skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why A.I. would need to be based on human intelligence. At the end of the day the black box of the process doesn't matter if the results are sound, and we already frequently don't understand how our current A.I. works (which features the system is picking up on, etc). I'd expect that trend to continue.
Why Gates gets the short end of the stick. Instead of buy a license to make BASIC, they wrote their own version of it. Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers.

Before MS-DOS there was CP/M and UNIX. After selling IBM PC-DOS, Gates had MS-DOS 2.0 made for PC clones after Compaq and a few others wrote a clone BIOS. They had to reverse engineer the BIOS in one room, and build their own BIOS in another. It was the cheaper PC clones that put an end to TRS-80, CP/M, Apple //, etc.

Windows was a cheap knock off of the Macintosh GUI, I used to have a blog that had an article that Bill Gates stole from Steve Jobs to make Windows because Steve Jobs would not give him permission to license the Mac OS. Sure Apple and Microsoft settled it out of court by Microsoft investing money in Apple to save it. But a lot of Apple fans don't like how Gates had cheated Jobs originally.

Even if Microsoft was not the first company to invent these things, they filed for patents anyway.

But I will say something positive about Gates, his monopoly created a Windows standard by forcing OEMs to pay the Windows tax per PC even if they didn't use Windows. So that killed the Amiga, Atari ST and other third parties as PC clones became so cheap in the early 1990s that the market was flooded by them.

Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and got into war with other companies in the same way Steve Jobs went to war with IBM. Without Jack Tramiel and the home computer wars that lead to $200 Commodore 64 ect systems, a lot of families would not be able to afford a computer to learn on. Commodore got a primitive version of Microsoft BASIC so they got a cheap license per computer.

The open system PC was IBM using off the shelf parts from Intel and other companies. Using the ISA bus for example for expansion cards.
Cold comfort, but better than most. I'd never looked into in-the-wild use of fingerprinting, but it does seem likely that people who've blocked cookies are terrible advertising targets to begin with.
What does that mean in regards to parent's comment? If it renders, it went through both a graphics driver and GPU. Therefore they're in attack surface for malicious data designed to take over privileged code and/or DMA engines.
>"If you or
someone else claims the November slot, then our closing party will be
December 7th, 2016 -- a day that will live in infamy? ;->"

Long live the history nerd!
Umm yeah because your blue collar paycheck goes a longer way then in SAN Fran.
This is really cool. The underlying graph optimization algorithm seems similar to how graphical models are trained. Is that correct? Can someone please help me understand the difference?
I think it is a reasonable default governance framework if you're a maintainer or group of maintainers who don't have strong opinions on something better and just want to focus on building a healthy open source project
Show HN: Presentation of the State of JavaScript 2016 survey results using Cx
The very first thing I ever heard about Burning Man was how it wasn't cool any more. This was in the 1990s.

I've come to believe that the real purpose of Burning Man is to have these kinds of meta-discussions. The actual gathering in the desert is nothing but a side effect.
Is Rent Control Fair? Rent Control on the Ballot in the Bay Area
Sounds like "if it doesn't work you're not praying hard enough".
Fat people do make it unpleasant. Fat frat boys and fat women.
> Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience.

It's an environmental catastrophe if the best travel experience is also the least efficient.
Part of the problem with DS is that there are known engineering solutions without good theoretical explanation, that is, we just brute forced some basic engineering solutions and keep hacking at them to get more performance, but don't have a good theoretical model of why those things do what they do. (Or have a theoretical model too complex to compute useful insight, which is another kind of problem.)

I think that this kind of approach is going to get us pretty far -- see how far we got on building bridges with no more sophisticated insight in to gravity than "things fall down; some things are heavy" or material science than "some things hard and not bend" -- but I think that ultimately, our longer term goals like AGI will require that we build theoretical models capable of explaining our current engineering progress and predict a new, deeper valley of progress to move to.

Of course, that's a lot like saying making progress on physics paradigms requires explaining high temperature superconductors (or other currently open problems). It's actually pretty normal for a field to be a mix of engineers being ahead and theorists being ahead.

Mathematical rigor is really a sign that you're in established territory and explorers have moved on, and much of data science is still under heavy exploration.
Yeah and they were bussed and dropped off in SAN Fran.. agencies in Reno were doing just that.
Most comments do not imply that. What they imply is that the magnitude and the speed of the change is suspicious (not necessarily a problem, but likely to be indicative of one). It would be just as suspicious if they went 80% to 20% in the other direction at the same rate.
I think you're partially right about these programs picking 'winners' and ushering them into jobs they could have done without this program since the actual work here boils down to a 3 week project.

