skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's being missed here is that it's perfectly possible to be an optimist that delivers, and does so reasonably fast. The problem is that it takes an excruciatingly long time to understand how to do this and most people simply don't have the patience to get there, so they get stuck in one of the two camps - do the right thing slowly, or do the wrong thing fast.

Or perhaps it's a luxury- you have to make the right career moves and only allow yourself to work for organisations and people who actively support you while you develop your skills. You need to convince people to really invest in you, that is. And that's hard to do.

Think though- what's the alternative? If you work for employers who believe that everything you do is always going to be a bit shit, what can you expect from them? You can certainly expect your pay to be a bit shit also, and then your say in anything that matters. Way to go to become a useless, incompetent, irrelevant, cost-center drone, there, buddy!

I'm not saying you should strive to be a rockstar. But you can get better at what you do, and one day, even get to be good at it. Like, really good. People do that in every craft, in every trade, in every art, even. Why is programming any different?

Well, it ain't. The "nihilist" programmer in the article is really a pessimist programmer. The stack is always half full for them (get it?). But if it wasn't for "optimists" we'd never have tail-call optimisation. See? It gets better.
I think it's more narcissistic than misanthropic; it presupposes that we are something distinct and apart from the "natural" world. A bird building a nest is "natural", a human building a house is "un-natural". In this worldview, we are a fundamentally and categorically unique kind of living thing. Our behaviour is not that of a highly evolved mammal, but of a lesser god.
You're exposed to too many of the same risks as Earth. Warfare, engineered plagues, rogue AI. Mars orbital distance from Earth gives it a safety gap LEO doesn't have, and an independent source of raw materials including fuel. Also orbital facilities are exposed to additional risks such as solar flares and Kessler Syndrome. He has actually thought this through.

That's not to say orbital habitats are a bad idea as such. We're going to need them. Its just that on their own they don't really solve the problem.
Your credit card has a history of all of your transactions (and we know that data is used to profile you). Taler makes it so that your transaction history is private.

In addition, Taler is _federated_ not fully decentralised. It works basically how cash works, except you don't need to be a new country to set up a new currency. In order for a particular mint's cash to be spent you only need that mint to be around.

I don't get why "decentralised or bust" is the end goal. Federation with individual privacy is still an improvement over centralised credit card companies. Also, like it or not, but Taler has much better privacy guarantees than BitCoin.
It doesn't matter whether it's online. If you want to be able to use it in meatspace for meatspace things then it will be regulated.
By extension, I wonder if he's also against every technological development (or development in general) since Aristotle.
I hate my bookshelves. They are really ugly... a collection of mismatched colors, styles fonts.

I would pay for a service that would print out new spine stickers for all my books that cover the existing spines and create a consistent look for all of them.

Bonus points for an app that I just use to take a picture of my existing shelf and it figures out the rest.
There are more practical reasons not to terraform Mars. Notably, the most valuable resources for human survival (oxygen and water) would eventually be lost to space. It is a slow process to be sure. In practical terms, it would probably outlast humanity as a species (either evolution or extinction, depending upon your outlook). Yet it does seem to go against the basic idea that many of proponents of manned space exploration tout: a second home to ensure our survival. Terraforming Mars would be, at best, temporary.

My take is that we should go out there, exploiting resources as needed, yet adapting to the environment through technological means. Even if we could terraform Mars, we would still have to adapt in order to go beyond that planet since there is nowhere else within reach that is remotely similar to either planet. Even if you could imagine a sci-fi future where the stars are within reach, chances are that a good portion of the habitable planets will have life of some form. That would raise more serious ethical issues than the subjectivity of beauty.
> the Scala Center has a mission to ensure someone keeps working on it.

Heh, I hope it's you! :)

Seriously, scala.js has been amazing for us! Thank you for all that hard work!

EDIT: Of course you might still be beaten out by scala.native -> WebAssembly -> Browser... nah, not really. :)
Can you ask your father to give you subdomain first.lastname.tld? and email first@lastname.tld?
Science and Pseudo-Science
Ask HN: How do you manage user permissions on production servers?
Do you allow root access to production servers? or full sudo access?
Do you allow particular tasks to be run with sudo? Which ones?
Do you grant users temporary superuser permissions?
What do you do in case of emergencies?
Do you completely forbid users from sshing to production servers?
Do you audit/monitor superusers activity?
Besides "perfect" and "good" there's also "better" and as long as you can do that, your results are guaranteed to improve.

