skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I had never heard of a planimeter[1], but what a fascinating device it is!

Not only, it was (is) extremely accurate if used properly.

I am old enough (unfortunately) to have used planimeters professionally in the '80's (just before drawing started becoming digital), at the time they were largely used because they were much faster than calculating exactly (and already hand calculators with trigonometric functions existed) some data in roads cross-sections.

So, for temporary accounting, planimeter based measures of areas were accepted (usually reduced by 5% or 10%).

Basically you had a (hand drawn) inked drawing of each cross section of the road (usually one every 20 m or so) where you would draw a pencil line at the level that was reached in the works, and then use the planimeter to get the area (and consequently volume) of the earthworks done at the date.

When the level was final, the amount would be calculated analitically, still manually, usually, but I managed somehow to write for the HP97[1][2] (constrained by 256 steps!) a small program capable of automatically calculating that, of course typing the measures manually.

Large stretches of the road earthworks had already been calculated by the planimeter and when re-calculated, the differences were very small, within 1% or 2%.

[1] http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp6797.htm
[2] http://www.hpmuseum.org/97.jpg
I don't really follow the development of Lua in any way.

Lua 5.3 was very underwhelming to me, I didn't care for the ints and bit operators at all (and before 5.3 the one number type was a selling point) and it's annoying how there is such a clear strong split between 5.3 and LuaJIT because it effectively finalized the fork that 5.2 has sort of started. Some things (like Love2D, OpenResty and other performance conscious stuff) stuck with LuaJIT so basically a 5.1 on steroids with few 5.2 features. 5.1 also had the killer feature of incremental GC and came at a nice time and was the main Lua for almost 6 years so it stuck into gamedev a lot (which is where I picked Lua from, my hobbist gamedeving).

I also stick to 5.1 by default in my hobby gamedev to be able to bring in LuaJIT at any time and ignore 5.2 and 5.3 pretty much.

My thesis was about history of Lua a bit (rehashing what's on the main website plus few Roberto's articles pretty much) and then a lot about how stock Lua 5.1 is implemented (most of it is 1:1 transferable to other stock Luas) like how bytecode is executed, how does GC work, what does it mean Lua is register VM and not stack one, how are internal structures laid out, how functions and closures and threads work, etc. It's (official) English title was "Analysis of code of original implementation of Lua 5.1" but it is written in Polish ("Analiza kodu oryginalnej implementacji jezyka Lua 5.1"). I don't think it's available anywhere. That was my engineering (inżynier) thesis which I defended in February and I'm now doing a master thesis but it's purely mathematical CS stuff and not related to Lua at all.
Seriously this and there is science behind it.

https://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/07_0506_hbr.pdf

"Over the past two decades we have seen a growing
body of research that indicates volunteering
provides individual health benefits in addition
to social benefits. This research has established
a strong relationship between volunteering and
health: those who volunteer have lower mortality
rates, greater functional ability, and lower rates
of depression later in life than those who do not
volunteer"
Although swatting is horrible practice, the sign of the bigger problem is that US police force is so trigger-happy that it is easy to trick them to kill innocent people. I can’t imagine this happening regularly in most of Europe.
Java threads are system threads.

I can confirm hundreds of threads for networked Java applications is normal behaviour.
Yes, but really, humanity is the incredible cesspool. Facebook is just mirror.

The interesting thing is that instead of trying to prosecute the criminals behind this content we would rather just censor it so we can pretend it doesn't exist.
People are not aware that they would behave this way.

> Researchers then priced the items the experimenters had assembled as well as pre-assembled IKEA furniture. The results showed that the subjects were willing to pay 63% more for the former than for the latter.

And it's clearly not rational. As long as you assign positive value to your time.
> IKEA is just rudimentary assembly

That's not necessarily true. Depending on how invested you are into an IKEA lifestyle there is plenty of reshaping and customizing going on :)

Source: I buy IKEA for years now and did plenty of modifications and customizations.
The only similarity between cooperations and AGI is that they are superhuman optimization processes that yield considerable risk and that are tricky to control. The difference is that in case of cooperations there still is a human element: vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy. The policies for mitigating the respective risks are very different.
There is the demovfuscator, which de-obfuscates movfuscated programs reasonably well. This work was actually done by friends of mine; see their talk here: https://recon.cx/2016/talks/"Movfuscator-Be-Gone.html
Sounds awesome! Any stories to share already?
Show HN: SpaceVim v0.6.0 is out
That’s a common misconception : Capitalism isn’t as ambitious as communism in that matter. It doesn’t aim at making the world a just or better place, just more economicaly efficient one. Communism is not only an economical system, but it also aims at solving the unfairness that it attributes to capitalism, and then invents all kinds of counter measure ( one of them being the revolution, and « temporary » dictactorship).

