skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some rand() implementation are really really bad for pretty much anything.

Obviously, it is not cryptographically secure but these RNGs are a class of their own and are typically much slower than needed for other applications.

The problem with rand() is that it may be unseeded (same result each time you run the program), have a very short period, very short range, and fail even basic randomness tests. Fill an image with rand() results and it may not look random at all.

It may not be good enough for monte-carlo simulations, fuzz testing, probabilistic algorithms and structures, etc... Some rand() implementations are too poor even for casual games.

A good example of a terrible RNG causing trouble is in the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate game. There are some randomly generated items in it that cannot be accessed because of the RNG. Players call it "charm tables" but it is just a result of a really poor RNG.
I can still hear "whoosh" in my own ears here 8)

Given how simple a Turing Machine can be, I seriously doubt (without any proof) that coq is not able to recreate a TM.

I am not an expert but the explanation about Turing Machines I read was in GED and involved a simple tape and a slack handful of symbols and operations and some basic hand waving. If coq can't manage that then it is unlikely to be useful - which I doubt.
I have no knowledge of the sport, but isnt that a rope in pic 7? I guess someone else left it and he didnt use it?
This is a flippant dismissal that is perhaps important to address.

Science is not a binary thing: hackers of all audiences should know that you can respect science while admitting partial knowledge of the world and embracing holistic (or less fully informed, yet well evidenced) modes of action.

In short, daveguy's argument simultaneously presents a false dichotomy and shifting the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_burden_of_proof based upon the implied assumption that formal, academic science is the only true source of evidence. In fact, there are many valid sources of information other than science, and many of its outputs are near philosophical anyway. For example, monocultures are weak would be scientifically founded, philosophical perspective for holistic thinking and against the implication.

PS. In fact my comment was mostly aimed at the folly of human behavior (overoptimization for macro-visible pathogens and backslapping self-assessment of broad self-assumed understanding when mounting evidence shows just how little we know about even human biology), not claiming that industry is bad, mmkay?
It is distressing to see the post flagged, and only get 36 upvotes as of 6 June, when the article on Alex Honnold is currently going through the roof (473 and counting). It makes me wonder if people have read the posting guidelines at all. Mainstream media is going to be all over Alex Honnold, and it's fun, but ultimately fluff.

After going to University in the '70s when global cooling was a concern, and after seeing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I undertook a journey: I was willing to be persuaded either way. I read pro and con media, and followed the links to their cited scientific articles. The evidence is overwhelming, as the Scientific American article says. But many intelligent people don't "believe" in global warming. This by itself is a hideously dangerous and perplexing problem.
Improving Customer Support
I intend to run this as a profit making business on the long run. How, I don't know yet. I don't like the idea of restricting the number of contacts you can have. Probably a paid plan for advanced features. I'm on this application for the long run - and this is also one of the reasons I've open sourced it: if I lose interest, the community will be in charge of developing it further. The current license permits it.
Is there a link to a paper? :)
Everyone lives their life in the face of impending death. Yet we usually judge the quality of our lives by what we accomplish, not the mere postponement of the inevitable.

Climbers climb for the enjoyment of the experience, and to get to the top--not just to show that they can avoid falling. Alex is a rare elite climber, so he reaches for rare elite experiences and accomplishments.
Thanks a lot for the kind words.
Not necessarily. See this Cornell study re the restaurant industry. http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/chrreports/2/
Networking only works if you're with a relevant audience. It's probably not useful to participate in a fashion industry networking event if you're a startup selling EDA software.

In any case, as long as it's not asking for an ownership stake, I don't see the problem with it.
Uber Eats: couple who ordered pizza get part-eaten, mouldy sandwiches
Oh yeah, good point (and one that I should have thought of before posting my comment). The scenario I described would actually be less efficient.
This starts to resemble something like abstinence-only education in schools, though, where a hard-line stance of "just don't do the risky thing we've told you not to do and you'll be fine" leads to less successful real-world results than embracing the complex realities of human behavior.
As of June 2016 the average age was around 29.

https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
quality control is hard at scale.

i don't understand why it's so hard for people to order from a local shop with an owner they trust?

sometimes you reap what you sow
You're missing a very important distinction though: for a solo climber the main thing out of their control that's different from normal rock climbing is holds breaking unexpectedly. For that risk, having lots of people climbing the rock helps increase the chances that such unexpectedly weak holds will have been broken already by someone else; obviously loose rock isn't so much of an issue, for the simple reason that you know it's loose and can climb appropriately.

Rock fall meanwhile is dangerous to all climbers, whether or not they're using ropes. Sure, it's more dangerous to a solo climber - you might get lucky and just get knocked out, something a rope can save you from - but we're talking about a moderate risk vs. high risk comparison, not zero-risk to high risk. That 2000 ton slab you gave isn't a very good example, because something that big has a pretty good chance of killing you rope or not.

