skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When they invented the COBOL compilers, the assembly language programmers were scared. "Now every business man can write their own code!".

Same when they invented the spreadsheet.

Same when they invented garbage collection.

Same with every new library, framework, "its just like legos"-invention.

Yes, they make it easier. But, the world then demands more software.

Sofware begets software.

Without compilers, there would be many many fewer programmers in the world.

Someday we might have the computer from the Enterprise. Then we can ask it "Give us the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and Everything".
+1 for mu (and mu4e)
China is older. So is India. Your statement is why education helps secularization; then religious propaganda is not effective any more.
If they don't collect it under this program, they'll collect it under some other program. Or they'll just let one of the FIVE EYES partners spy on Americans. That's how they operate.
Yeah, but Mike Rogers has been reading Marie Kondo.
So you'd rather the government hand out certifications and only allow those certified people to create websites? That sounds better.
Nice algorithm. I am curious what happens when the dimension becomes really large (more than 100). I have heard about kd tree but as far as I know the performance becomes really bad for d > 16. What should be the strategy of finding nearest neighbours for such high dimensions?
That's what I thought as well when I first found it – once the initial surprise passed, it seems nice to have something just work for anyone using another script. The Unicode consortium has put an enormous amount of work into building that database and it's nice to reuse that to make something friendlier for humans.
If SVGs were embraced more broadly (and the standards team supported) many of the raster images would fall to the wayside. These recommendations are still totally valid for content-based images (photos, etc.).

Some sort of hybrid between the two, and the recs in the article, seem to be the future of visual imagery online.
Relevant Taleb tweet: "A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion."
I use OfflineIMAP to fetch & emacs/mu+mu4e+exim to read+index/search+send my E-Mail. It works, and overall I'm happy with it.

I used to use mbsync but when my employer migrated from Cyrus to Exchange IMAP I couldn't get mbsync to work with it, but OfflineIMAP worked just fine.

Now they've migrated to GMail, which works fine with both, and even though OfflineIMAP is more flexible & easier to customize I'll probably switch back at some point.

OfflineIMAP regularly pegs my CPU at >100% just downloading a few dozen E-Mails, whereas mbsync's CPU usage never went above 2-3%. When my laptop fan starts spinning it's usually OfflineIMAP in the background.

So if you're looking for an IMAP->Maildir retriever or backup solution consider trying out mbsync first.

It's a PAIN to switch between these programs, or even using the same data when switching between different servers (e.g. Cyrus -> Exchange). Inexplicably neither of them have some sort of reindexing mode where they can take an existing Maildir and reconstruct their local database from local/remote Message-Id's. They both use & maintain an opaque local database. That's why I haven't simply gone back to mbsync.
Ways we harden our KVM hypervisor at Google Cloud: Security in plaintext:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483603
Everything eventually gets represented by a string somewhere. Paths aren't inherently strings, but that's how they are often represented in code. You won't be defining your namespaces as a string in normal usage, but some things do need oto represent source, so why choose a character that makes their jobs harder. There are parallels. It's a downside of using backslash. It's not guaranteed to cause a problem, but the potential is there and waiting for anyone that needs to deal with representing it in language.
Indeed.

ML seems a great part, "Magic Function Machines". People make features that can be tracked, and more features, and more features. Then they splatter them against the wall, and hope for the best.

The best, are things like "Tell what type of bird it is"... But in the end, we have no clue HOW it got those results. Just that the Mystery Magic Function + data = results.

I can certainly see a middle path of being able to train a learning function, and then interrogating said function for the underlying things that make it true. Once we understand the primitives, then we can make ideal functions that do X, and do it well. Because right now, learning functions do it rather well but with exceptional overhead. And they're hard to tune without recrunching the whole dataset.
I am "worth my salt". I think so. But when I was asked for estimates, I told them a number, but only after I told them that that number is without foundation. It is an estimate, a guess. At many clients / projects, it was taken as a guaranteed time, a deadline - despite my effort to explain that it is just a guess. And when things got bad, it was often used for blame.

Because of this experience, since 2-3 years, I am fighting estimates unless I am in an environment where estimates are really only estimates.
Sounds like they knew he wasn't an employee. What they didn't know was if he was associated with some high profile account and whether an employee (generally in sales or marketing) had inadvertently signed up the company to sponsor the guy in that competition.

Better to check internally (and chew out your employee for overpromising if needed) than to accidentally jeopardize a large account by calling the guy a fraud or ignoring him and it turning out to be true.
Next story will be about Windows 10 and WSL? ;)
It seems odd that something can be absolutely moral one polling cycle and not absolutely moral the next polling cycle, if a whole bunch of subjective opinions change, as they have a tendency to do.
I've been in a home that was burgled, and slept through it. It wasn't until I was woken up by my wife asking what I had done with the X-box that it got weird.

