skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prostitution, Gambling, 24-hour alcohol sales, Driverless cars, rentable fully automatic weapons!

Come to Nevada, we are the FUTURE!

EDIT: I was not actually bemoaning any of these, uh, services. I lived in Nevada for a few years and aside from the fact that I was traumatized against it by the game Fallout - actually like Nevada. It is one of those states that actually fantastic to live in if you have enough money/your own business.

I plan to retire back to the Nevada side of Tahoe. Lets see how well those driverless cars handle snow.
FTC Prepares Google's Antitrust Investigation
Is Your Startup Solving a Worthwhile Problem?
> they can decide if they want to store variables in registers or main memory, they can change the order of a variety of operations, etc.

As long as they follow the "as if rule", which states that any transformations that is done to code that does not invoke undefined behavior will produce the same final result as if the transformations were not done. Reordering floating point multiplications does not follow this rule.

(Watching stuff in a debugger doesn't count for this rule)
The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid
I believe there is already some sort of driver .
https://github.com/orenmazor/node-tds

Haven't tested it, and it's no ORM, but it's something.
I've heard this argument before, but I haven't seen the numbers to back it up (outside of 'emerging markets').

RIM is like typewriter companies in the 90's. They are selling typewriters and they are trying to compete with computers by making more sophisticated typewriters. There may be some people around who still prefer typewriters because they're cheaper, better for X,Y,Z, but at the end of the day their advantage is gone.
Solution For High CPU Usage By svchost.exe
Great stuff. Do you accept pull requests?
This should be a feature that one can enable should you have consumed any alcohol.
Projecting meaning
Hey Neil,

I do not disagree on any of those counts, the fact still remains that impediments to immigration are not caused (either solely or entirely) by welfare states. And more to the point, they can have considerably more liberal policies than less progressive states.

So when i hear people attack socialized systems, especially in oblique manners such as this (rather than highlighting specific policies that need to change), my bullshit radar goes off.
Card.io - fast and easy mobile credit card scanning
Tech giants vie for cloud control
What would the reaction be if, for the sake of argument, EMI took a photo that a small independent photographer made, ran it through what looks like a basic Photoshop filter, and slapped it on the next Coldplay album? Internet outrage right?

And then what would happen if the photographer sued EMI and Coldplay, and won a $32K settlement? I'm guessing the Internet would either be satisfied or angry that $32K is too little for such deep pockets.

I understand and agree that Jay was too vicious in this, but how is he in the wrong again?
There is a surprising fact I stumbled upon when i visited Panama couple of weeks back. Blackberries rule in Latin America (at least from what i saw in Panama and heard)

Maybe Blackberry is losing out in states but is still going strong in other places.
> Is it really Microsofts fault that IE6 won't die?

IE6 stayed around for so long because people built in-house apps using its non-standard technologies and found themselves locked in when the standards and everyone else moved on.

So rather like almost every major functional change in Firefox or Chrome within the last year, then.

(That's not fair? Really? Take a look at your CSS and see how many -moz- or -webkit- entries it contains. And if it doesn't contain any, did you need a bleeding edge browser anyway?)
The cult of the NDA
if you'd stick it on github, i dont mind giving it a good design forking
Tempted to just leave this in the background all day while I work.
Have you ever used an iPhone (or Android) for an extended period of time?

Anecdote: I don't know a single person that switch from a BB to an iPhone or Android that has regretted it or will ever switch back. This group includes some pretty hard code BB fans.
This would be a big boon to any of the cities around me (like Athens [GA]). They have limited street parking, so the fees are big and the times are short. This would let you go to where you're going and send your car over to a high-density parking garage across town to wait for you.
C# Light Syntax
I'm curious about the hashing algorithm. I read about the planned whitepaper, but some preliminary info would be cool (e.g refs to academic papers that you build on).
They still have some harsh drug laws though.
What is that song?! Earworm!
Would a JSON implementation be better then? I mean, it sounds like the design is just painful, and regardless of the implementation it would be horrible.

Or do you think JSON encourages simplicity enough to overcome these issues? That the person who created his interface would have created something cleaner?

I guess what I'm asking is, is it the API that sucks, or the implementation (or both)?

* I've never had issues with XML-RPC or SOAP implementation. I prefer JSON because it can use it from JavaScript easily. But having consumed SOAP and XML-RPC API's (mostly with banks), I've never had problems that I'd blame on the implementation.
Big trains and buses still move a lot more people than one small car. If everyone hopped into their driverless car, we'd be back to where we are now -- gridlock :)
Yup, you summed up everything I was contemplating saying. Well done.
Agreed. SQLite also has a great copyright notice in its headers:

** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of
** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
**
** May you do good and not evil.
** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
** May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

(http://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact?name=a8571665d43ff18f89a4...)
How Harry Potter And "Pottermore" Could Force Amazon To Open Up The Kindle
To be honest, at least half of those sound like perfectly reasonable ideas. Aside from machine guns, I'm not sure there's a strong logical argument to outlaw any of them.
Overblown .net developer panic in 3...2...1...
How do you deal with the inherent inefficiency of having a separate vehicle for every passenger (or small group of passengers)?