For a capitalist, this vision is like blaming the engine for the direction the car is taking.
Growth of language: Universal Grammar, experience, and principles of computation [pdf]
The problem is more the job conditions than the job itself.
We (nomads) don’t travel to get to a destination - the travel itself is the destination
I would add:

11. Your whole organization won't likely ever be brought on its knees by a virus or ransomware attached to a piece of paper or fax.

12. Even if your device batteries are low, or you are in a blackout, the piece of paper can still be read [1]

[1] This is specific to plane tickets/boarding passes, I have been mocked for printing them by the same people that had it on their smartphone (and I already saw it happen twice that the battery/device died at the time of boarding/passing checks)
> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future

I don't think a computerized authoritarian dictatorship is a 'positive view'.

> It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.

The Chinese dissidents are in Berlin and enjoy more freedom.
Allow me to coin a new portmanteau: regrape.

"I no longer want that person to have done that with me half a year ago. I hereby retroactively revoke my consent and bring on the charge or regrape."
When new mediums appear, usually they don't get rid of the previous ones but coexist with them. Besides, paper is really good at some things, changing it just because it is more techy is not something valuable to anyone.
'Swatting' suspect arrested in Los Angeles
Author here, I'd love to hear about similar experiences :)
Sounds like a nice excuse. You are telling me you do not have an hour a week or an hour once a month to reflect on your life?

I am not saying you have to make your story public by blogging, but you already have some interest from others on the site who may have experienced or are experiencing similar things that you went through.

Sounds like you are rather humble which is fine, but do not think what you have to say is not interesting if random strangers on the internet are asking you about your story.

If that does not trigger alarm bells of you being actually interesting/ having interesting things to say than I do not know what would.
Yes. You do have some valuable skills: from teaching computer skills to implementing solutions. Lots of people/organizations need help in those areas.
> dialectical materialism

You keep using that phrase, but I don't think very many other people still do or have any idea what it means. Everyone's moved on to Picketty now.
To clarify (if necessary), its the distinction between criminal vs civil case. Rape is prosecuted by the state on the initiate of the state. The victim do not "initiating lengthy legal proceedings", they only report the crime to the police and the dedicated prosecutor for sexual violence crime is responsible to take it from there.

A victim of such crimes have a right to be heard, right to get support, and the right to receive compensation from the accused if they are found guilty. The victim is not required to testify and the accused can still be found guilty.

In some cases it happen that the victim rescinds their version and the prosecutor still continue to go forward with the case. That can't happen in civil cases but it can in criminal.
Courses in London?
My day-to-day job is as a Digital Designer and I'm a self taught front-end developer.

My wife has suggested that because I'm self taught I should probably get some certification to back up what I say I can do (which makes sense I guess!)

So my new years resolution...

Does anyone know any short recognised courses in PHP, Mysql, Python or front-end ones for Angular etc?

Thanks!
Ill
That's a reference to the austerity absurdly imposed upon Greece, Portugal and Spain (and soon Italy and France) though it has demonstrably worsened the situation (not for Germany, though, so you may say that it worked well enough for them).
To protect against such attacks, I write some normal English before getting to the randomness, something along the lines of “This MUST be quoted exactly or it is wrong”. That’s ~40 characters “wasted” (they’ll normally have distressingly low character limits, but I find them to normally be at least 50 characters), but I’m optimistic about it offering reasonable protection against such an attack.

In practice, I’ve never actually had to quote such a string to anything but a machine, so it is mere optimism on my part.
That's why I don't use a cloud password manager. I use one that allows syncing my devices directly with my phone via wifi. Doesn't even touch a file hosting service like Dropbox.

Yes, that makes the physical devices a vulnerability, but the attacker would still need to guess or brute-force the master password to decrypt the vault. It's also a much less juicy target than a million customers of a cloud service.

And as someone else pointed out, using the same password everywhere is a non-starter. Nor is memorizing the passwords for more than a tiny fraction of the roughly 1000 entries in my password manager.
There is no such thing as pure capitalism either, because private property cannot exist without all the elaborate state machinery that libertarians love to hate: a court system, contract law, a police force, an army, and the taxes to support it. All this stuff exists to create the illusion of such a thing as pure private property. Neither pure communism or pure capitalism are things that could exist in the real world.
ReCurta: Our goal is to build the first Curta calculator since 1972
I agree, I think there is a level where this is true, and it is at the absolute bottom (like $15 nightstand level), but if you move slightly up from those "lines" the build is a bit better. No, you aren't going to hand them down to your kids, but I have some fairly cheap ikea furniture in my bedroom that survived two moving trucks just fine.