Knowing that we had two dogs and three people living in the home, none of whom were apparently woken by the intruders? That freaked me out for quite a while.
The smallest scale is basically the same as for tokamaks (the advantage is that you can operate a stellarator continuously, while a tokamak is pulsed which may be less convenient for power generation).

The scale is mostly limited by magnetic field strength. With ordinary superconducting magnets they get pretty big (the planned ITER reactor will weigh 5,116 tonnes). Some people say that new high-temperature superconductors will enable stronger magnets and hence smaller reactors (http://news.mit.edu/2017/brandon-sorbom-designing-fusion-fut...).
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
I totally agree with these gems ...

> It's all relative. Sometimes solutions require insights. Other times solutions involve a ton of grinding.

> Many people have a tendency to overemphasize the first and greatly under emphasize the second, even though the grinding may actually be harder than devising clever solutions.

> No individual problem is hard. It's arguably hard to do tedious work day in and day out for months at a time, but I don't think people would call that "technically hard".
If you value your safety, don't buy a gun.

Owning a gun makes the people in your household statistically more likely to be killed both inside and outside the household[1].

It also makes you more likely to murder an innocent person or have the gun used against a family member[2].

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-guns-in-home-increase-suic...

2. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun...
Where's the rest of the article? This is a great opening statement followed up by...nothing.
Sad to see:

Python v3.4+ [STALLED]

But looks like development is pretty active so, hopefully they finish making the jump to Python 3 soon!
Proper quote (from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac#Le_P.C3....)

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done

The key part that people keep omitting is "without apparent cause". If the cause is apparent, there is no need to speculate about possible crimes: just look at the cause and decide if it's criminal or not.
You took the words right out of my head. The propaganda coming out of mainstream media (on all sides) is not even close to believable anymore. Nothing is true and everything is possible.
> ... were too eager to draw sweeping conclusions based on a, while promising if fine tuned, shotgun methodology to classify gender

I'm not sure exactly what this means, but you didn't say this—you said something deliberately inflammatory on an already controversial topic. We need commenters not to do that here because it sparks tedious flamewars by which our intellectual curiosity (the reason this site exists) is decidedly unsatisfied.
proposition: every intentional public statement by a business is a 'publicity and marketing stunt'.
The kind of person who is in your home on the prowl rarely wants to escalate to Murder 1, unless they're after you and not your things. If you're not confident in your ability to subdue or do not have an opportunity, comply and protect your family. Best you can do, even with training; waking up you're at a disadvantage and don't know if they have backup. I know an Air Force major who has won awards for hand to hand combat and he still let his stuff go. Smart.

Your goal should be to get them out. Grease those wheels. Offer more. Be blunt. Nothing you own is worth the escalation.
We can't sensibly discuss this story here unless we know which definition of "collect" is being used in the story.

Normal definition: collect. For example: "Even collected all the data going to and from Bob's house by putting a splitter on the cable."

NSA's definition: not that, as cited in various stories sourced by the Snowden leaks from the Guardian.

I won't attempt to define exactly how the NSA defines "collect" because I don't have time to track down and read the relevant article. But the upshot is-- their definition is idiosyncratic and misleading for a piece that has a general audience like this one.
As someone who is a bit younger - how did you ~know~ how/where/what assets to put money into?
Back in the sixties some scientist said "Fusion is ready in 20 years", then in the eighties some others said it again, and in the 2000's the next ones... but hey, I don't care how long it will take as long as humankind strives for such stuff I'm fine
Depends on you dev environment. Almost all of the browser dev tools should catch up eventually. The fun of an ecosystem with multiple competing implementations.
Nitpicking but the article has 5 examples, only 2 of which are true to the title. The travel agent and the customer representative actually train the "robots" to do their own job. However the software engineer, for example, doesn't train A.I. to write software - she writes code which helps A.I. to get trained in driving better. At present, I think very little of a software engineer's task can be replaced by an A.I - understanding requirements, debugging, deployment, and the likes. Mind you programmatic automation has to be distinguished from A.I.
And even if revenue did start dropping, unless it totally collapses overnight, Alphabet's enormous cash stockpile buys a lot of breathing room.
If you intercept traffic from gmail as a whole you would get messages from US citizens, not only from foreign people, not counting replies, fws, etc. That's my take from this excuse.
Honestly in my mind Google is already passing Amazon and their Alexa.

They just released an update to their Google Home which does individual voice recognition per person to offer individualized results for each, even going as far as to play my favorite playlists when asked, and my wife's when she asks.
A good example of the durability of religion in the heart of SF/tech: Reality SF, a thriving, fast-growing church in the Castro, made up mostly of under-35 tech professionals.