I would even go as far as to say that, if you do the same thing over and over again, you can only avoid getting better at it if you try, really hard, to be worse at it.
Off-topic: There's a typo in you're profile; "flounder @ Latacora".

EDIT: Appears possible it's a not a typo given it's also in this profile too:
https://m.facebook.com/thomas.ptacek
You don't need to have your number ported for this to work, Signalling System 7 (SS7) hacks can redirect SMS messages.[0] For the truly paranoid (or high value targets) SMS is not secure.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/03/hackers_fire_up_ss7...
The Prime Minister said introducing new rules for cyberspace would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online” and that technology firms were not currently doing enough.

...

"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed - yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide,” Ms May said.

Is it fair to say that the seeds for these attacks were first sown well before the emergence of the technology companies she's criticising? I remember reading of a private suggestion by someone in (US?) foreign affairs that this broad wave of terrorism is "birds come home to roost".
Considering the earth has roughly 2.5 times more gravity, the climb would probably be quite a bit less exhausting (after terraforming Mars).
True. What does viewing pornography have to do with terrorism? I find it despicable that she's using a horrible event to push forward her own agenda.
Given a choice between a free net and a failed state, I will choose the net every time.
Below The Root [0], by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

A highly imaginative, original, and underrated, world setting.

Also had the distinction of having a sequel in the form of a video game, with the game's story written by the book author herself. [1]

The game (for the PC, Apple II and Commodore 64) was way ahead of its time in 1984: [2] and I only just heard of it and the books last month! It definitely needs more recognition.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy

[1] http://blog.stahlmandesign.com/below-the-root-a-story-a-comp...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdUBefQ1cT4
I just don't understand the UK on surveillance and free speech issues. In most ways, the UK seems more sane than the US, but they have these absurd libel laws and take any and every opportunity to cry "regulate the internet" when anything bad happens involving the internet. Notably, there was no call for "we need to increase our regulation of cars or knives" after this incident.

Any UK resident have insight on why the UK is so backwards on these issues? It is pretty obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of computers that terrorist "safe spaces" (assuming that big internet companies knowingly provide them, which I find dubious) are kind of impossible to remove or regulate. The ability of the internet to provide encrypted, point-to-point communications is a pretty core feature.
https://youtu.be/7t4paclIwuU
If humanity ends up with the ability to travel to other stars, Mars is but a stepping stone. It would be the testing ground for almost everything else. There's no reason to view that as temporary. It's necessary and the whole terraforming process would include figuring out a way to not lose those resources to space.

We don't really know how long terraforming Mars would take, but it's conceivable that it could take as few as a few centuries, especially given the advance of tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Protectin...

(some scientists say it could be done with current tech)
This is the party that is also open about wanting to ban encryption.
I'm sorry to break it to you Theresa, but the internet didn't attack anyone. I wish people didn't lose their ability to think rationally in these moments.
VW was barely the only one who cheated. They just got the brunt of the punishment so the other cheaters could evade just desserts.

Watch this video:
https://youtu.be/7t4paclIwuU
I don't know about the internet being regulated, however it is clear to me that our politicians idiotic utterances need a serious amount of regulating.
The FFMpeg wiki has some information, including calling out its own "vorbis" encoder as sub-par and not recommended (but apparently they also support a different "libvorbis" encoder that does not suffer from problems?) See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio

Also for AAC in particular there are a few options https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC
ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered
From one glance I see that it doesn't covers neural network architecture or it's not taking about RL agents. What this book is about?
>All this does is increase the number of documents.

Perhaps you didn't get what I said.

That information should be displayed (by law) with prominent letters as big as the base price, under any sign/ad/etc which shows the latter.

Not to be buried in another document.
"Too many people are buying cars" simply
>Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
Rust has no backward compatibility: C code compiles fine after decades. It would be a waste of time to rewrite Linux in Rust when the resulting code has a lifetime of few months until it won't compile and start breaking everywhere.
Conclusion: they don't want the surveillance to stop terrorism. It's against someone else.
>However, signing a piece of paper in plain english certifying saying "I read it" when one did not ought to mean something.

If that was the case, EULA also should "mean something".
> The decision to terraform Mars would also exhibit hubris. Often understood as an “excessive pride before the gods,” hubris has ancient roots and is perhaps best epitomized by the fabled Icarus, whose wings of wax and feathers melted when he got too close to the sun in his attempt to reach heaven.

One man's hubris is another's whole raison d'être of humanity. I suppose the reference to Icarus is a good one here, because I wholeheartedly agree with Randall Munroe: "But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.".