And one thing about them...they are generally much lighter than solid wood "real" furniture - so the actual process of moving them is easier and generally less prone to damage in the first place.
If you don’t cover your webcam you could end up a ‘slave’
The story of Reality Winner, America’s most unlikely leaker
You should use another bank. I've never heard of anything like that when I was living in Germany (I used Comdirect and N26, lots of my coworkers recommended DKB and ING DiBa also).
This is a well communicated argument.

In the same vein, if a database is breached and personal information leaked, I think most people here would agree it is the company/system at fault, rather than some scapegoat programmer/sys-admin.

I can't believe the amount of deflection/justification in the comments section here. A police officer showed up to a house and shot an innocent person. They either shot a hostage (if they believed the threat to be real) which is unacceptable, or they shot an innocent bystander (if they believed the threat is not real).

This is a process failure, as is evident by how "SWATing" is a known/common thing.
> (nope, Transferwise doesn't have it)

fwiw Transferwise has had this for around 3 months now: https://transferwise.com/borderless
I handle sensitive data on a daily basis and religiously keeping stuff like Facebook off my devices is beginning to look increasingly sensible.

I'll point to this next time someone questions my stallman-esque stance.

What's full-disk encryption do if Facebook et al are going to funnel the data off your devices anyways?
I disagree that its straightforward in C. C is built around pointers, but the bitmasked array uses a completely different kind of pointer. IE you can't just do

n->n.num_children++;
n->children[c] = (art_node*)child;

You have to do:

__m128i cmp;

// Compare the key to all 16 stored keys
cmp = _mm_cmplt_epi8(_mm_set1_epi8(c),
_mm_loadu_si128((__m128i*)n->keys));

// Use a mask to ignore children that don't exist
unsigned bitfield = _mm_movemask_epi8(cmp) & mask;

And that's all CPU-specific.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but rather the tools are a poor fit for the problem. Have you tried to build this data structure? Can you link to the code? I'd love to see what a clean, high-level, understandable example would look like.

> Also we are long in a world where computers are needed to program computers.

Yes you're correct about this. I just think its headed even further in this direction. Languages like C++ and Rust are designed to give the programmer control, but the platforms we're programming for seemed to designed to be impossible to understand.

If I were tasked with building data structures like this I would really want some tools to help me feel confident the code was correct.
I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing my signature with 8 random hex characters. Possibly selected spontaneously, different each time. Or writing “handwritten signatures are outmoded; use digital signatures that actually mean something” or similar.
Honestly I think about half the problem is that psychiatric illnesses don't make people bleed, so there's no way to universally tell something is wrong.
I mentioned raw milk not in reference for "0 sugar". Just mentioned normally that I try and keep away from processed food, drugs, medications etc.
As people have pointed out, it completely depends on your body. However, a good measure to see whether you're fully rested is to be aware of your energy levels after you wake up, and to be aware whether you feel sleepy/sleep deprived (not the I ate too much sleepy) during the middle of the day.

I've found them to be good indicators to whether i need to catch up on my sleep.
Why 64 bit? The minimum key strength supported by AES is 128 bits, so 64 bits seems very low.
I wonder what AI thinks and then does to us when we have one.
In France yes, they are an exception (with the UK too maybe). But in Germany banks don't issue chequebooks anymore.
My (UK) ISP puts my full name and address, home phone, email etc. in my /64 v6 allocation, and I think also for the v4 address. It's not optional, but then again I'm not worried about being randomly shot by SWAT.
Fitbit Firmware Modifications and Data Extraction [video]
> Oh, and since I'm commenting now, I will add that I also feel no attachment to the IKEA crap I assemble and the eponymous "effect" probably does exist, but should have been named differently.

The effect doesn't really mean that you are going to attach a lot of value to a 9-dollar table you mounted yourself. It means you're going to attach more value to it than if you had bought the same table already assembled.
Don't ask me, I'm thankful for all the bailouts, debt restructuring and the dragging the inefficient, bloated public sector of Greece into the 21st centrury.
Absolutely. I should have included it in the line with Body.

You are absolutely what you eat. And for people wondering, I follow simple principles with food

1. avoid processed sugar like you avoid cigarettes (avoid both if you don't)

2. mix your diet with fruits and vegetables (make sure there is some rather than sparse or none)

3. be high on protein and good fats, low on carbs (protein + fat ~ 80% calories, carbs 20%)

4. eat right amount of calories (resting metabolism + daily activity level)
If you just repeat the November numbers in December, you get GM higher. The Bolt and Volt is actually ramping up, while Tesla is flat.
Preparing for Nero
It's interesting how GitHub has evolved from a code sharing tool , to more broad uses for open source content
Measuring up to Heisenberg (and since)
A child whose father(s) commissioned an egg donor and a surrogate?

An adoptee (of a father or fathers) who never knew who their mother was?

An orphan who never knew who their mother was and lived in an institution their entire childhood?