FWIW, I do a lot of cave exploration, and in caves the "already broken off" effect is a very powerful one. Virgin passage that's never been explored before can be a very scary place to be because everything can be loose and ready to fall. This is particularly true in areas that undergo freeze-thaw cycles, such as upper parts of alpine caves - I've been in places where every single bit of rock, including the ceiling, is heavily fractured due to frost. Breakdown piles are also a big problem - they're huge piles of rocks and boulders, generally due to ceilings gradually collapsing, and you have to be really careful around ones that haven't been visited frequently because pretty much anything you stand on could be unstable. Lots of cavers have been trapped in breakdown piles that shifted unexpectedly.

The underlying cause of this problem in caves is simple: caves can be very static environments with no weather, increasing the chances that the force you exert on a rock will be the largest force it has ever experienced in that position.
My experience was definitely of this, the problem that you cite.

But as you mention, police, despite all accusations to the contrary, are not stupid. They know what policing is and it is about communities and people rather than enforcing the edicts of a given political party. It is strange how police are always politically controlled, maybe in some do-gooding place like Norway they are allowed to be professional without interference.

Along with 'twenty seconds to comply...' there is this instant execution by police that happens. Nobody is shedding a tear for the three terrorists shot 8 minutes into their killing spree, however, would the police have been able to apprehend them if they only had their batons?!? This was the situation in the UK until recently, if you 'went postal' in some regional town it would take a while before officers with guns would arrive. You would have hours to escape bullets. But now? 8 minutes.

I also imagine a world where no terrorist gets tried in court. Death awaits them before they get that far and the quaint notion of justice before a jury goes by the by.
What matters is if it's a success to you. Which I'm worried sounds like it might be flip or dismissive, but I think is the core truth of it.
I remember 8.8.8.8
printing documents that could expose government corruption, without fear of backlash or even death?

If we all lived in a perfect world then we wouldn't need a way to print things without being tracked.
Indeed. If you're looking for programmatic web search, I'd suggest you go the Bing API route.
That's pretty much true of every profession. People on the outside are horrible at understanding the risk, amount of time needed, and how amazing something is. This is one of the examples where the risk and amazement are so extreme that and observer gets in the ballpark on the estimate.
What about a mobile device contact import? Facebook and other platforms update those contacts. That could be your social network workaround.
Yes I have and it's no less horrifying then thinking you can access your cloud server when you suddenly cannot. My point is for a small amount you could afford to buy microsd cards in bulk and backup every day. Or even CD-R/DVD-R/BR-R. But I was trying to keep the discussion to direct transfer from a cellphone as per the parent.
Actually, interestingly, QR codes can be better for some payment scenarios than NFC.
I live in China and I can go to my local corner shop, pick up a bottle from the fridge, and even if there's a queue at the register I can scan the code from a distance, pay and leave with a nod from the shop keeper.

QR codes are also used for exchanging contact information... when I give a talk in China, I put my Wechat QR code at the end so any member of the audience can scan it from the slide for follow-up conversations.
WWDC: Apple's Strengths and Weaknesses
> If you really want to understand just how impressive this was:

I have no doubt it's impressive. I'm impressed. I'm not trying to diminish that in any way.

> you could say the same thing about top-roping vs lead climbing (placing protection from the ground up). Yes, top-roping is much safer, but the experience & sense of achievement is just not the same.

My question is why is the sense of achievement not the same. Is it because of the danger, or because it's inherently harder when you abstract danger from the situation?

> Free-soloing (climbing without ropes) is the purest form of climbing. ... not having to bring up your partner, not having to haul a bag

That's the closest I've seen to a an actual differentiation. Here's the question: If you could Free-solo the same wall but with without (or greatly reduced) danger? That is, hypothetically assume there's tracks installed vertically in the wall, and a robot that you are attached to ascends with you, so if you fall the robot keeps you from falling far and getting hurt. Does that somehow dampen the feeling of achievement when completed? If the answer is yes, then I fail to see how it's not about cheating death in some part.

Which is fine! Just own that shit.

I'm not making a value judgement about people doing this, I'm just trying to understand that statement. Either it is about cheating death to some degree and the author is not being truthful to someone (us or himself) for whatever reason, or it isn't about cheating death and I don't understand it at all, so I'm asking for clarification. Either I understand it, even if I don't practice it, or I don't understand it, in which case I want to. It sounds like it's about cheating death (even if just to get to some desired state easier).
This is potentially huge news - given that Apple just fought (and won) an antitrust/anti competition lawsuit in Australia in respect of not allowing Australian banks to use this NFC API!

http://registers.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1197...