I can understand appeals to aesthetics. I can understand pointing out generic irresponsibility of humans in aggregate. But hubris? The strong drive to adapt the world to what we see fit is literally what separates us from animals.
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We are looking for both Frontend (angular) and Full-stack/backend (python) Devs.

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Drop us a line - we're working on a large, well funded, project where we process (for search & convenient reading) thousands of documents a day for the finance industry and need a solid pair of hands with a sense of humor and a life outside of work. This involves a pile of aws infrastructure, and a fair amount of tricky reporting and data-collection work, as well as things like 'similar to this document' and surrounding compliance. Lots of good concurrency issues and careful balancing of resources & profiling profiling profiling... and testing!

As pretty much everything we do is based on open source libraries we try to contribute back where we can, have contributed small patches to sqlalchemy & deform.

We will happily consider a range of experiences, but would prefer someone who is familiar with our tool-chain, any experience with elastic search & recommendation mechanisms a plus. Some frontend js/css knowlege, and sysadmin (ansible, linux) knowledge welcome too although we are happy to share internally.

Our offices are in London (near Baker st), and Canterbury, Kent.

Drop us an email to contact at our domain name with a CV, and any work you may have open sourced online.

Our interview process will usually involve a skype chat, followed by a group chat with the whole team. Depending on background we may ask you to complete a task or two.

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You can read this one from Muhammad Asad, it's very good.
http://muhammad-asad.com/Message-of-Quran.pdf

> I've asked Muslim friends but they seem adamant that it must be read in Arabic

Not sure if these are practicing Muslims but that's simply wrong.
She's actually been saying this for quite a while but nobody's listening. Now she's using the incident to bolster her argument. It's a pretty ridiculous claim to state that this type of monitoring will help - "these terrorists have safe spaces on the Internet". Smart terrorists will find a "space" to communicate where big brother is not listening. If you eliminate one, they'll simply move elsewhere but there's no practical chance of removing them all.
Sony Toio: Robotics for Kids
It does look like either the Labour or the Tories favour surveillance heavily. It makes me wonder, do the leaders of these parties actually believe that such surveillance can ensure security ? Or, is it that most of the common people see surveillance as a good security measure and the political parties are just appeasing these people. I can't help but extrapolate this situation to the scenario depicted in "V for Vendetta".
skillet is for crisping up the bottom, add a lid or a circle of aluminium foil to get a nice bubbly cheese top
I don't think that's anywhere near a practical concern so it would be over-engineering and wasteful to do that.

You'll need entire new processor micro-architectures to use more bits from your 64-bit pointer. It's your hardware address bus that only supports 40- or 48-bits of address space, not your application or operating system. That's already 256 TB as well. I don't think you'll hit that limit any time soon.
> just from the phone alone one can break into gmail

The social engineering only gives you access to receive SMS. It does not give access to a complete backup or gmail's password.
It is. But that doesn't stop people from playing on fear to get what they want.
the Defamation Act 2013 fixed a lot of the problems with the libel laws

however I really don't understand the surveillance thing
Didn't take her long.

May seems to really hate internet freedom for some reason.
> People do that in Lisp, too.

"there exists" (existential quantification) is valid argument if someone implies "there don't exist".

The argument was common tendency or ratio.

I speak as one who has done numerical programming with CL. I bet most of us have personal numerical library that implements third of what is needed for initial release for numpy or matlab and the code is somewhat incomplete with matlisp or clasp. It's just too easy to accidentally implement almost viable general library for numerical computing in CL. Of course you don't need to document it or polish it because you use it only by yourself.

In retrospect we would have been better off by working together bottom up well documented replacement for R, numpy, and matlab. The amount of work would have been only slightly more.
> Huh, What kind of unused code and data is there in a 25MB hello world?

If you want to produce a standalone Lisp executable, you have to embed the compiler with it, hence the big size.

However, if you just run the programs with your own compiler, you only need the actual code — that is a 44 bytes "Hello world!", shebang included.

On my machine, the SBCL package is 70 MiB, while for example the Python one is 125 MiB.
It's refreshing to know I'm not the only one who can see this obvious thing.
It's unlikely we could have more strict laws on knives in the UK. It's illegal to carry them and illegal to own many types of them (e.g. flick-knives).

Essentially if you have a knife on your person, and you've not got a damn good reason (e.g. it's a breadknife and you're on your way to work at a bakery) you're committing a crime.

Cars are basically impossible to legislate against. What they did is already illegal.

