skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. Maybe you're thinking of anonymous functions? A closure binds a function to its scope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_science%29
Is anyone else more annoyed by the 250 number? That means 250 people were essentially being surveyed upon illegally.

Granted I'm betting some of those 250 were "bad people" but considering the previous articles about these devices, I'm willing to bet a lot of those 250 people weren't even close to being dangerous and were just a waste of taxpayer money.
If you worked in a "traditional" corporate environment, you would know why it's offensive. General rule of thumb is, don't say it if you wouldn't say it to your mother. I certainly wouldn't say that to my mother.

Edit: to elaborate, corporations aren't concerned with being labeled as sexist. They are worried about being sued because of sexism, because it's one of the toughest kinds of corporate lawsuits to defend against, and one of the most lucrative kinds of lawsuits for the plaintiff. (IANAL though)
Crowdfund Act Passes In the Senate, But What Will It Mean for Startups?
Betaworks Allegedly Offered to Buy The Onion to Keep It From Moving to Chicago
New Startup OneTok Wants to Bring Voice Recognition to the Masses
Mayor Bloomberg Is Sick of Everyone Criticizing Him on Twitter All the Time
DUMBO Startup Lab Expands to New Loft Space
FoodToEat Takes on Seamless and GrubHub With Low Fees and Food Trucks
Vending Machines in Taxis and Fitting Rooms on the Web Win NYC Next Idea Contest
But instead of just losing use of those servers, they have to actively maintain them. It looks like they just want someone to pay for the $9000 per day that it costs to keep the servers running, they aren't looking for money that they lost from not being able to use the servers.

To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).
"I'd gladly save fuel and make a 2hr trip in 3hrs if I didn't have to waste my attention on the vehicle."

Isn't that the bus/train?
Backblaze quoted this price before the flood at $120 for 3TB. I'm not sure if post-flood prices are back to these prices or what range of prices you can expect at this volume.

This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost should be closer to $1.6 million.

[1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2341206&cid=36834390
I'm so glad there are nuclear startups. There's so much to be done in this field. It's enormously tough to disrupt but licensing a design might be a start.

Talent is extraordinarily hard to find for this. All the great engineers with domain experience are starting to retire. The ones that are left are extremely risk averse. You have to attempt to poach from GE or Westinghouse.

I worked for Westinghouse for two years doing Pipe Analysis and Fracture Mechanics. There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Only nukes are familiar with the stresses and environmental fatigues that can happen in that environment over an 80 year period.
Making Megaupload pay this $9000/day seems unfair, too. The US government has cut off all of Megaupload's revenue streams, and so they would be forcing Megaupload to keep paying for a service that they can no longer make money from.

Regardless, why is the cost so high if the server is down? Does this $9000/day reflect the loss that Carpathia suffers from not re-allocating this storage to other customers? It would seem to me that given Megaupload's current state, it would be sufficient to leave the servers powered down and unplugged until the legal dispute is resolved... surely the cost of leaving a server idle is not $9000. I don't really know though...
If you know Python / Ruby / Lisp, you might know it by the name ‘lambda’, or if you come from a JavaScript background, you might’ve used it under the name ‘anonymous function’.

This is false. Lambdas capture context; pointed-to functions i C do not.
The costs of moving that amount of data is crazy. I am surprised the government hasn't seized the hardware, and chucked it in a warehouse.

I did some back of an envelope calculations... and its absolutely crazy. Tape would require over 17,000 Ultrium tapes. Now you could De-dupe... but the hardware to process and dedupe that much data.... not really an option. Not to mention the time to write that many tapes...

Something like thumpers (48 disk sun x86 boxes) would be expensive, last time I looked they were around say $30k for a large order... 160tb usable assuming 4tb disks are the thumper is split into 4 Raid 6 arrays... thats 160 thumpers... 4.8 Million

Even backblaze pods would likely be well over a Million...

This doesn't even cover hosting costs, transfer and such. Not to mention to be usable in court there are going to have to be processes in place to document compliance and validity of the copy....

All in all not a great place for Carpathia to be in.
Yes, but the difference is that multiplication is a fact about logic, not a contrived interface to obsolete hardware. Multiplication tables do have rhyme and reason to them. We don't memorize our 21-times tables because as soon as we pass 9, we switch to a methodical system with a simple, general system of rules.

It is pretty hard to swallow that something developed a hundred and forty years ago for interacting with box of springs and levers is a close-to-optimal text entry system.
Not deleted, flagged. Folks who think an article is not HN material or useful can click the 'flag' button, enough flags and the article is made 'dead' which drops it out of consideration for ranking.
I'm not an expert on any of this, but since it is talking about annual income, I'd assume the limits are also annual limits.
I once walked out of an interview because they told me about their mandatory drug testing policy, and I don't ever take any illegal recreational drugs. I just found the culture of distrust created by the statement "we need to inspect your bodily fluids" to be toxic. I'm fortunate that I had the luxury to do that.

Similarly, I never post anything on Facebook (or the Internet at large) that I wouldn't feel comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper. But the moment anyone asks for any account password, I'm done talking to them.
No, not really. Closures... close on variables, function pointers, are just pointers to functions.

What you are saying is sort of like saying that Classes and Objects are equivalent, creating a closure creates an instance, wheras a function pointer just references the canonical code.

Also, don't undervalue anonymous local functions, which is another thing that full closures have over C99 functions.
> At the most basic level, though, the comparison remains valid, doesn't it?