Edit: pulled the trigger on this comment too soon - it appears that the API will only support "reader mode" which is not what the main subject of the litigation was about - the banks wanted a 'total' (for want of a better word) public access API.
Pure marketing bs. I've never had an unscathed CD-R fail. The cloud is just redundant servers and nothing more.
The Bias-Variance Tradeoff
Say you want multiple links to the internet - redundancy/cost/whatever.

Each link will have a prefix that you are delegated and your SLAAC or DHCPv6 will give out addresses etc.

Now which one will your device use? Your PC cannot know that link C is down because that is only known by your router.

IPv6 does not address the same basics that IPv4 failed at - routing around crap, without a routing protocol.
Pretty rare thing: free working tools for TF-IDF calculation
The idea that glorified media coverage would make someone think they're capable of free soloing a 3,000' 5.12d who didn't already have that idea in their head is pretty laughable. No one who climbs thinks that just because Honnold does something that they can do it too.
"Becoming"? Can you point to any large project (at any point in the history of Git) that doesn't use some centralized service as a single point of distribution/source of truth?

The beauty of Git's design, though, is that you've still got everything to use it distributed even if you, under normal circumstances, just use it centralized like a fancy SVN.
>
Your question seems to indicate that you have a runtime dependency on github.

Really he is speaking to the problem with SAAS. Sure it's cheaper to rely on someone else to do the heavy lifting for you and they can do this because they 'make it up in volume'. But the other side of that coin is no one really knows how to do that anymore. If you wanted to roll your own it's going to be very hard for your company to do the basics because you've become dependent upon the cloud, and someone else paying employees to do the basics for you... The basics have never been hard.
Wow Windows. You've outdone yourself. Can I assume Linux and Mac are safe?
Only if you don't stop to consider the alternative.
No need to be a genius, a passionated teenager can do as good as a junior dev that went through university
Lyft and Nutonomy partner to bring first self-driving Lyft service to Boston
Nameless resumes are a good way to counter the inefficiencies of a system not based on merit.
The SIM card doesn't contain the radio, the phone itself contains the radio. Phones can only transmit on a fairly narrow set of frequencies, you can't tune one to an arbitrary frequency in the gigahertz range.

If you want to transmit on an arbitrary frequency you'll need to buy a software defined radio, like the HackRF http://www.kr4.us/HackRF-One.html?gclid=CJGdyMDLqtQCFYGUfgod...
And that's the point. A lot of us walk around with certain fears that would be best to be put behind us. This kind of thing helps, indeed.
The real takeaway for me as a parent here is that the more and more we prevent our kids from being actual kids, the more subtleties we might be depriving them of.

Dating myself a little, but growing up as a kid in Virginia, 'outside' play was a mainstay. We went out into the woods, we built tree forts, we dug holes, we made tire swings. Nowadays, the parents of my children's friends are completely unwilling to let their kids engage in such behavior, whether because it's potentially dangerous (it is), or dirty (that too), the kids are expected to meet up in a sanitized location, play in a playroom, or possibly on a playground with rubber mulch as the surface material, and seldom are kids allowed or expected to just go play.

Meanwhile, we've got more and more kids being prescribed more and more things, and while I honestly haven't the slightest clue whether to attribute it to the lack of outdoor play or the miracles of modern medicine, it seems possibly correlated.
I think the new equivalent of "I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall" is "I'm going to send this to my friend on Messenger", although that can be borderline too once you start talking about groups with more than two people.

I agree Events is the highlight of Facebook these days. Although, it has been steadily corroded as well, and FB Messenger's Plans has muddied the waters a fair chunk.
This stuff is not so that you'd go out there and live a life like Alex. It's more of a, face some of your own irrational fears, sort of thing.
While it definitely sounds like a good idea, every single time I've seen it applied, the reason was the opposite. It was essentially "we've got so little control over our stuff that we'd rather not touch". Mostly goes along with lack of backups, lack of change management, and lack of automated rebuild procedure.

If you have "danger times", then any unplanned disruption in that time will hurt so much more.
Make a #pragma for deprecated functions and then harass people that use them if they want with a -w flag.
Maybe it was written by programmers trained on compiled languages with no interpreter to automatically catch all exceptions and print a traceback for you, so now they're cargo culting onto "Every exception must get caught to avoid undefined behavior."
I wouldn't trust most working developers I've worked with to be able to deliver me something decent from start to finish, alone.

