skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal
At this risk of sounding like a Buzzfeed headline, number 3 has been key for me. Diving into a new "whatever" and asking how and why it does something makes it so much easier to "get" something. Bottom up vs top-down approach.
What if the study compared bedridden 100-year-olds as non-exercisers to the college track team? The track team was 20% less likely to die in the subsequent 10 years...

Self-selection can completely override other well-understood mechanisms...
I'm not sure that language integrated ones would be better. As D's abstraction abilities have improved, we've been moving features from the core language to the library.
For what its worth, I actually don't most of the time. A bit of ambient chatter doesn't really bother me, however that is of course down to personal preference. We try to accommodate people's working habits, but the floor I'm on is relatively quiet since its all technical folks (we have the sales people on another floor where they can chat away)
We are out of jobs. Need to downsize the human race. post peak employment.
That's a good place point. I see Apple's disability servies praised on a regular basis.

One would have thought this scenario would have been thought of.

Is it possible on iOS to disable animations / autoplay within an app?
> At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know).

Agreed, but I know of precious few WM users who went back to a DE. It feels like it would be 100 more effort to do DE->WM then it was to do WM->DE.
Outside of distributed systems what is it used for?

I've only ever heard of it's use in the formalization of distributed systems.
Great article on the philosophical and mathematical ideas that lead to the computer.
Is there anyone here that's an actual subject matter expert on this topic? I know 1) that I am not a expert on why people cry 2) I don't believe the author has more than a day's worth of googling more background on the subject than me 3) I suspect there are people that have devoted a whole lot more time than the author to the question of why humans cry.

I'm not trying to judge the author, I'm just selfish about and hate wasting my time. This had every hallmark of half-assed pseudo-intellectualism and I don't have a day of time to find out.
> I've lived in the UK 30 years and I've never heard any nostalgia for the empire at all

Was it under a rock? Because I lived the first 26 years of my life in the U.K. and practically every conversation around patriotism was a bunch of faded empire nostalgia.

Hell, the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony contained a lot of it.
Reading this comment, I imagine you ordering a steak rare, "discovering" it's once again undercooked, and immediately ordering tequila shots.
It was interesting to me because of how ordinary it was. I just assumed the user would be doing this from a regular computer, and that the police tracked down the IP. Not that the suspected troll would be dumb enough to use his own phone number to register for Twitter. And be someone who is "Clever" enough to use a pre-paid account but then dumb enough to sync data to iCloud. But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.
It's possible to do generational collection in D. I've written one before and was careful to design the semantics of D to allow for it. It just needs someone to spend the time to implement it (the core language doesn't need to change).

I'm skeptical, however, if it will offer a real improvement.
So how amenable is tla+ to automatic translation to an existing programming language?
> Not gravitational waves.

Yes, gravitational waves.

You are correct that in the case of the Earth, other causes will lead to its demise long before said waves would amount to any significant effect. But even in an ideal case where a single planet like the Earth revolved around, say, a black hole with the same mass as the Sun, which would emit no particles, it would still not orbit indefinitely due to the energy lost to gravitational waves emitted as a result of its revolution around another body. The amount of energy lost in one revolution is tiny, but is not zero (according to this calculation [0], for the Sun-Earth system it amounts to about 200W).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave#Power_radia...
Very pretty...is it just a nicer version of the one MIT's SICP page links to?
White socialism
I think a lot of why games struggle to reach the stature of a film or a novel is that both films and novels are massive undertakings that can be prototyped in their entirety by a single person. The reason a great novel can be written with tens of thousands of images and ideas is because written fairly cheaply. And film can be shot fairly simply. You can write several pages, or film several scenes in a single day.

Video games are slowly getting there, but historically it requires days and days and days just to get a single facet of a game on a screen. You can't create a fully realized scene in a day the way you can on a page.

This isn't going to be true forever. We refine our programming toolkits every year. We draw ever closer to the time where you could sit down and write a page of prose-like code with dozens of references, and have all of those references appear fully realized on a screen.

We're just not there yet. It's like we were trying to make a great film but we haven't even invented the video camera yet, so we need to build a mechanism that makes every change in the frame by moving around animated elements. Basically, our current video games are the software version of the Zoetrope: https://jellygraph.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/early-moving-ima...