Publicness is not the only benefit of public transportation. Trains and buses are incredibly efficient per passenger mile. They also take up a lot less space than cars, and last longer and cost less per passenger to manufacture. Making a car driverless doesn't solve these problems.
No drive-thru beer vendors like Texas?
It's cliché, but totally on point:

Only sue if you have nothing to lose, or your opponents are ridiculously rich. (preferably: both).
All you need to do is disabling the receipt checking algorithm in the app, which, depending on the developer's talent and ingenuity, could be anything between trivial to pretty challenging.
You'd be surprised how often stuff like that happens. It's not uncommon for "artists" to sue for their works being caught on film. And in many cases this art is on public display, for example, in a park.
For others, like myself, that are unfamiliar, yet very interested. MusicBrainz[1] is written in python, distributed under the GPL, and I will be trying it ASAP.

[1]https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MusicBrainz_P...
Hmm. I don't think this is exclusive to IT workers. Finance workers are as bad, or worse.

Having read and listened to a lot of finance training classes/materials recently, I can say that much of this is not just a lack of effort put into explaining things, it's shockingly sloppy standards of epistemology. Concepts are blurred constantly, terms are reused for different things, procedures are introduced with little attempt to ground them in related ideas. Much of the time I suspect people have learnt in a very ad hoc manner, and don't really know what they're doing, just enough to get things working.

I get that sort of lazy vibe from a lot of Unix culture too, although it's a bit more superficial.
When you talk about privacy, are you referring to the recent app list? Doesn't everything phone do this in multitasking? iPhone shows recent apps with a double tap, Android with a long press, WebOS with cards...
Clojure/core Reading List: Rationale, tutorials, resources
Creator has a long way to go to be a viable development tool for QML. This stuff is still quite rough.

Granted, the N9 finally has a processor with enough horsepower to handle the Declarative runtime, so maybe there's hope.
Fair enough -- I forgot about 'self' being dynamically scoped, which is an interesting point. Perhaps it's no coincidence that I have a particular dislike for the scoping rules around Javascript's "this" keyword, as they're perhaps even more dynamically scoped than in other OO languages.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3166 was my reference though, with at least some seeing the PL design debate as being settled in favour of lexical scope. Although some dissent in the comments there.
Does It Really Move the Needle?
Should I Change My Password?
This is a fundamental problem with the implementation of fair use in the US legal system. Fair use is a limitation of copyright (not a violation of copyright), and the law defines guidelines for establishing fair use, but it may cost you tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache if the copyright holder disagrees with your interpretation of the guidelines, regardless of whether you are right or wrong.

Copyright in the US exists to promote the progress of science and the useful arts (US Constitution), not to protect the "purity" of an artist's work.

Parody is one well-recognized, legally protected form of fair use - and no doubt it would cause this photographer to feel "violated".
> with language and the ability to spread new ideas from one individual to another

We got ahead because we developed the first mesh-net -- spoken language . . . free and unencumbered by artificial legal restrictions like copyright.

The more richly you communicate, the more advantage. Newspapers with pay-walls, and such like -- the Homo-erectus of now.
You're not the only one, but there are very few of you. I know a couple of people that swear by physical keyboards and they are seriously hardcore about it. But I know 200 more that hate hate hate hardware keyboards.

Phones with a hardware keyboard have a future, but it's a small future and it's not one that can sustain a company like RIM.
There aren't any easy (accurate) answers to these sorts of questions, which is also why they are such fascinating areas of research. Understanding all the factors and events involved is very difficult with the type of information available.

Speciation is only something that can be determined after the fact, anyhow. Species are entities we use to discuss the combination of innumerable bits of historical happenstance. Our being the only human species left might be due to little more than luck.
it is similar to our closed source FP ENMFP, which you can read about here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.185....

The codegen is very different (instead of relying on echo nest chroma, it does its own onset detection) but the back end side is almost the same.
My cynical take on the law: the purpose of the law is to settle disputes nonviolently, not necessarily justly.

The only consolation is things would be even more expensive if it was a "Gangs of New York"-style world today.
Are they though? in which language?

I was under the impression that the traditional 'catch' block has the stack unwound for it back to a frame with the same lexical scope as the associated 'try'...
Auto-properties can be public read, private set. So really, it looks like:

namespace MyCompany.MyProduct
{
public class Person
{
public Person(string name, int age)
{
Name = name;
Age = age;
}

public string Name { get; private set; }
public int Age { get; private set; }
}
}

I suppose it's not technically immutable, but you can just refrain from setting anywhere else inside the class.
Do a lot of people avoid public transport just because of the lack of personal space?
What? I'm excited! :)
No doubt.

