skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if a similar approach could be used to help discover common programming errors and their solutions, i.e. data mine bug hindsight.

It would work something like:

1. Go through a repo's history and look at commits.

2. Using text classification of commit messages and/or cross-referencing with a bug tracker database (and limiting to issues that are really defects, not feature requests), identify commits that fix bugs.

3. Now you have before and after code. Try to discover the salient part of what changed, perhaps by parsing them both and comparing ASTs, or by diffing the text. Or run the unit test (that you added with the fix) through the old code and the new code while tracing execution to see differences in the dynamic behavior of the code.

4. Correlate this with descriptions of what the method is trying to do.

Perhaps you might be able to generate statements like "when fixing bugs related to create a daemon, programmers often add calls to close() or add calls to umask()".
Google Cloud Storage (GCS), an S3 competitor, is backed by Colossus (CNS). [1]. Colossus is the replacement to Google File System (GFS).

[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/01/easier-faster-l...
> What I cannot create, I do not understand

Does not imply that you necessarily understand what you can create.

In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it may left us with more questions than answers.
You can use the download your information tool to download all your data on FB, including all your messages https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644

A Brooklyn based artist did this recently and made a book of his conversation history (and covered an apartment with some of the pages). You can find a bit more information and pictures at https://www.halfspace.uk/messages-2011-2017
Can Firefox meanwhile play video via hardware acceleration on Linux or does it still use the CPU?
> Raw null terminated strings are just a bad idea.

Absolutely agree. Scanning the memory until "we find it", potentially crossing boundaries between segments of memory with different characteristics (caching etc.) just doesn't seem right in general, and if I recall, some CPUs even used to have published errata related to that.

> std::string` and the bafflingly just-introduced `std::string_view` are the right way to handle strings.

I'd even go straight to custom implementation of Hollerith strings. Literals have lengths known at compile time, protocols would either carry the lengths alongside the strings, or be trusted (to have good strlen behavior) until they do, composite strings would compute the length out of the components, etc. This doesn't seem too complex to do, looking from from my bell tower, but I know many people here would frown upon mentioning C++ in the context of embedded development (my area).
The 'hard problem' here is to explain how a set of physical processes give rise to consciousness or sensory experience at all. In other words, why the lights are on.

But subjective experience isn't the light being "on" or "off". Subjective experience is a messy, fuzzy collection of stuff. People do things without intending to, people believe things they've automatically were intentional and reverse. The zone between waking and sleeping isn't set, etc. etc.

If one does the "blind spot" experiment, one realizes one's vision is constantly confabulating to make for vision's imperfections. And so-forth.

So there's no reason no to expect that our experience and memory of consciousness isn't a incomplete reflection of what's actually happening.

Lots of people strongly believe they have a soul. That's clearly anti-materialist and has no basis in reality but it seems like a quite natural illusion (one that the "hard problem" ideology resembles). The "subjective experience exists" statement, if it's taken to mean a single, uniform fabric of experience exists, seems unjustified given the overall messiness I mentioned and if the hard-problem claim isn't this, what is it?
> Dennett is becoming more and more part of the "old guard". Things are shifting towards other approaches.

What evidence do you have of this? In fact, the majority of practicing philosophers are actually physicalists (56.5%):

https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
Better security is not letting them get the cash at all.
I was targeted by an ad for those Gravity Blankets (as I'm sure many others were). I bought one as a gift for my SO. The whole time I was looking at the Gravity Blanket website, I was thinking to myself "dammit, they got me."

What I was even more impressed by is that after I bought one, I never saw another Gravity Blanket ad again.
> If a developer claims to do security, ask to see the Covert, Channel Analysis of their product.
> You'll find that most developers and "security professionals" don't build secure stuff using methods proven to work in the past.

Could you tell which security professionals actually offering such in depth analysis? I have the feeling that most penetration tests or security assessments offered aren't that deep, rather mostly of low-quality.
Could you also tell how the NSA is doing their security evaluations exactly? I know there is Common Criteria, but these documents are so high-level that you can't derive the techniques on how to conduct thorough evaluations.
Vortex tube
I've been a Nixie fan for a long time and finally started working with them ~2 years ago. Here is a custom timeline of tweets from my various projects - https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121
> Spotify allows consumers to binge on music for a flat fee, however it is crucial to note that the musicians in this case significantly lose out on revenue.

As a side note, it amuses me to see this repeated so often, given that it's not true. If you do the math, Spotify pays about the same as a radio play. You just have to remember that each radio play goes out to a few hundred thousand to a few million people each time.