And actually, the vast majority of programmers don't even believe that rapid, short-hand programming is even possible. Whenever the idea of regular people programming comes up there is a stampede of programmers claiming that programming is so complex and arcane that it will never be as accessible as writing or shooting video. I disagree, but that gives you a sense of how far we are from parity with film and print.
> reasonable protection from asshats

Is there a strong argument that distinguishes this case of being "asshat on the internet" vs "homicidal with intent to kill"?
I really like this open office plan trend. Well, not for me, but for the companies I compete against. ;-)
US Homeland security banning electronics on Mid-East Flights
There are at least two problems with this idea that "The urban areas are financially funding the rural areas."

First, in terms of taxes and benefits, urban areas vote for that stuff. It's only fair that they pay. The rural areas are trying to cut costs.

Second, one could argue that the economic activity in urban areas is sort of stolen from rural areas. There was a time when many more businesses were in non-urban areas. Activity was moved to urban areas, and often then overseas while perhaps retaining some corporate leadership and marketing in our urban areas. This, or the laws that allowed and encouraged it, is essentially a brutal attack on rural America.
Because that's not how I understood your question. I interpreted it as asking if GST is included as part of revenue then expensed. This is not the case as GST is a tax collected on behalf of the government so it is always regarded as a liability.

As to what you intended, perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm not an expert in sales of Apple products, you'd need market research to see if a 13% discount would result in an appreciable amount of sales.
Good point.

Maybe there are many other cases but they go under- / un-reported?
Can't do
1 nt m -> in lb

I mean can't even come close to doing it.
As a long-time C programmer, I am immediately urged to consider the simplification

b = parseExpressionAtPrecedence(op.precedence + !op.rightAssociative)

...and IMHO those variable names are a bit longer than useful --- expr(prec), atom(), and op() would be my choice, as it shows the structure more clearly, which I think is definitely the most important thing to see here: it's a loop with a recursive call inside it, and an ending condition based on the precedence.

This technique (called precedence climbing) makes parsing these sorts of arithmetic expressions a lot less painful.

This article is a more detailed explanation of this technique:
https://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/exp_parsing.htm#climbing

It also naturally leads to being table-driven, whereby adding/removing operators and adjusting their precedences becomes extremely easy.
My understanding is that "toll records" simply means the metadata that AT&T keeps to charge Tracfone the usage of their customers.

At minimum they need to keep track of the ICCID for your sim card and the IMEI for your phone [1]. Once you have the IMEI and know that this is an iPhone, it is trivial to ask Apple for the records of who bought that device, or which iTunes account is associated with that SN.

edit: corrected per comment below.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/on-call-how-does-my-carrier-know-w...
Yeah, we have sales and marketing on a different floor - A year ago we were all on the same floor before we expanded upstairs, and it was pretty insane!
Making Giovanni, a Game Boy Emulator for the Apple Watch
From an article related to the case [1]:

> charged with criminal cyberstalking with the intent to kill or cause bodily harm and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison if convicted,

What is even more sad:

> More than 40 Twitter users sent similar strobes to Mr. Eichenwald after they realized they could trigger seizures, he tweeted Friday.

The agent went through these steps to identify the suspect:

- Asked Twitter about account information. (w/ search warrant)

- Got phone number

- Phone number was Tracfone prepaid but asked AT&T for information about phone number. AT&T could map [phone number] -> [specific iPhone model] ("DPD sent a request to AT&T")

- Asked apple about iCloud account related to [phone number] (w/ search warrant)

- Find selfie of accused with his DL in hand in iCloud pictures, and also a screenshot of the seizure-triggering GIF, and many other incriminating/stalking behavior items.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/18/twitter-user...

EDIT: Added (w/ warrant search) to clarify what "Asked" meant in my summary.
But there is literally the `map`, `slice`, `chan`, and `append` which are generics.

The fact that append exists and the language would be extremely convoluted and inefficient to use is a testimony to how useful generic programming is.
I've read that before. I do regard the conservatism here as carrying a cost: specifically, great rafts of code will be written without generics and the absence of generics will influence other parts of the language.

I'm not an expert in generics by any stretch of the imagination; I timidly implement the occasional template function, happily use STL/BGL where I can, and am amazed at the sort of data structures this lets me get away with.

I do find myself puzzled that apparently no generics system in common use was deemed 'good enough' by the Go team to just clag before an entire language and its aforementioned 'rafts of code' sprang up around the absence of such features... there may be good reason.