However, it can be pretty hard to even get an interview if you don't fit what recruiters pattern matching against, so in some sense this is helping companies make smarter recruiting decisions.
How did it actually end? or has it even ended? (I know that cases sometimes go on for years, and I vaguely remember reading something about it lately.) I tracked what was happening for a while, at the time - just out of interest - mainly via Pamela Jones' groklaw site, but don't think I read about the end.
The opposite of NIH is Tinker Toy. You just glue existing bits together. This can work, but usually only on problems that have been solved before, and therefore have OSS software available.

A good example I experienced personally is data pipeline / job management. Six years ago there wasn't much out there, and at Facebook they developed DataSwarm. Today there are many decent OSS choices out there, including AirBnB's Airflow, Oozie, and Apache NiFi which was developed by the NSA.
I've read that letter at least ten times. The last five or so times, I've patted myself on the back for not crying, until I get to the postscript and then... off I go again.
Just jam them: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120583-new-speech-jammi...
Similarly, there is always a place to tell the critics to get off their asses and pitch in effectively.
What's been on my mind about these things is, we don't need to have "space" to be a "thing" that "exists". You can simulate a universe where "space" is encoded in each "particle"'s state as a scalar distance to some other particle.

Thus you don't have a "full dimensional vector {x,y,z}" but you have a bunch of particles each keeping a list of variables with distances to other particles around them.

Maybe I'm not explaining it right, but no one has proposed anything like this as far as I know.
To be pedantic, they do not "love" open source.
Do you require that fellows to accept a job with one of the Mentor companies after the program?

The program looks really interesting and I'd definitely like to increase my skills in this area, but it's also unlikely that I would accept a job at a new company. (I would be happy to interview though - maybe a company could convince me.)

Also, I would suggest putting the important information in something besides a "white paper," like a FAQ.
Isn't that really a variation on being good at patterns you've encountered before?

Perhaps the only "real" secret to intelligence is avoiding malnutrition or any type of poisoning such as from lead.
I'm watching that Scottish guy reviewing the data sheets, and I'm just laughing. Absolutely hilarious.
Backlinks Make or Break Your SEO Rankings
I hope other open source projects are watching this unfold and some good lessons learned come out of this. I don't want this to happen to Meteor!
Oh, well - he removed the post, but I archived it from Google Cache - http://archive.is/URN78
I can't upvote this enough. I do suppose schools are partly to blame as well - harder exams, harder projects, more people failed is the answer. I've seen Junior year Comp Eng's who somehow passed Digital Logic and Computer Architecture but still don't understand the basic concept of flip flops. Same story with Data Structures classes not being graded hard enough.
I think the breakdown has four/five key cases that need to be considered to 'trust' someone with your data.

1. Day to day use of data. (Google does pretty well here).

2. Collapse/failure behavior. (Will they sell it? If not, will they securely delete it as they close up shop?)

3. Breach risk. (Heartbleed was bad news, but Google is no worse than anyone.)

4. Abuse risk. (Police databases might have noble motives, but people keep stalking exes with them.)

5. Government access. (Ugh.)

Google's data ownership does better on that checklist than most people, but no one offers full safety with that list.
>I can say that Carnegie Mellon is definitely ranked nationally a Top 10 university in computer engineering and/or computer science.

And it is just one of the numerous examples of non-coastal universities who run quality undergraduate programs producing graduates with the tech skills mentioned by the article.
I hope you are right about some culture production still going on, I can not speak to the whole event or even a statistically significant amount. Perhaps limiting ticket sales to a tiny time window has helped.

Yes, the bulk of the community is gay friendly. The cops (which were not there in the early days) sure as hell are not. Aside form being told of other harassment by them, I personally witnessed an event in 2006 when two friends of mine were detained for the weekend in Reno on some ludicrous indecency charge and released on Monday without charge.

So good luck to the event and its narrative but I and every one I know are sure as hell out of it.
That's what happens when people reuse passwords...
To be honest, I kinda like the image. It might not be great to you but it has a nice spooky fantasy air to it to me. As to wether it should be considered a good picture, I have no idea.
I am familiar with the idea (and have felt it in the past), but the best approach I have found for most places (less than 10k engineers on staff) is, "be very careful that you only invent things that are core to your needs."

The greater internet population will move faster than your internal team, and your beautiful snowflake will be supplanted with a better OSS option much more quickly than you expect if it is not a core driver of what you are doing. Your time and attention will necessarily shift to the core once the non-core is good enough. Therefore, you are almost always better off contributing to something external for non-core software rather than reinventing internally.