One of my favorite sermons in recent memory is quite related to this topic: it was about "rootedness in community" in the context of SF, and talks about how most people in SF come with a miner's mentality (come here for material gain, extract as much value as possible, then move on), whereas the pastor challenges us to consider a farmer's mentality (invest in the land, care for it in the long run, treat it like a home for the long run - of course, big agra is probably more like mining at this point but you get the point!). highly worth anyone in SF checking the talk out here: http://realitysf.com/sermon/slow-church-we-value-rootedness/

some choice quotes he uses in the sermon that I really loved (admittedly a little romantic, but I think carry some good insight):

"the 20th century will be remembered as an age of wondrous creativity, when Americans voluntarily shattered their lives into distant and dissonant fragments. America's industries learned how to assemble atomic bombs, airplanes, iPads and the genetic codes of life itself in the same era that American society disassembled the ancient overlap of family, food, faith and the field of work. Americans reached for the stars as they withered their roots, inhabited space but lost any sense of place." (David Janzen)

"The failure of the urban promise: That promise concerned human person who could lead detached, unrooted lives of endless choice and no commitment. It was glamorized around the virtues of mobility and anonymity that seemed so full of promise for freedom and self-actualization. But it has failed...It is now clear that sense of place is a human hunger that urban promise has not met...It is rootlessness and not meaninglessness that characterizes the current crisis" (Walter Brueggerman)

[full disclosure: I'm a member!]
what you just said is completely orthogonal to the comment you're replying to.

self-directed vs. manager-directed is a separate concern from whether or not a programmer can be expected to put in 40 hours of high focus, high concentration technical work per week.

in my experience getting 20-30 high focus hours in a week is a very good week. the rest of the time has to be used for things that are much less focused. like arguing about this shit on hacker news, for example. it's not even an either/or scenario. you need to do both. just like when breathing you have to both inhale and exhale.
Guide to Hiking Boots and Shoes – Feet Love Socks
Imho this has nothing to do with privacy or law. This is an operational decision. The bad guys aren't using email these days. I don't agree with much of the "going dark" narrative, but it is clear that bad guys are using IM services and other not-email means of communicating. So to hear NSA talk about not collecting email is like them saying they are going to stop monitoring library records: It sounds like a win for privacy but only on paper and we know that they will simply redeploy resources to the interception of other communication.
Back when Fetchmail would segfault on certain spam messages, and a bug report to ESR went nowhere, I wrote my own mail fetcher in Perl. Then I extended it to IMAP, and later IMAPS, working around some bugs in some popular IMAP servers. I had it deliver mail to a local mda (so I could use Maildir and mda filters) and configurable to keep or delete mails from the remote server. I think it only supports one remote mailbox, however. https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/po... (It's very old code that sucks, and not secure, fwiw)
You're moving the goalposts. First you said there's no personal cost to losing an account; now you're saying there is a cost but one deserves it. Which is it?
Doesn't this apply to literally everything? Cheap programmers v/s expensive programmers, cheap photographers v/s expensive photographers, etc.

When it's their own field, people suddenly become very attached to the nuances and about the additional value they can provide which the cheap counterpart does not.
SEXIST

The illustration portrayed the burglar as a man and the victim as a woman.

I'm offended.
Another +1 for mu/mu4e. Been using it at work for three or four years. Having instant access to ~8 year old email is like a superpower.
Seems like a truly unbiased source.
Off topic but: this is some good nostalgia here. I was that other coworker. Some of the best pair programming I've ever done. It was fun working closely with Nick.
My go-to answer is my time when I worked in AIX kernel development at IBM. We'd get bugs for kernel crashes that appeared related to memory corruption. They frequently ended up being caused by stale DMA addresses in device drivers for (mostly) Infiniband adapters writing into memory that now belonged to some userland process or kernel data structure.

How I'd debug these (it took me a while to be effective in this regard):

- Main tool was the AIX kernel debugger (like cutting bone with a butter knife :)
- Identify corrupted memory, look for clues like recognizable data structures or pointers in the raw dump that could be cross-checked against symbol maps, etc.
- Confirm the alignment of the corrupted memory. Page alignment was a tell-tale sign of errant DMA writes in our system... cache alignment is more mysterious and can be related to CPU design bugs (IBM designs their own POWER processors, and we'd test on alpha hardware frequently).
- Scour the voluminous kernel trace for the physical frame # of the corrupted memory. A typical offending sequence was:
1. Frame assigned to adapter for DMA
2. Physical memory layout change (we supported live hot-swappable memory arbitrated by the POWER hypervisor)
3. Frame allocated for use by page fault handler
4. Crash happens

Sometimes the root cause was that the device drivers were not properly serialized with the dynamic memory resource subsystem (the hot-swappable memory) and the sequence above happens very quickly (<1 ms). Sometimes the bug took a while to manifest, and the nice story tols above for our page was interspersed with thousands of unrelated activities in the same region of memory.