But a language that doesn't let me do what I happily do in C++, with type safety, using language features that are over a decade old, is a total non-starter for me. The language may be all the simpler for this, but the code I would have to write would bear the cost of this instead. It's not a win for me, and vague threats that I'll get a vomitous compiler message when I bugger up "make_pair" and hints that the "princess is in another castle" aren't going to browbeat me into accepting a throwback of a language. My guess is that g++'s template error messages are going to be acceptable long before I see generics in Go, if I ever do.
That's like saying people whose homes have been burglarized are a subset of electronics stores.
Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law (2016)
How good is the tooling? IDE support, code completion and debugging especially.
Also disclaimer I own this company. I think it's awesome that tech people gravitate toward locks so much. It really is an interesting trade that somewhat maps to programming. At least in the sense of requiring lots of concentration and the ability to push through struggle and learning curves. I will say also once you get good at picking locks it's very satisfying to be able to get into anything.
Eide shoma mobarak!

Happy New Year!
I haven't watched the videos yet but I have been keeping my eye on TLA+ ever since seeing the whitepaper from Amazon and how they use TLA+ to spec out their distributed systems. As someone that works on distributed systems that could use some formality I think TLA+ could help, however, I have a hard time really understanding it.

Do you know of any straight forward non-trivial examples? Something a little more complex than "hello world" and something that isn't abstract?
Ideology has a genetic basis.

We are all combinations of the r and K gene sets. (there is no ideology which falls outside the political compass). Epigenetics will bring out ideology lacking in a society. The ideological dialectic is never-ending and the only way the human race survives.

For example, if UBI ever became a reality, it would simply then give those ideologically opposed to it all the time in the world to take it down.

Recently Steven Pinker has come closest to getting the ideas of ideological genetic predisposition into the mainstream, refuting the theory of tabula rasa. But ultimately the truth is too 'racist' for academia.

also: True creativity is not to break out of cliches, but to install new cliches.
To clarify individuals don't directly pay the tax. All sales of goods and services have 15% tax added. It's collected by the companies and remitted to the government.

Since all prices have the 15% added most people don't pay attention to it.
Isn't it way easier now to find harassers on Twitter because Twitter made a telephone number linked to the account mandatory in some (all?) cases?
Go made me appreciate static typing and a compiler.

Before picking up Go around the 1.0 release, the last time I spent any significant time with those tools was 10 years prior as an undergrad using Java. Java really made me hate those things. I spent the years in between with languages like Ruby, JavaScript, and Python.

Now I actually prefer using compiled, statically typed languages, Rust being the most recent one for me (and I still dislike Java).
P ≠ NP
An initiative to extend broadband to every household in New York State by 2018
After ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is actively developed. [1]

Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path; Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager) does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing, popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2]

I'll miss hacking the good hack.

[1]: https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm
[2]: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway
Toll records would be the CDR, I'd imagine. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record
That would require insight we don't really have. Personally, I had no idea something like this would work. I assumed it would need something more powerful in intensity, like an actual strobe light.

Maybe the suspect in this case knew it would work, maybe not.
> The statement that motion is relative is true

Ok.

> but using it to argue that nothing has motion is what doesn't make sense.

Nothing has motion worth discussing that is not able to (a) change it's trajectory or (b) change it's configuration.

As soon as those options are out you have an inert piece of matter, by definition not a perpetual motion machine.

> An object does not have to be alone in an entire universe to have no acceleration, or utterly negligible acceleration.

No, it can be without acceleration in an extremely crowded universe. And any acceleration that it does have will likely come from gravitational interaction with other bodies, or the impacts of particles or other objects (including light).

> And if it's not alone, it's trivial to have motion, even if you're not 100% sure which objects are moving.

That is where we depart. You are thinking of motion in a classical sense, possibly anchored in 'relative to the point of origin', but that's not how it works in physics where acceleration to a local frame of reference is the only meaningful one because it shows you whether or not the 'device' is the master of its own fate or merely along for the ride.

That's a huge difference, roughly akin to 'dead' or 'alive' and of course there are always people who would like to split hairs over that but we all know what 'dead' means. In physics it can be a little harder to prove that an object really is dead but it gets a lot easier once you catch on to the inertial frame of reference idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_frame_of_reference

A final note that may drop the coin for you: An object 'at rest' does not change relative to it's own frame of reference, but an object that has a powersource can change relative to that same frame of reference. The reference frame stays still relative to where you found the object the first time and then you track it over time. If the change is just a translation then the object is dead, if it can change trajectory relative to that frame of reference, rotate about an axis faster or slower than how you found it initially or change it's configuration relative to the frame of reference (for instance, by operating some kind of actuator) then it is still 'alive'.
Let me try to explain my entire point in one go, because I don't think you understand what I'm trying to argue.