I sometimes think we fail to pay enough credit to the early pioneers of the computing field. I was recently reading the "Artificial Life" book by Levy[1], and it starts off with a lot of history about Von Neumann, Turing, and a host of other characters. Fascinating stuff, and that definitely has nudged me to try and make some time to do more reading about the "early days" of computing.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bio...
All the more reason for data havens to exist. Run your server from a country where the police can't just take it with impunity.
I thought if I was ever going to be successful at programming, I needed to learn a whole bunch of languages. Now I think that a language is only as good as the person writing in it. Learn algorithms and logic, and read code that other people have written, in all languages. Let it influence you. When it comes time to pick a language for a project, you'll be prepared to write it in the language that fits it best.

Of course, I've only been programming for 4 years, so feel free to reach for the salt :)
Could do, but the aim of my answer was to keep it short and simple and not a full reference to closures (there are some good links on this page with more detail for that).
"We use tapes, still, in this age because they're actually a very cost-effective way as a last resort for Gmail. "

.. what kind of tape drives does Google use?
He could be a mogul though, that building would sell for many tens of millions. He's a very wealthy man.
Please down vote this, I wanna see what will happen.
Looks like the FBI is operating from the Department of Homeland Security playbook now.
>"The fact you can still run most 10+ year old software on a modern OS from Microsoft illustrates this. Look where Microsoft is today."

38th largest company in the US in terms of revenue.

$18 billion in profits puts them 4th behind Exon-Mobile, Chevron, and ATT.

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/full_...]
It wouldn't necessarily have to be the only public transit option. In New York, I can get to work by train much faster than by car - but if I need to go to, say, Ikea, it's two trains and a bus. A cheap, public car would be great.
Square root interview question
OTOH, If you started that question from the original, I bet most people would draw the line below the pixelated version that was sued over. And most people would draw a line at some point, so the idea that it is clearly fair use seems very debatable.
So, the FBI has a copy of Instapaper's complete database and a copy of their website code. The database includes:

- Salted SHA-1 hashed passwords for Instapaper

- Encrypted passwords for linked Pinboard accounts (with the encryption key stored in the website code)

- OAuth tokens for linked Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr accounts (and presumably also the secret keys used by Instapaper to use those tokens).

That's (potentially) a lot of personal information.
GPS companies must be pissed off...
I'm pretty sure you can't create a working Facebook account using a quick bash script.
I get the feeling you're mocking me. :-) But I'll play along...

> So many of the problems of building a robust global IT architecture have already been solved in the Internet itself.

Ironically, I think the Internet is a fine example of what I mean. Before the Internet, no-one could DDoS a whole business out of existence, because business models weren't vulnerable to that sort of instant mass attack. Before the Internet, you didn't get rapidly evolving viruses that could sneak into your corporate networks because one user clicked the wrong Facebook link during their lunch break and cause you weeks of grief to remove because they could propagate quickly throughout a whole section of your LAN. Before the Internet, one executive doing something dumb didn't result in every confidential report to which that executive had access being uploaded to someone who would extort money from you to keep it quiet. Before the Internet, your database front-ends were in-house, and one error in a front-end didn't leave you vulnerable to having all your customers' credit card details stolen.

Does this mean the Internet is a bad thing? Of course not, it's overwhelmingly positive on balance. But it presents many fine examples of what can happen if the damage causable by a single rogue element isn't effectively contained.

> If my previous thesis has any value, that a big problem with corporate IT is attitude, how do we fix it?

Exactly. You are assuming that the problem here is the attitude of corporate IT groups, and not their choice of tools. I am suggesting that Firefox and Chrome are making themselves into unsuitable tools and the responsible thing for corporate IT to do is to not use them, presumably going back to using a stable IE version and Microsoft's well-developed management tools instead.
Presumably, the machine guns are only rentable at the range - what's the logical argument against that?
I agree completely. I don't necessary think it's a bad idea, I just don't think it's a good idea "instead of big trains and buses."
It's the future of "transportation", period. People will look back to the time when humans drove transportation and laugh.
I think of this more as dealing with the present (and unpleasant) reality. I prefer buses and trains, but we haven't found a way to get people to fund and use them enough to make them viable outside big cities.

A lot of the gridlock in my city comes from people doing stupid things that force other drivers to slow down to avoid a wreck. Automated cars would reduce the impact of bad drivers by removing them from the equation.
Once you factor in cost of living, the difference for top notch coders (any coders, really) is going to be less than 2x and nowhere near 6x.
Katello Project - Open Source Cloud Lifecycle Management from Red Hat
Your post is indeed very useful, but for the sake of completeness I'll add some remarks to it.

