4wowtp/why_is_that...
tl;dr because 4chan
What makes you think that?
I recall reading previous articles linked from HN on this very topic that Facebook most strongly values the network size they can use in marketing sales pitches (i.e. the print circulation equivalent, the "reach"), not the ad impressions specifically.
This all reminds me of what happened to VeriCoin and the MintPal heist. A hacker stole millions in coins, but the devs of VeriCoin rolled it back and in one fell swoop stopped one theft but cut the floor out from under themselves.

What's needed is a cryptocurrency that cannot, under any circumstances, be rolled back. Otherwise crypto is a fiat currency just like all other modern currencies that can be manipulated.
Dutch Teen Collects One Million United Airlines Miles for Finding Security Flaws
Once try to solve a bug, from a program of size 100mb. Then you will probably known what happens to your brain.
Try to continue a project, which is huge, without any documentation, it takes years of efforts, to do so.
You're arguing with something different to what I said.

I pointed out that it's easy to design cryptosystems to be unbreakably strong against all adversaries except governments, and indeed can be unbreakably strong against mass eavesdropping by governments, yet still provide access on a case by case basis. And in fact this is the outcome of all kinds of natural and widely adopted designs.

You're arguing that governments won't content themselves with such access. That's a different question entirely. I think many of them would and that we're heading in that direction, more or less, where mass decryption of TLS isn't done by most governments and the era of GCHQ/NSA style bulk wire tapping slowly fades away, but it doesn't matter to them much because they can still warrant the other end and ultimately that's what politicians feel safe campaigning on.
Livecoding sessions d'époque, I love old programming videos!
I wouldn't be quite so dismissive of scratch holograms not being (a type of) hologram. See the reference in the article:

http://amasci.com/amateur/holo3.html

Having studied with Steve Benton at the Media Lab and built some of the highest fidelity white light 3D displays of the time, I would agree with this article: scratch holograms behave very similar to rainbow ("Benton") holograms. They use a combination of diffraction, diffusion, and parallax to produce an HPO (horizontal parallax only) 3D image.

Yes, it isn't made by interference. No, it isn't full parallax or does it form an image purely by diffraction. But a scratch hologram is the superposition of the equivalent of many zone plates, and the basic mechanics are the same as in a hologram (well, a holographic stereogram). It definitely isn't "just" parallax.

All that said, I agree that what's happening is very different from a computed hologram that models interference mathematically and records the detailed pattern on a recording material. Computing and writing such a pattern requires very high resolution to get the high spatial frequencies needed to get large diffraction angles. That makes it very tedious to make any image, and even worse one made of lots of points.

A scratch hologram (or a holographic stereogram) gets around that problem by essentially modulating details in the spatial domain (the image) onto a high frequency diffractive or diffusing carrier signal (the scratch, or a holographic diffraction pattern in a holographic stereogram).
Ask HN: Why does Google 404 serve invalid HTML?
e.x. http://google.com/notfound

The "html" tag is not closed. "body" does not exist. CSS refers to elements that do not exist.

Are they minifying to the extreme and relying on the browser to add <body> and close the HTML?
Until the adserver serves malicious ads (which has happened dozens of times on high profile sites in the past year or so), and then the website is sued.
I work on a service with high OLA requirements. I'm terrified everytime I roll out a new build or config change, in spite of having tested them thoroughly. At the scale at which these things operate, it's very difficult to manually imagine all the possible ways things can go wrong. Especially when you have multiple services that are all interdependent on each other and written/maintained by different teams in different geographic locations.

I'm sure there is lots of research happening in this area within Microsoft and Google. Can't wait to have this sooner.
> And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which start-ups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success" - Marissa Mayer

Perhaps (perhaps) this applies to startups.

> Maybe you can get away with doing just your job and going home to relax.

Most professionals do this, yes.

> I would wager, you may have difficulty finding your next job however.

Presuming he is actually a skilled programmer, almost certainly not.

> Have you never programmed so much you start having dreams that it takes steps to breath and you subsequently have a difficult time breathing?

This is not normal, if this is your experience from working perhaps you should look into changing companies / careers. Please, do not take your own health lightly. If this is what your job is doing to your body, you need to find a new job.

> The physical toll takes years to manifest. I am in my 30s. If I did not exercise at least every other day I would not be able to continue doing what I do.

It's good that you're exercising, but as a 30 something developer myself, I have never, ever felt like my job is taking a toll on my body. Even in my periods of most sedentary laziness. Perhaps your experience is not indicative of others' experiences?

> You are most likely in your early 20s. Wait and see what a lifetime of programming does to your nervous system.

I would love to see studies that point to any type of harm from programming. Not sitting at an office desk, but programming specifically.

> I would not be surprised if a study reveals programming causes brain damage.

Oh, I see, haha, you've been joking this whole time, good one!