We have the real world, where something can go on nearly-forever but there are no magic energy sources.

We have unicorn world, where there are magic energy sources.

Arguments about friction and air resistance and tidal decay and heat death prove that nearly-forever is not literally-forever.

That's fine, but it doesn't disprove the unicorns.

If we were in unicorn world, our magic energy source would take 100% power input and turn it into 200% output, and even after losses to friction you'd still have 190% left over.

Saying that "eventually the magic device needs parts replaced" is completely true, but that's not what people care about.

When someone says "perpetual motion machine" they're talking about turning 100% power into 200% power. They're not worried about exactly how long it can run without maintenance.

In other words, you're taking 'perpetual' too literally. You're disproving the idea that anything goes forever, but what 'perpetual' actually means here is that it's extracting energy from an infinite source rather than a finite source.
You can buy ESP8266 boards with wifi built in for less than $3, so wifi doesn't justify the price tag. The Edison is certainly a lot more more powerful, but most IOT applications simply don't need that power. And if you do, Raspberry Pi Zero is still far cheaper.

But this actually proves your larger point that Intel just aren't that interested. If they were, they would sell Edison at a loss for $5, which would spawn huge community support around them.

Intel they are suffering the classic innovator's dilemma, where competitors grab the low-end with products so cheap that no-one cares about their inferiority. The competitors then slowly improve their products (see the ESP32) and gobble up most of the market. Inel will rule the high end for a while yet, but I think they recognise they have already lost the low end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
With long lags that penetrate through the frame & multiple studs.
Ha! I remember that. It was all over secret.ly .

They freaked out because they weren't able to get the biggest room at one of the events.

Good riddance, I say.
The claim is that what he is about to say is worth your attention.

Achievement of the highest professional accolade for the very stuff that he plans to discuss is literally prima facie evidence in support of that claim.
So the lesson is if you are trying to murder people over the internet, don't plug your anonymous sim card into your iphone which is tied to your identity?
Not much to say really. HN commentary thrives on change, and the analysis around it.
What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "content sites" so that you don't have to do a and b so much.

Outside of SEO, now popular is also fake social media profiles. What's the guidebook there to "Social Media Optimization" (I'm sure there's a real acronym for that by now), and how are Facebook/Twitter policing their datasets to prevent spam and fraud? afaict they're not, beyond basic anti-scraping methods like blocking anonymous proxies, etc.

Not trying to be aggressive, just really don't think that there is any reasonable way to do organic internet marketing anymore. It all boils down to either spam or advertisements. Spam (used broadly here to include astroturfing, PBNs, etc.) is the more effective solution by far, which means if you don't do it, you'll lose to the competitor who will.

I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO, but on further inspection, they're just referring to using all of their clients' sites to link back to each other and insisting that they're the only ones who know how to do this.

It is true that an SEO firm's rate may be worthwhile if it buys you access to a well-governed link ring, but personally I'm skeptical of the abilities of anyone who has chosen to be involved in that type of career path. It's usually sales types who think they're good at computers, i.e., people who don't really have any idea what they're doing beyond convincing someone to pay them money.
It should be noted that in the document, Twitter and Apple were provided search warrants whereas AT&T received a "request."
Go is more about pragmatism. If you need to deliver a web API today it is definitely a better choice than Rust and many other languages. Tools such Godoc encourages you to dive into the source code, something that is missing on many languages(i.e. Apple Swift/Objective-C).
Shortly said I think it makes you a more pragmatic developer.
My mother is making Fish as she does every year for Nowruz. I detest fish.

However, on the bright side, I will be decorating the eggs, yet nowhere near the level of the ones you see in Google images. I'm doing stick figures this year.
In many ways this is what APL was originally about. Ken Iverson used it to describe the operation of early IBM computers while at IBM.
It is totally bananas.
Sorry yes, they signed it in 2011 but it went into effect in 2013
Import tax? There should only be GST on most Apple products.
Tavis Ormandy reports new LastPass bug affecting 4.1.42