Sure, everyone has at least one biological mother. But there are plenty of people who don't and never will know their biological mother's name.
We've not been offerred a smart meter as yet.

I've also got some reservations about the security of the smart meter systems, so ideally I'd like to wait as long as possible for those to get ironed out, before I get one.
As an aside, there’s stuff on the lua wiki about sandboxing lua, how would you go about sandboxing lua to limit heap, cpu cycles, and os level api calls? For lua 5.1? For luajit? An example use case would be letting users upload scripts to run in game?
LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police
I am bombarded with ads on Facebook for the Sense. This
device allows you to monitor whole-home power
consumption. ... I realized it would be extremely simple
to do something similar without any wires or hassle.

Sense monitors two things:

* instantaneous current

* instantaneous voltage

Different devices have different electrical signatures, and this allows it to learn what devices you have in your house. RTL-SDR is much too low-resolution for this.

RTL-SDR monitoring would actually be awesome to add to Sense: the method it uses for measuring current is designed for microsecond-level accuracy, not long-term accuracy like your meter. So over time they won't keep perfectly in sync. If Sense could automatically read your meter it could calibrate itself.
I do something similar at home. However, the meter in my house has a LED that blinks per Wh used, so all I did is put something light sensitive on top of it, wire it to a tiny board of your choice (GPIO on a Raspberry Pi in this case) and then export the data from there. I run a tiny Prometheus exporter on that same Pi which gets scraped and everything neatly shows up in Grafana.

For other devices I use Z-wave powered sockets which do power metering, which is exposed by another Prometheus exporter. Since those Z-Wave sockets can be on the expensive side I only really use them in places I want to meassure, like my desk (which has laptop, screen etc.) or the TV.
Capitalism is actually currently ending the world hunger because trickle-down effects actually exist. Living standards are rising globally incredibly quickly. Middle-class kids in Jordan are playing Diabolo 3 on their computers despite the region having almost no natural resources, almost no water and despite it being troubled by Syrian refugees. Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.
Perhaps if it would support reverse video, white text on black background, it would make the reading experience even more better.
As a side-side question, is it just me or "unsolved secret" doesn't sound "right"?

I mean, "unsolved problem" or "unsolved mistery" or "unrevealed secret", but "unsolved secret"?
As far as I can tell, this is another piece of Amal Ahmed's high-level compiler verification project.

The idea is that we don't have good tools to compare programs written in different languages, but these tools do exist so long as we stay in the same language. So while it's currently difficult to verify a compiler from a rich functional language to assembly, we have very good tools to verify a compiler from one subset of a language to another.

So if we want to verify a compiler from a functional language to assembly we "simply" need a language that is a superset of both, and that's where FunTAL comes in.

---

I'm looking forward to reading the paper and it's great that this project is producing some independently useful artifacts. On the other hand I still think that this approach to compiler verification is a bit odd. Time will tell, I suppose...
That's great, but using a 64-bit key in 2017 isn't "taking security seriously". Especially if you are designing meters that will have a lifespan of 10+ years, therefore must be secure until 2027 and beyond.
After Brexit: the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties
To expand on something you stated, range is still very much an issue. How even "two hundred miles" became acceptable I will never know, apparently that is what marketing was told to push but the general public isn't buying into that.

Worse, that two hundred mile range is only good in mild to warm conditions. throw in winter conditions and it plummets. plus until automakers all adopt a higher voltage charging system similar to where Porsche is going adding range will just exaggerate how long it takes to charge.

Higher voltage charging is easier than higher amperage from both the size of cables internal and external as well as cooling. a trip in even the fastest available charging cars requires an hour diversion/stop per two hundred miles on average. this needs to get down to fifteen minutes with a range pushing beyond three hundred in winter.

instead of trying to encourage employers to install chargers at work more effort should be made toward the electrification of school and city bus lines. everyone who has ever been caught behind one knows the pollution factories they appear to be. initial up front costs will be high but it will keep districts insulated from volatile gasoline and diesel prices. delivery trucks already might be headed there but government investment into this area should be by example and where better than to have children on electric buses to tell mommy and daddy
I did over 18,000 burpees this year and wrote about it
The Great Silence by Ted Chiang
If you read my comment carefully, I didn't say you "must" be doing it wrong. I said "maybe".

Statistically, men are more likely to react to tales of woe by trying to solve the actual problem, whereas women are likely to react by (first) offering sympathy, so I was just being a typical man, not doing anything wrong.
Ha I knew there wouldbe people giving up on paper books :] However where reading e-ink is almost like paper I really can't get used to lots of reading on a backlit screen (assuming your tablet is like that). Anyway, TIL there's a thing called fanfiction. Any recommendations? I read practically all genres but since English isn't my mother language preferrably something without too much uncommon vocabulary.
January will bring two supermoons, a blue moon, and a total lunar eclipse