The reason artists don't like Spotify is not because they pay poorly, it's because they pay fairly. When you get a radio play, it's assumed that all the people the station reaches listened to the song. Spotify knows exactly how many people listened to a song, and pay accordingly. Unpopular artists don't like this because they get accurate counts.
Government Cloud: infrastructure as a service
Kernighan didn’t actually design C. He wrote a book with Dennis Ritchie, who did.
Oh God, Petzold's book. What a piece of trash that was. The code, while not incorrect like the one in the article, was fairly atrocious, and the various UI things he did were unforgivable, if only because it encouraged legions of programmers to completely disregard any human interface principles. If I could erase one CS book from history, that might be the one.
If you edit the LastPass record you can copy the password. It shows it though so make sure no one is watching.
Every piece is desired in some fashion.

We want Outlook to open our attachments without having to explicitly choosing the program.

We want Word to have those advanced macro features.

We want Word to have hyperlinks to things on the internet.

We want to be able to install things downloaded from the internet.

In isolation, each of those things are desirable to some segment of the userbase. It just so happens that the chain basically allows you to install a program from an email attachment.
i am not that old =p, but thought it was pretty cool to see one of the .orgs on my bday
LastPass: I missed the "copy password" thing too, until I discovered it's still there.

If you're on Windows, install the LastPass binary for Windows (I think running the LastPass Windows Universal installer[0] will do the trick).

Once installed, it actually enables the "copy password" menu in Firefox. I'm using it right now with Firefox 61.

[0}: https://lastpass.com/misc_download2.php
Just be careful it doesn't turn into felony document freud :)
Abbott to match student loan payments with 401(k) contribution
I wonder what the story is behind nordu.net being the first registered domain name (I'm assuming it's the same nordu.net that exists today; I don't actually know although the dates seem to match up.) It is associated with research networks but it still seems a bit odd that they registered before BBN, Berkeley, and organizations like those.
>By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical.

Not at all. Cucumbers have a relatively short shelf-life due to a high water content and a permeable skin, so wrapping them makes economic and environmental sense. Apples and citrus fruits don't need plastic packaging, but their shelf life is considerably enhanced by the application of a protective wax coating. Some products like loose salad leaves need modified atmosphere packaging to achieve a satisfactory shelf life, while delicate soft fruits require a protective packaging system that could involve a variety of wood- or plastic-based products. I'm indifferent to points of principle, I care about choosing the most sustainable tool for any given task.

The critical environmental issue in our fruit and vegetable supply is the needlessly high use of air freight to maintain supplies of out-of-season produce. A single package of asparagus or green beans might produce emissions of >10kg CO2e, simply because of their transport mode. If you want to reduce the sustainability of your produce consumption, that one issue overwhelms pretty much everything else.

>It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste.

You're trading one kind of waste for another. Plastic packaging is wasteful in one sense because it is disposable, but it reduces a potentially far greater waste by protecting products during transportation and storage. Plastic isn't always the most sustainable packaging material, but it often is. That decision needs to be made based on hard facts, not the presumption that plastic is evil.

>Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2.

I'm fully in favour of both, as long as those charges represent the actual economic impacts of mitigating those issues.
And you use it as if it's some singular person, and of course it isn't, just like I use "the US" as if it's some singular person, which it also isn't. So we're both doing the same thing, and you're pointing that thing to me whilst doing the same thing. You used "the Chinese government", I used "the US", we both used it as if it's some singular person, and of course it isn't. Not sure how many more ways I can say this until you get it.
Berlin Airlift hailed at 70th anniversary as model of transatlantic cooperation
As Amazon starts winning fat government contracts for unaccountable sums of money, it will probably care less and less about offering "value" to its smallest private sector customers.
Reminds me of when I was 15 and the teacher we had the previous year had left and one of the maths teachers took over.

He did his best but I have taught my self faster than he did.

Though because I was on the CSE stream even though I got a grade 1 they wouldn't let me do computing at A level - as CSE kids where supposed to leave at 16.
Trump Signals He Favors Mnuchin’s Path to Shield Technology from China
Maybe not stealing but extortion. “Give us all your data or you can’t use the service all your friends use to keep in touch”.

It’s even worse when the service we’re talking about goes beyond social networking and becomes a must-have like a cell phone (referring to major US carriers secretly selling location data to a marketing company).
Which BSD? :)

I ported u2f-hid-rs (the library Firefox uses) to FreeBSD, it's been in the www/firefox port for a while and now accepted into mozilla-central I think.

The Chromium FreeBSD port also has had U2F support for a while.
I believe that GP is referring to the idea that objects are moving at a constant velocity in space-time. In that model, things that are moving rapidly (from our perspective) in the 3-space of, ummm, space, are moving slowly along the time axis of space-time (think of photons moving at the speed of light, but where the velocity along the time-axis is slowed to 'zero') and things moving slowly in space (like us!) are really booking it along the time axis of the space-time 4-space.
Girls Who Code: Is There a Wave Coming?
Based on the comments, there seems to be a barrier to the capabilities of our understanding timespace, which makes it extremely difficult to explain or teach, but that doesn't make it less interesting.