I have the same feeling for a lot of my CS university peers but yeah like you implied being on its own is a different situation
If you're growing and profitable, you might consider ignoring all the startup culture nonsense.
There are very promising "ultrawideband" solutions (allowing distance to be determined from time of flight of a message rather than signal strength) but the use cases are limited as there is no existing infrastructure.
The best that can be done on phones is "sensor fusion" from all available sensors (including wifi and BLE, also integration of motion data) but it requires very extensive mapping of the location in advance. iOS suppports this since a few releases ago but only for locations that have been mapped by Apple so the use cases are rather limited, presumably the mall/airport feature just shown used it.
When I was in high school, my summer jobs included: lawnmowing, building construction, dishwashing, and being a gas-station attendant. It worked out just fine.
Address by Minister Freeland on Canada’s foreign policy priorities
Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone much about the capability of spies, nothing we didn't already know. If you're interested in a good book about the technical history of the CIA check out 'The Wizards of Langley'. It gives a pretty accurate history of the technical ability of spies throughout the years, and the bureaucracy which limited them.
https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate-Science-T...
> It sounds like it has to prompt users to get permissions:

Well, in some sense, yes, but really no: The idea of a PowerBox is that the very action of opening a file already demonstrates the user's intent to grant access. Normally one does not conceive of opening a file as a prompt for permission, because it is necessary to designate a file in the first place.

As long as the thing that is being granted access is isolated and nothing else grants it access, problem solved.

It's a very neat idea, and it works.

This goes along with the capability slogans "No ambient authority", and (stronger) "No designation without authority".

Here's an old talk with demonstrations by Marc Stiegler, who I believe came up with the concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbmMPlCp3U

More recently I hear essentially the same idea has been used in mobile phone security (I don't have that kind of mobile phone). The capability ideas that surround it are not widely known or understood, though.
You can purchase your own IPv6 block from an RIR and do multi homing.
> There are certain things we humans can do which give us access to unique highly desirable mental states.

Sure. If cheating death is the path to that state for some people, that's understandable, and not really something new. I'm not judging him, this isn't some roundabout way to say people shouldn't free-solo. I'm literally trying to figure out if there's something else to it I'm missing, because the way it's stated makes it sound like there's something other than risk that's inherently different about free-soloing.

People are responding as if I said I don't understand why someone would do a risky behavior. I understand the high from cheating death. I don't understand doing something as risky as this if you aren't necessarily looking for that high, as the statement implied to me.

The alternative as I see it is that the author is reluctant to admit, or in denial about, some of the real reasons to free-solo. I didn't want to assume that without first checking my own assumptions.
Scientists Pit Sourdough Against White Bread
if you could go beyond reading NFC tags (and also allow apps to use the NFC chip fully), then you remove the need for things like physical loyalty cards (like the Starbucks card).

That's a really basic use case, but popular enough in Japan, where even old flip phones had NFC
A daisy wheel printer would actually be less susceptible because a dot matrix could add small dots to the text.
I like all the new things coming in iOS11, including this. I recently got my first iPhone and it's on iOS10. Do users like me get to upgrade just the OS on the same handset when they release iOS11? I haven't found the answer to this on some of the apple articles I have browsed.
No, but the photos showed that there are several rest points along the way. Presumably he'd try to get to the nearest one despite his injury.
It was when 4 MB RAM was what a typical desktop had.

Sun was inept in many regards, but not terribly greedy.

I don't see how JS doesn't magically have GC pauses. WebAssembly doesn't have a GC built-in, so it may host a pauseless process.
This is another trend we are seeing -- so-called "fact checkers" claiming something is false because the most ardent reading of a specific claim, or maybe just a comment left by a troll in the same page -- isn't completely true.

"But nothing suggested that CNN “staged” the demonstrations to any extent greater than engaging protesters, directing their positions, and asking them questions as part of a news segment."

So it was staged, but not "really staged"?

This is like the fact-check where Trump precisely and accurately quoted a decrease in the national debt, but Politifact still checked it as "mostly false".

[1] - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
Why would "growing" be a prerequisite to success? Isn't profitable enough, especially if already decently profitable?
I wouldn't say Python or Rails is more scalable, but the libraries may make certain things easier.

What libraries do you feel you're missing out on?
The first RC for Cettia is now available
The Mornington Crescent esolang
iPhone support for a NFC 2FA key would be powerful.
Seems like a lot of data to print. I suppose just unique id would be enough. If the printer has access to wifi or internet connection in general (even through usb drivers) it can report the details.
A relatively hassle-free, alternative local backup solution makes sense! Does it exist? For being realistically useful, it should work either over w-fi, or over cable when attached to a computer.
The salient point in the Adam Curtis piece is that regardless of their _technical_ capabilities, the organizations are themselves incapable of making use of what signals they may capture. A similar case can easily be made about the US intelligence establishment, for what it's worth.
Ruby and Python could help -- but depends what you're doing. They aren't going to magically make your DB queries faster... but certain libraries can perform many, many times faster.

Though, that's the library, not the language.
I'm curious if there is a "half life" to this knowledge. Or, rather, what that would be.