So to answer your question - what's left when everything is already illegal?
This is getting sillier every day.
This is one of the reasons I get quite nervous when people start talking about these private-implementation, "cloud native" database services (Aurora, Redshift, Spanner...). As wonderful as they sound (and possibly are), not only are you binding yourself to a single vendor by adopting these, but there is nothing to keep the pricing of these services connected to reality.

Whereas as long as you e.g. "keep it postgres", you're able to experiment (at fairly low effort) with different database setups and find what is more efficient or cost effective for you. If Cloud Provider X's pricing model starts to deviate from what people are able to achieve with some custom database setup, people will start flocking to that - and, in fact, Cloud provider X would probably find themselves competing with an easy to use "managed database" service that does just that on their own Cloud Marketplace.

Not that this isn't an extremely interesting project as long as it's possible to wrestle the concept free from Amazon's infrastructure.
Theresa May probably ordered those terrorist attacks herself - she's the one who will benefit the most from them, using them as pretext for regulating Internet and otherwise limit civil rights. Pretty much the same way Erdogan organized coup against himself.

EDIT: Also, this is not a coincidence that this attack happens just a few days before elections: this will earn her few percentage points of votes as she will now pose as the only one able to fight terror.
Isn't the European version of the APR exactly designed to overcome that problem? (It's mandatory for every loan in the European Union)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_percentage_rate
Personal responsibility is not a binary.

And in any transaction I put the first blame in the person which had the more information in advance. It's their duty to inform the other, especially if they are the one's receiving the money.

Taleb has written something close to that recently:

I worked once for a classic U.S. investment bank of the prestigious variety, called “white shoe” because the partners were members of hard-to-join golf clubs where they played the game wearing white footwear. As with all such firms, an image of ethics and professionalism was cultivated. But the job of the salespeople (actually, salesmen) on days when they wore black shoes was to “unload” inventory with which traders were “stuffed”, that is, securities they had in plethora in their books and needed to get rid of them to lower their risk. (...) Salesmen hawked how a given security will be perfect for the client’s portfolio, how they were certain it would rise in price and how the client would suffer great regret if he missed “such an opportunity”, that type of discourse. Salespeople were experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest, while being happy about it and loving them and their company. One of the top salesman of the firm, a man of huge charisma who came to work in a chauffeured Rolls Royce, was once asked whether customers didn’t get upset when they got the short end of the stick. “A customer is born every day” was his answer.

Which brings us to the notion of asymmetry, the core concept behind skin in the game. The question becomes: to what extent can people in a transaction have an informational differential between them? The ancient Mediterranean and, to some extent the modern world, seems to be converging to Antipater’s position. While we have “buyer beware” (caveat emptor) in the Anglo-Saxon West, the idea is rather new, and never general, often mitigated by lemon laws. So to the question voiced by Cicero of a debate between the two ancient stoics, “If a man knowingly offers for sale wine that is spoiling, ought he to tell his customers?” , the world is getting closer to Diogenes position of transparency, not necessarily via regulations as much as thanks to tort laws, one’s ability to sue for harm in the event the seller deceived him.
This seemed shocking as I thought SIMD was still on track for inclusion in the next ECMAScript release as the proposal was on stage 3 the last time I checked (stage 4 means "it's in the spec", so stage 3 generally means "shipping ASAP"). I first thought Google had single-handedly decided to violate the spec.

However it turns out the SIMD proposal has been dead since at least April: https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd/commit/c6ca655dcbfc0...

So this isn't really "Google kills SIMD" but "Google kills implementation of dropped proposal".

It's still surprising to see proposals get canned this late into the process. The only other example of a late-stage retraction I can think of is Object.observe, which was originally expected to become part of the 2016 edition: https://esdiscuss.org/topic/an-update-on-object-observe
We published a list of speakers that does not reflect the standards to which we hold ourselves. We will be postponing this event until we can deliver a more diverse slate of speakers.

Oh get over yourselves. Why would future speakers not feel like token representations used to meet an imaginary quota?
The article states that Google Authenticator is more secure than Authy? As someone who has been using GA for a long time but thinking about moving to Authy - what is the rationale behind this assessment? Is it because Authy stores your 2FA sites in the cloud?

I was going to use that as a plus, as I have now had to switch phones twice, and re-setting up my GA 2FA sites on the new phone was a major PITA - I thought Authy would make that easier, but now I guess that feature could be an attack vector too?
I said "nixy side" with Windows in mind.

OS X is not really very adherent to the spirit of microkernels, earlier and more recent Windows releases have it well beaten in that respect.
We should be regulating 2-ton steel boxes hurtling down the road 2 feet away from pedestrians at 50mph, not the fucking internet.