I really thought you were serious.
Unless you are taking extra time beyond the requirements to make your software easier for other people in the organization to access, then you are doing exactly what I'm saying: making it just easy enough for you to manage.
Ansible also has --syntax-check and even --check, which "tries to predict some of the changes that may occur".
Well yes, except adoption of WinRT in industry appears to be zero.
How would your users know you had "respectful" ads?
I use SleekXMPP for most of my XMPP work and is about to move in my support for the IoT Xeps into main track which is currently out in my branch on github https://github.com/joachimlindborg/SleekXMPP/tree/xep_0323_3...
This always comes up but Google has been pretty explicit in saying that they share some internal infrastructure but that lots of existing stuff isnt running on GCP. They have decades of customized software/hardware running already.

GCP is pretty new and there are plenty of big customers running on GCP that you can reference like Spotify and Snapchat. Also it is a rather important and money-making service, on track to potentially eclipse their entire ad business.
Over 45 different hacks for staying awake at work
So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet.

Is it just pointing out an interesting contradiction and we should enhance and improve existing products, or there a message about moving back and reverting to using weak encryption like before or treating it like "munitions" for purposes of export control. So you you end up in prison just as long long for using OpenSSL as for reselling grenade launchers.

Yeah I can see how PR is on government side here -- "look terrorists use this and other horrible criminals, this needs to be stopped".

The answer usually is -- "Ah, but think of the human rights people from <insert far away country>" or make a reference to some generalized principle from the Constitution about freedom from search. Both of those lose in comparison to an image of scary guy with a bomb under their arm.

So the answer is to operate at the same level of PR. Bring in issues people can identify with: for companies and enterprises remind them of the Target credit card breach, about the Sony hack and how embarrassing that is. Or for private individuals talk about identity theft. Everyone has heard about that how disruptive and upsetting that is. "We need stronger encryption to protect you from criminals" kind of message.

(I am not the first one to think of this, I noticed Apple applied this in their response to FBI. I just thought it was a great approach).
> The problems are centered around naming.

What's that expression? "All problems in computer science are ultimately about naming."
I knew enough C++ to be dangerous around the turn of the millennium (college), but haven't written anything in it since. I've often wanted to pick it back up, but the thought of putting that much effort into something that requires so much more effort to use safely than the languages I currently use has always kept it as a wish rather than reality. At this point, I think I've given up on C++, and I'll use Rust when I finally get around to going low-level again. If I'm going to give up the ease of an interpreted language, I might as well put a little more effort in and learn something that provides a bit more assurance for the work required.

Then again, we'll see if I ever get around to it. It's not like I'm swimming in free time.
Only a matter of time before they start injecting ads into Whatsapp. They are owned by Facebook after all.
Yes. Big Four. The new manager, who was not even employed at the time, had a coffee with me, told me he's assembling a new team. I did not meet with anyone from the recruiting staff, not even my future boss, I just brought my paperwork and I was in within a month.
So what constitutes a digital currency? I mean, I've heard arguments that BTC is really an asset being traded. Didn't see that

Also: looks like proposed fee has been increased to $5000 from $500 (didn't look for other details).

Amusing that legalese is essentially similar to code, but without variable declarations (ie, $digitalcurrency := "currency that's traded online, including but not restricted to BTC, etc") it's a bit of a nightmare to parse.
Yes, but that works the same for Bitcoin.
People take sides on Soylent but I'm so glad a company like this exists to just attack the notion of what a meal is. It has such an impact on so many parts of our society including many of the glaring issues like poverty and nutrition.

Personally (and I've tried it) I didn't like their initial strategy of being a 100% meal replacement and feel strongly like it makes a great supplement. I think their new products are more aligned with this and will likely renew my subscription today.
Why does Facebook care about specifically geek usage behaviors? Geeky types constitute a small fraction of the population, only a subset of that already small cohort has the concerns you're expressing here, and only a subset of those care enough to stop using their services. If Facebook can increase add revenues 10% by a change like this, they couldn't care less about losing the maybe 2% of users who will be genuinely put off from them by it.
> If the code isn't the law, then what is?

The law is the law.

And, when effective steps have been taken to prevent real remedies under the law, then, in practice, the war of all against all is the law.
It's much harder to hide 500,000 dollars in small bills than it is to hide Bitcoin.
They had to use a scene from "Breaking Bad" as a joke because they probably have no scientist, laboratories, or equipment. That's no joke.
I'm aware of it, but it's a ghetto... In the sense that it is largely kept separate from professionally maintained codebases.

For me, I don't like working in Excel, and I want to have better working relationships with designers, customer support people, business folks, etc. I want us to be able to work on the same projects together, which means not Excel because Excel is extremely limited and difficult to work with. Not difficult for a random person to use for some calculation. Difficult for me to get the things I want to get done in Excel when I'm trying to build arbitrary web apps.
>>I think that language is what the human brain does.