So, if it is core to what you do then build it yourself and maintain (possibly shared) control of it. If it is core to what you do but is not differentiating, open source it and drive to create a real community around it (so that it is the thing that keeps getting better, and you already use it!) If it is core and differentiating, then you are talking product strategy and there is no pat answer :-)

(edit, minor grammar fix)
Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement
This is a small medium post I wrote a while ago. It's just one thought/observation on HN. Hope you enjoy.
The DDoS that didn't break the camel's VAC
Jesus, that's depressing. For me, the airport is a place that's always buzzing with human activity. The atmosphere is electric. Here, you find people from all walks of live, traveling for all sorts of reasons. Work. Family. Love. War. Weddings. Funerals. It's a goal-oriented sort of place, everyone has somewhere to be and a task to perform. There's common interest, we want to get to our destination safely. There are delights for the weary traveler - coffee, shops to browse in - Take the time to treat yourself! You're travelling.
I would pay money for a subscription service that would give me way to challenge myself every... month? (hopefully the system would tell me how long I should work on each new topic for).
This needs a vim mode.
I need to open a bank account in China next month - out of curiosity, in what way are they one of the most modern? :)
When you say "backend," specifically what do you mean?
What? I don't know a single developer out of ~10 across multiple companies that would have to work more than 8 hours plus 1hour lunch break. Outside of London you get 37.5 hours weeks. Hell, I know contractors who work 1-2 days a week from home! But yeah, the money is crap mostly.
Smaller countries are on the receiving end of advanced hacking for a long time.

This one is about some old private server...
Your question is too vague. What's important to you?

Is it the culture of being totally present, here and now? Well, then you need to find something that without cell phones, computers, etc.

Is it the culture of sharing? Then you should find something that tries to run itself without money.

Is it the art and the spectacle? Find your local arts community. That's probably the easiest.

Find something doing stuff you like to do, go in and participate--even if you are an introvert. There is something very different about standing on the stage than standing behind or beside it.
All the orgs suffering from amplification attacks from services using UDP. DNS, NTP, chargen, etc.
I've lived in California as well, and I maintain that you are full of shit.
I just tried a famous Cartier-Bresson image...

"It's not super amazing. It's…something I guess; you could do better. Try improving your colors. This is at most 3.9/10. #boring"

Yeah, Henri, improve your colors you lazy hack! ;)
Neither headline nor URL contains the word "might".
Reading over the comments here makes me want to hug everyone and carefully explain that complaining that you want to dedicate less time to your craft and still get the outsized rewards you feel you deserve just for being old isn't going to convince anyone to hire old programmers.
Agile isn't a thing you do, and it isn't a thing that works or doesn't work. Its very little more than the recognition that what works is highly specific to the group and task, coupled with specific warnings against practices that were commonly and harmfully adopted as one-size-fits-all straightjackets at the time the manifesto was written.

Particular methodologies -- like Scrum, which is often conflated with Agile -- may or may not work (and, more particularly, may or may not be ideal for certain classes of project), but that's a very different issue.

OTOH, I think that Agile has a critical problem which is revealed by the fact that people confuse it with various methodologies (particularly Scrum) -- it is so nebulous that no one actually considers the manifesto to be a thing, and everyone just accepts whatever canned, one-size-fits-all methodology some book or consultant sold them (usually Scrum or a derivative, though I remember when people who said "Agile" were more likely to really mean "XP") is what Agile is, which is fundamentally the kind of mindset Agile was a reaction against.

Because Agile -- the manifesto itself -- contains no clear actionable recommendations, just value statements, everyone with a concrete methodology to sell once Agile became a popular buzzword just decided to sell their methodology as Agile.
"And then one day you find, ten years got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun..."

To the author: Hang in there, man! You're just feeling the time crunch, now that you have kids and other responsibilities. Based on your age, it would have been the mid-1990s when your professional career started. Back then, the economy was a lot better and outsourcing hadn't yet taken over at large companies. It's a little more dog-eat-dog economically, but your brain probably still works fine. Just take a breath and keep going.
iCloud Control – user-controlled selective sync for iCloud Drive
The US tampers with elections openly all over the world including in the election of so called allies.