The technique you call Return Oriented Programming is not as new as you seem to beleive. It evolved from ideas and techniques that have been arround since late 90s, mainly what is called "return to lib". Surely it was not as popular and hyped as it is today, but then again neither was a non-executable stack popular back then.

Also an effective implementation of Address Space Layout Randomization serves as a mitigation to ROP shellcode. I'm no expert on exploit writing but I beleive that modern ASLR on 64 bits system will be very difficult to bypass except for the most skilled exploit writers out there, and they would most surely need to pinpoint exact versions of your OS, libraries and layout of your binary.

I don't know any specifics about your work, but though "You can't. Don't make any buffer overruns" is a very good advice, its rather simple-minded... I firmly believe any bug can be leveraged into code execution until someone shows the contrary for said bug, but that doesn't mean that a single technique is the silver bullet of exploit writing. To be able to code in a security-minded way, as one learns about were each protection might fail, one must also learn about how each exploit writing technique might fail.

A good introduction to ROP in the form of a somewhat self oriented self contained blogpost can be found here:http://eticanicomana.blogspot.com/2010/06/so-called-return-o... by a guy from Immunity Inc. I'm mentioning his post because I think one of the automated gadget finding tools you may be talking about is their Immunity Debugger/DEPLib.
This is an example of the beauty of American federalism. The states can push forward with innovation, as appropriate to their local needs.
It seems, post 9/11, 'democratic' governments around the world have been appropriating the 'right' to hold individuals without charge indefinitely. Guantanamo?
It's not too surprising that we often root for the little guy, but this wasn't a Coldplay album or a Photoshop filter. This was a very limited release art project to celebrate Miles Davis, early computers and talented electronic musicians.

The case is especially interesting because no large faceless corporation was involved, it was one (very wealthy) artist going after other (not very wealthy) artists.
A country like the US, especially with vast suburban areas, it isn't necessarily a strict dichotomy between public transport and driverless cars. We can have both.

Especially in the west coast, American cities were built to be navigated by cars. Even today, the very fact that carpool lanes in most parts of California are designated for 2 people/car, not 3 implies we already have separate vehicles for each passenger. If we can take advantage of the road infrastructure and cut down on the need to own a car, it will be a huge benefit to lots of people. See how popular ZipCar is, precisely because of this sort of benefit.
Good stuff. I especially liked point #7:

Solve a worsening problem: Pick a problem that is likely to get worse over time and you will guarantee that your market opportunity will grow for years to come. When Google set out to make the world’s information useful, its a problem that is getting worse by the day. So there’s plenty of headroom for them. On the other hand, distributing DVDs in stores or by mail is not a problem that has legs, which is why Blockbuster Video is bankrupt and Netflix is moving to online streaming.

I'd never thought about that point specifically before, but it makes a lot of sense... if the problem is constantly growing, the market should be expanding along with it. Seems like a "well, duh" thing in retrospect, but sometimes it's good to be slapped in the face with the "should be obvious" stuff.
Couldn't disagree more in Canada. There are lots of young people sporting Blackberrys (lack of cash, praise of BBM).
If civilian nuclear power gets replaced by other forms of power generation, we'd have a surplus of rocket fuel. If present sentiment continues, investing in nuclear-thermal propulsion could result in something interesting.

Maybe I should start lobbying against nuclear power ;-)

However, before we start, we should have some clear, economically viable, destinations. An NTR is worthless for launching stuff to orbit and that is 99.999% of what current rockets do. Where it shines is in Earth-Moon ferries and in planetary exploration.
JK Rowling's 'Pottermore' details revealed: DRM-free, embedded watermarks
C# covariance and contravariance by example
The coming death of open government
Are you saving the "registered" cookie? If a user is registered, but accessing the site on another browser, there would be no cookie and he/she wouldn't know how to login. What language/framework are you using?
And vast majority of corporate desktops.
you go to a hotel in which you once stayed, and tell them that you're going to dump every bit of possessions and furnishings in all the rooms outside on the street, rifle through them, set them on fire, then photograph all their guests in the nude and distribute the pictures. Most hotels will object. C++ won't.

Of course, then when the assigned task is to ransack a hotel (what if you're filming Spinal Tap or conducting a riot response police drill?), the other hotels won't even speak to you and you can't perform the task at all. Hotel C++ does not object so it becomes the resource by default.
This looks like an interesting project. It combines a number of other open source components like Puppet, Pulp, Candlepin, and Foreman into a management application that has both a Rails front end or Python-based CLI.
It's Earth but it has a Maps style view as well. The system is powered by an Nvidia Tegra chip.

http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/06/nvidia-and-audi-drive-auto-i...
Wouldn't that depend on the request? But seriously, it's a Git repo. Send a request!
Why is Git so confusing?
Recorded history is just 5000 years old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history