The existential barrier lies in understanding time as a benefit to survival. There's little benefit to most of us I can see. In fact, you could argue that an understanding of time-space may lead one to conclude "what is the point of getting up and going to work?"

On the other hand, engaging with time as understood by the frog (in the article) and using it to survive better in the future (i.e., make more money and whatnot), is a definitive advantage to birds, frogs, and physicists alike.

According to this view, the most useful application of time-space as a concept are science fiction books and movies, which may produce income. Otherwise, there's not yet a clear product to go along with the research, which we can point to and say, "See! There is time-space. $9.99 on sale."

I guess such a perspective may reveal me as an economist. News to me.

Perhaps by not studying economy (and merely staying in the same place) time-space has delivered to me an understanding of the subject of economy.
Landfill waste doesn’t generally end up in the oceans. Landfills aren’t the problem, it’s the bad management of waste, typically by countries that care more about basic survival than the effect of their trash on a whale. A villager in rural China doesn’t typically have the luxury of caring as much as some Instagraming Brooklynite. Creating better processes around waste management is going to have a much larger and predicatable effect than outright bans — which can have unintended consequences that the “smart people” fail to predict. Blanket bans on DDT are a good example, sounded good, until millions more people died of malaria. (I am not suggesting we continue or end the DDT ban, it’s just an example of the effect of a policy that was driven by emotion rather than a rigorous scientific process.) It’s possible that banning plastic could have unforeseen consequences that haven’t been considered by the simpletons that typically are charged with making government policy.
I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912546

jobhound.io
I tend to "catch" those, by accident, quite regularly during certain seasons in Germany, and I'm always a bit torn between being annoyed and amazed at it.
I also have performance issues. High CPU usage with minimal tabs. I regularly see 20% of a core with around 10 tabs open.
More context: "At the moment, Zapper’s two biggest limitations are that it does not currently support conditional rendering or nested templates (like foreach loops over the elements of an interior list). Zapper could be extended to support those things, I just haven’t implemented them yet. Due to the design of Zapper, those features should have effectively no performance impact on templates that choose not to use them, which is nice."
Announcing idyll.pub: Publish interactive blog posts and explorable explanations
Just to nitpick, this was before CIDR, so you're probably referring to Class A blocks, of which there were only 125 (the first octet being 1-9,11-126).
Good point, I should have been more specific and said gopher form, but I didn't want to confuse the youngins. :)
Sourcerer app makes a visual profile from your GitHub and Git repositories
> drug manufacturers pay most of the FDA budget. That’s by design

Do you happen to know what law congress passed or otherwise how this became "by design"? News to me. Doesn't the government have enough money to fund these kind of public agencies? Is this true of others too? Does the USDA get funded by farmers too?

And am I the only one that sees potential conflict of interest that would lead to threats to public safety arising from this "design" you speak of?
Photons are moving in speed of light in our perspective. They are stationary (both in space and time) in their perspective.
What exactly does "semantically meaningful and accessible html" mean?
Being able to turn off consciousness in a gross way is in no way equivalent to being able to prove that its origin is chemical.

A complete chemical theory of consciousness would need to explain not just how general anaesthetics work - a field which is much less comprehensive than most people realise - but also how exactly LSD, psiloscybin, DMT, and other hallucinogens produce all the very specific and very different effects they do.
GitHub – oxy-secure/oxy: A secure remote access tool
Nice back-of-the-envelope analysis. But just wanted to let you know, the ARPU numbers are per quarter, not per year! For Q1’2018, from the official earnings report, has worldwide ARPU at $5.53 for that quarter. In US, for Q1, it was $23.59 ARPU.
What is your use case? Do you have poor vision? What's wrong with Cmd+?
No need to dip down to DSP. You can do this with Android over AP-less ("peer-to-peer") Wi-Fi, so you're coding against a nicer API and Android will speak the protocol for you [1][2].

[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifi... [2]
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifi...
I, on the other hand, would like to point out the lack of accessibility of this approach, it's unusable with a keyboard. Let's not forget about assistive technologies.
GitHub – vibora-io/vibora: Fast, asynchronous and elegant Python web framework
Yes, very suspect behavior.
> Absolutely. With a professional judge (NOT an elected judge!), you're in the hands of someone with years of training in law and justice. With a jury, you've got 12 yahoos off the street who don't know anything about the law or the tricks lawyers play, let alone what their own rights and obligations are.