We had to be like a prosecutor and build a strong case to implicate a bug somewhere else. Until then, our team was always on the hook to figure these out.

This class of problem was hard because the tools we have at our disposal to collect evidence were quite inadequate, and the amount of data to sift through was enormous. Also, any tool we think might help to sift through all this data needed to already be in the system and in the kernel debugger as a diagnostic command (a crashed system in the debugger cannot be modified in practice). There's hundreds of those debugger commands for all kinds of randomly recurring problems we had trouble figuring out. Over time, you'd build your own for your own set of problems in your kernel specialty :-)
Thanks for the tip! Too late to edit, bummer. [Edit:If you're right I] would have switched it to: "not for the faint of heart!"

My understanding was from Qubes choosing Xen and also AWS (they both deal with Xen advisories instead). The Qubes Architecture Specification goes into detail starting on page 11: https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/wiki/QubesArchitecture/a...

KVM uses the open source qemu emulator for [I/O emulattion]. [...] The I/O emulator is a complex piece of software, and thus it is reasonable to assume that it contains bugs and that it can be exploited by the attacker. In fact both Xen and KVM assume that the I/O emulator can be
compromised and they both try to protect the rest of the system from a potentially compromised I/O emulator.

Also pointed out elsewhere on thread: Google skipping QEMU.

Edit: I am digging into it more, but I don't see KVM+QEMU on any top-tier provider (GCE, AWS, Azure [Hyper-V-ish])? My understanding was the only time QEMU was required was to emulate processor architectures, eg. x86 on ARM or vice-versa. QEMU is also used by some reverse-engineering/anti-malware emulation stuff.
Here’s when the Pixel and Pixel XL will see their software support end
And in fact, jury nullification is the ability of a jurist to find a defendent innocent when they believe the law is wrong, even if they've determined the defendent to have violated the law.
If you just put a unique subject each time - perhaps include a date or time stamp, this problem goes away.
> To me (and I know this will be a controversial opinion) I feel this is something smart phone manufacturers should work together with the government on. A simple "has a text been manually entered in the last x minutes" read out feels like a non slippery slope that may save lives by proxy.

It wouldn't save lives -- it's only useful after the fact. My phone shouldn't spy or taddle on me (more than's already required to connect to the cell network.)
Please stop breaking the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Phishing Scammer Scams $100M Out of Facebook and Google
> Seems like some economic SJW stuff

I love how the existence of whiny college students becomes a shorthand excuse to write off anyone who wouldn't be chosen to appear in a Mentos commercial.
I'd say that if 95% or any majority of population agree on something, it can make something LEGAL. There are some ethical systems that prescribe universal morals regardless of however many people agree. For example, in utilitarianism, killing someone who is about to poison a water supply (thus probably killing many others) would be morally good. Deontology or absolutist moral theories prescribe that killing is always immoral.
I think it was a joke hinitng at the sun, but it seems to be @ 1 order of magnitude off, so I'm just confused now.
It's a new broom. Let's see how long that lasts.
What is the hardest technical problem you have run into?

Almost always asked from companies that don't have problems to offer even remotely comparable to the "war stories" they're expecting to you rattle off -- at least not for the position you're applying for, anyways.
I find relational algebra most useful for anything involving querying, validating, aggregating, and transforming data. SQL99 is by far one of the more useful implementations of it that I know about. And yes it does have limitations.

That's why most mature RDBMS servers ship with at least one procedural language. Though it'd be nice if there was an option to use OCaml or Haskell in PostgreSQL.

I'm not suggesting to throw out all your code and build your entire application in SQL. I'm just saying that if you control the database, use it, exploit it and don't abstract it out unless you absolutely have to (because you need to ship your application on-premises to clients who may run MySQL servers and others who run Oracle.
Funny, i consider systemd very much a part of the containerization cool-aid...
When it comes to autism in memes, it's pretty obvious. But I understand why honest perception bothers people.

Try spending some time in alt-right meme communities, on 4chan, etc, and form an opinion for yourself.
In the short term the so called "capitalists" may have received marginal profits by the selfish and stifling use of automation, just as a luddite may temporarily maintain their status quo by stifling automation. But in the long term, anything but humanitarian ends of automation will be self-defeating; that is the misunderstanding.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BfXln4NCQAAN5z2.jpg
I used to work at a life insurance company that had a sessions page for the developers that wasn't locked down at all. If you could get someone's id you could go directly to this page and set your user id to that. Done.

They also had a contest for their agents and the database they used to store all of the entries and information was an access database that happened to be sitting in the public directory for the website to simply serve to anyone who knew to request the database.

Seeing so much "security" makes me realize that a large majority of sites out there are a complete shit show, especially if the companies I worked for / with couldn't get it right and they actually had some money to their name.