This isn't a jab at the US just a simple fact, swaying the local political opinions of both your allies and your enemies is a pretty standard practice in geopolitics and diplomacy.
My understanding is that, in a large majority of cases, flying has a large carbon footprint than driving.
'They Live': John Carpenter's Enjoyable Assault on Reagan's America
this book was posted on John E. Hopcroft's webpage - https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/ who also has won a Turing award.
London as well: Heathrow is directly connected to the tube (subway) and Gatwick is directly connected to local rail. With only hand luggage and a scannable passport, it takes about 50 min. from getting of the plane at Gatwick until you're in the middle of the city.
So what you're telling me is next year, regional burns ruined burning man.
Frameworks and 3rd party libraries do not solve problems. Programmers solve problems.

Understand the problem you're trying to solve. Do you need a complicated dependency injection framework when establishing a design pattern is a better choice? Do you need a complicated ORM when a few pages of data-access code is a better choice?

Remember, 3rd party libraries aren't free: They have bugs, they need to be updated, they need to pass muster with the lawyer, ect. When you need to update a 3rd party library, it might cause regressions. Complicated frameworks can sometimes take a long time to learn to use correctly.

Another problem that some people explained is that 3rd party libraries can often force particular design decisions into your product, or require that you reference them all over your product. If this is the case, make sure to think carefully about your design patterns and make sure that the library pushes you towards patterns that are appropriate for what you're building.

Thus, you need to make sure that the 3rd party library is easier / cheaper / faster than whatever you can write, given the disadvantages that I explained above.
Since IP spoofing could be done by a few malicious hosts, is it really accurate to consider a DoS via ip spoofing 'distributed'? Sure the source IPs may appear to come from all over, but that's just an illusion.

When I think DDos, I envision thousands of compromised hosts all over the internet making requests to a target to consume resources.
actually that was the first thing that came to my mind, what a ginormous job it must have been with a team hunkering down and working with multiple experts from around the world, for many unsung months (maybe years). However I personally believe that Google not shouting about how hard this was, explicitly, makes it all the more commendable. Quiet, amazing work, not shouted from the rooftops by PR/marketing people. Honest, modest, brilliance. Like all the best things.
No, it was also the way in the Amiga, Mac and Atari, the floppies only had a partial implementation, all 16 bit.

As for the mainframes and minis, I never worked with them, besides the AS/400.

But from my collection of old papers and manuals, many of them had "bytecodes" with microcoded execution (more higher level than plain CISC Assembly) burned on their processors.
Russia has a fairly well known "troll brigade" as well. Search a bit about Russia's army of Internet trolls and propagandists. It's interesting.

Of course I'm sure the USA does a fair bit of this stuff as well. Every major nation does propaganda.
"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton

Thank you. I had never heard this. My ex was career military and he always said "Sometimes, a ninety percent solution now is better than a one hundred percent solution later." That appears to be what filtered down into military culture from Patton's remark. (FWIW: My ex's first duty station was a former Patton unit.)

For the OP, I will add that I find some of the following rubrics generally useful:

1) Assign X amount of time for research or thinking on it. Pick a date/ time when you will decide/execute. When that date/time arrives, you are done researching/cogitating. It is time to do something.

2) Take a break between thinking/researching and acting. Do your research before lunch and execute after lunch or do your research late in the day and execute the follow morning after sleeping on it.

3) Track performance metrics. Get hard data and see if your actual performance is really as bad as you think it is. Often, very competent or knowledgeable people have endless criticisms of their own work because they are more aware of defects or potential defects. Mediocre performers often think they did better than they did because they are oblivious to how bad it is. The solution here is objective measures of performance. Humans are tremendously bad at figuring out how well they are doing based on subjective feelings or opinions.

4) Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. In other words, partial solutions are better than no solution. Though, to be fair, this is basically another take on the Patton quote and the military rubric I am familiar with.

Best.
That is true. Or until the camera's get small enough and numerous enough that your environment drowns them. It was still an interesting experience.
Are you looking for assembly language in general or have a target platform in mind?

- For Linux, the lessons here are good: http://asmtutor.com/

- For DOS, http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Getting_Started (previously posted on HN)

- There's also the Art of Assembly Language which uses "High Level Assembly Language": http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/

If you are looking for a fun/education activity:

- Octo / Chip-8 (as previously mentioned)

- CoreWar

- Box256
U.S. Formally Accuses Russia of Stealing D.N.C. Emails
> let's just say I rode by some places with signs that made it very clear non-whites weren't welcome.

I'm extremely curious to know where you saw that. I live in Chattanooga, and I've never seen such a thing.

I am sorry you had such a bad experience with the cycling and can sympathize. I stopped riding on public streets here a couple years back. Not worth my life.
Why isn't it branded Skype?
If your team is filled with not invented here types and you resist that they make think you're lazy. That's my experience, and I can be lazy but I like to think it's in a good way.
Why I love CakePHP? And You’d too