It may reflect a difference in culture, but as an American, I feel juries are an important institutional check in a democratic society. Ultimately, the law is meant to serve the people, so the people should not just be subject to it, but they should also have an active role in its administration.

I think that any deficit in jury quality should be addressed by improving the quality of the people the jurors are selected from, though increased legal education in the public schools. Perhaps the law should also be rendered in plainer language to make that easier. While there will always be legal specialists, I think it's important that the people themselves understand the law to a good degree.
It is useful, but I tried to be upfront about the limitations of the current implementation.

There's no inherent reason those two features can't be supported, and I want to add support for them when I have some time.
When you hover over an item in the main list, then move your mouse to the right, does the sub-menu stay the same or revert to the sub-menu for the first entry? (EDIT: Looks like that bug has been fixed. Earlier this morning, it would revert to the first sub-menu, now it works as expected)
That's really interesting data! I threw up a quick viz of the data: https://public.tableau.com/profile/braxtone7168#!/vizhome/Ea...
> This is solved by tracking the mouse movement and holding the current menu open if the movement is at a specific angle

Was it Amazon that first used this trick on their giant dropdown menus? I remember reading an article about their implementation but do not recall if they were the first or merely the most visible.
Vetting by the publisher at least sets a minimum bar that isn’t there with web.

I don’t see obvious scams, phishing or malware being advertised on TV or print, but I saw a lot of them back when I was on Facebook, and even reporting them didn’t do anything.
You are misinformed. Fargate is out and it works. I have containers running on it right now and they have been for several weeks now. You can select it or the old EC2 approach. Try it, you may like it.
> An illusion is simply what fact? What does it mean to take it at "face value"? What "false conclusion" does it entail?

A fact is an observation, a sensory input, a measurement, etc. The observation of a pencil in water [1], if taken at face value, entails a false conclusion.

If instead such a fact were integrated into a larger set of facts from which we infer a coherent picture of reality, a very different conclusion emerges.

No part of the above depends upon any sort of subject.

> I think you're equivocating here. What definition of illusion are you using?

I'm not. I'm using the same definition that I provided to you, namely that an illusion is a fact that naively entails a false conclusion. If you want a dictionary.com definition, "something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality".

Of course, you could jump on "deceives" again with some unnecessary appeal to subjectivity, which is why I say "entails a false conclusion" instead.

[1] https://pixabay.com/en/pencil-bent-pencil-pencil-in-water-24...
> A large portion of the left has always disavowed authoritarianism as well, so there is no conflict here.

A significant portion of the left in North American and Western Europe avows a collective authoritarianism of a mob which uses tactics of toxicity, vandalism, and violence to de-platform, intimidate, and de-facto censor. There is a huge conflict there.
What Microsoft's GitHub Acquisition Could Mean
Ask HN: Ways to improve testing skills for a developer?
I have 5 years of experience working as a Software engineer and most of it was working for small startups and teams. Now I am looking for a job change and all the coding tasks and interviews seem to give lot of importance to Unit or Integration testing. Can anyone guide me on how to tackle these situation? and also how to learn advanced testing skills.
.net defiantly as it was originally only for players in the industry .org was always more open.
Ironically, from what I've come to expect comparing popular websites to phishing websites, I have a knee-jerk worried reaction when I see a URL that isn't 'centre-heavy'.
Chip design stuff like Cadence.
I said "easy". And by the way, the second link is dead.
Google.gov: “smart” government and the universal information engine
Except countries and companies will eventually cave as their trade and profits are at stake.
I highly recommend Techmoan - http://www.techmoan.com/ - which has an enthusiastic presenter doing Youtube videos covering various retro and new items. There are several about Nixie tubes including solared powered watches! http://www.techmoan.com/display/Search?moduleId=19697008&sea...
The fact they supposedly recovered 15k Bitcoins tells me he wasn't sophisticated enough to secure his private key sufficiently. If he had memorized a BIP39 mnemonic for his private key we wouldn't be reading about $162 million dollars worth getting seized. Brain wallets are pretty tough to crack.
I have an eerily accurate internal clock. In high school I repeatedly awoke around two or three second before my alarm clock went off in my washroom. Enough time to get there and turn it off just as the first beep was starting.

Unless I'm sick (or otherwise mentally altered) I know how much time has passed.
Think.com was owned by Oracle for a long time.

I always forget that dashes are allowed in domain names.
Moreover, the on your own for education bit, even if true is a bit dishonest. Being "on your own" with this in 2018 is absolutely incomparable to how it was 10 years ago, much less 20 or more. The amount of materials accessible for free or extremely cheap is mind-blowing to people who had to learn programming from a single (physical) copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language".
Now that's what I call a Freudian slip
What's the "Pythagorean maxim"?
Facebook reverses cryptocurrency ad ban