I think language is a UI with our own brain. It allows us to interact with its knowledge system and representation of the world. Self is a thin client running on the vast knowledge system. If you think about it, thinking is not where the real thinking happens. We get intuition signals from the brain on what is true / false , which are required for our higher level thinking. So thinking we do is also a thin client running on top of the Brain OS. Both the thinking and language are serialization tools of representation of the world that was solely evolved for communication with other brains. Since we don't have direct neural link with other brains, we have to serialize it and hence language based thinking.

So i think to evolve language understanding in machines, we might have to simulate many intelligent agents in a simulated environment and let them collaborate. Similar to how our brains collaborated and gave rise to natural languages.
> that cannot, under any circumstances, be rolled back

But getting hacked is ok, right?
"...here's what makes this campaign great in my estimation - each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest - three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar."

- Fred Pohl and C.M.Kornbluth, "The Space Merchants", 1952.

I am glad to see that Soylent is continuing to name their products after Sci-Fi Future Foodstuffs Of Dubious Safety.
> So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet.

I think the larger implication of the essay is to consider addressing privacy from a systemic/game theory perspective. The underlying threat isn't technological, but in the response to technological capabilities. Encryption is just another capability that provokes a response.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

I believe this is a better link to the same editing, its atleast easier to parse the changes and it has colours!!
it's easy to design cryptosystems to be [...] unbreakably strong against mass eavesdropping by governments, yet still provide access on a case by case basis.

Is it? How? Because that's certainly not the default that you referred to.
Matching APIs to SDKs: long tail of Web API client libraries?
Well, if anyone is interested in doing a seed or angel round for a profitable PAAS / FAAS, check out my profile and shoot me an email: hn@marak.com
> The law is the law.

Well, in a decentralized distributed system, the "law" may not be clearly part of any jurisdiction, and enforcement may be impossible, making the law somewhat less helpful at resolving disputes.
Welcome to the People's Republic of California. Where we're tolerant of everyone as long as they agree with us.
It's a claim worth discussing, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced by it.

There's absolutely reason to believe that the effort can't be smoothly continued into digital realms. First, because interpretations of how existing progress applies to digital issues has consistently minimized privacy and maximized institutional power. Second, because it's not clear that government oversight or legal protections are actually working when they are obtained. We have a long tradition of using activism to produce legislative wins, but on digital issues we constantly see those wins being ignored or circumvented (e.g. illegitimate takedown requests and unapproved domestic surveillance).

I don't think giving up the political fight is a good idea, but it's always jarring when I see people say "crypto nuts should turn to politics instead!" The people pushing strong crypto have historically also been the ones seeking political progress with minimal results.
> This isn't an engineering problem, it's a philosophical problem [...]

Indeed. However we can not rule out the possibility that we engineer a system without a "body" (I think you are referring to the Embodied mind thesis?). It is a complicated topic and discussions about it are futile without precise definitions of loaded terms, like "intelligence", "body", etc.

A rather well-defined test is the classic Turing test and I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that it can be passed by a bodyless machine/program-thing.
field roast grain meat sausages, actually. I, an omnivore, use them all the time. They're seitan with vegetables.

And there is the venerable Dillburito.
Anything by Joko Beck. It talks about meditation in the context of daily living.
Highly recommended.
Truly fuck this law. Not even sure how they are going to enforce this rubbish.
The "cloud" is not organized in such a way as the article wishes it to be, to have ecologies to be explored, such that a field guide or niche study is appropriate.

Lots of assumptions required to back the parallels, most of them off-base, and so the article kind of just confuses like urban exploration and eco/techno-tourism as some kind of like 21st Darwinian voyage stuff that will tell us the hidden structures we're creating and unintentionally relying on as a new networked, data-laden society.

At least I think that's what they're getting at.

The linked videos are cool though on their own merits.
> The FBI is certainly not talking about only defaults.

You are right that considering the whole history of encryption and the FBI, they don't want it anywhere, but as James Comey has himself said, this debate kicked into high gear late 2014 when Apple started with the default encryption, and law enforcement saw an increase in devices they couldn't get into. I think if strong encryption had been on the outliers as it was before that time, we wouldn't have seen this issues raised by the FBI in this manner. I think it is undoubtable that the default is a big reason for this because if many companies start to follow suit, it can have real consequences.

Even though James Comey's proposal of wanting "both strong encryption AND government access" probably came from a place of ignorance of the technology, I do think there is a debate to be had there about securing servers with keys or whatever else just like Google and Facebook and Apple are expected to secure all their other data. Right now, it is completely out of the question when you ask a tech person, because of lack of trust.

> They aren't infallible though, and we need checks and balances to keep them in place.

Absolutely, the way I like to look at it is basic costs and benefits, pros and cons.

There are real harms to strong encryption, whether one would like to admit it or not, so the point is to weigh the costs and benefits and go from there. Right now encryption seems more like a religion, a last bastion of freedom or something. Maybe there are other ways to have accountability.
The Ultimate List of TensorFlow Resources