Given that function pointers can't close over variables in the environment, it's a fairly tenuous comparison.

The ability to pass function around is different from the ability of functions to close over their environment. When people talk about closures and their power, they're generally talking about the latter, not the former, at least in my experience.
I don't think that the quote is particularly worrying.

I think the FBI lawyer is pointing out that as the scope of what constitutes a search expands the harder it becomes to establish probable cause in the first place.

I agree with the article, that if 90% of the affected GPS trackers could demonstrate probable cause to get a warrant then the FBI doesn't really have cause to complain (about this one ruling). However, I don't think that invalidates the quote.

I think the quote is literally true and shouldn't be taken as anything but a FBI lawyer talking about the limitations that the agency faces but like the article says the limitations aren't necessarily a bug.

Edit: Clarity
Integration Testing with Selenium and Capybara
If the HR person thought that you were being a prima donna for not wanting to sign that NDA, then you're just doubly lucky that you didn't wind up working there.
FTA: The point was not to go into the nuances of closures and lambdas, but only to highlight the basic similarity between function pointers / lambdas / anonymous functions.
Any large datacenter has storage allocated in complex ways. IT may be challenging to isolate one customer's data physically from another. For instance, physical disks can be virtually concatenated then repartitioned into virtual storage containers, which may reside on part of 1, or parts of many physical disks.

They could of course migrate all of the contested data onto new storage. But its large; who would pay for that?
sigh

FTA: The point was not to go into the nuances of closures and lambdas, but only to highlight the basic similarity between function pointers / lambdas / anonymous functions.
Some people have legitimate files on MegaUpload. They can no longer access them. Should they be able to get those files back somehow?
An interesting perspective. I too would like to spend more time writing open source software. The main reason I do not, and something which I think holds true for a lot of people, is that even if our company wanted to open source some of our software it's fairly difficult to do so and of questionable value.

Many of the components and practices in our software are quite specific to our business and environment. They'd just be useless or, worse, an impediment to other people wanting to reuse the software in a different context.

Even if we were to refactor parts of our code base to produce some "clean" components that didn't rely on the specifics of our business or other processes, there are many cases where that would just add to the overhead of maintaining the software for us.
This is why the US Government shouldn't have seized the site first, and asked questions later. They should've filed a trial against them, and let them keep hosting the data, and if found guilty, then take it down.
Senate Passes Start-Ups Bill
Being a student who's been in the process of learning C over the past 3 years, I for one have not come across many examples of function pointers in actual use, apart from the standard library functions qsort and bsearch.
I listened to the NPR story when it ran. The FBI explained that they use these devices to establish probable cause, which they'd then use (ideally) to get a warrant for more invasive processes.

But as pointed out, if >90% of your cases already can meet that threshold according to a (theoretically) independent judiciary, then you don't really have a problem. Perhaps the other 10% reflected the abuses we want to prevent, or perhaps just sloppy police work.

Either way, the warrant requirement is a security control against abusive law enforcement. After all, by their own reasoning, if they've done nothing wrong, then they've nothing to hide (from a judge), right?

Interestingly, the story concluded by noting that the FBI would probably just depend more often on cell phone tracking records, which companies will often provide in response to a prosecutorial subpoena even without a judge's signature.
its funny for a core group member to yet again make a
joke about how Isaac can't be trusted because he's a
mexican thief

Over the line, dude. Not cool.
The Mac Application Switcher
Still seems likely to help, since the HTTP connection can go over a fast, low-latency loopback interface.
> "Discounting based on a source repeatedly shown to be unreliable is not ad hominem; it is proper evidential weighting."

Consider the related approach of giving someone who is a known expert in field X undue weight for their commentary in field Y. We recognize this as a mistake because one's ability in field X does not necessarily correlate with their ability in field Y.

In this case, you're suggesting we completely ignore the statement of a source which is known to be unreliable on a particular set of partisan topics, and known to be reliable on non-partisan topics (such as sports scores), when they are addressing a topic within the second category.

Proper evidential weighting takes into account not merely the "reliability" or "unreliability" of a source in a generic sense, but the specific details of that (un)reliability.

(The problem with the heavily-downvoted grandparent post is more than mere improper evidential weighting. The larger problem is that it's boring and off-topic. Here on Hacker News, we prefer comments that add value to the discussion.)
Come change the way data is used. Chartio (YC S10) is hiring.
The fact that it can be used where other languages would use closures doesn't make them equal, and the language here is pretty definite, you're not using "similar", "like" or "can stand in for"… I can do a tree with an array, that doesn't make them equal.

I don't want to sound too harsh, I'm just noting that any blog post that starts out like that is a bit likely to be instantly discarded by some people. And will confuse others later on when they want to learn about closures…
This is a predictable reaction from an incumbent one month away from a competitive election. It is not a failure of democracy for one arm of government to react like this - it's a failure if that populist whiplash becomes policy (or is debated seriously enough to spook).

An analogy would be October 2012, Romney is hot on Obama's heels, and a shooter goes on a rampage in Times Square. It would not be unexpected for the President to call for greater monitoring, no limits to what will be done to safeguard the American people, yada, yada. Norway's reaction was anomalous in the shooter being Norwegian and the political climate being mellower than France in an election year.
CodePlex now supports Git
This is great fun!

Some sort of feedback loop might be useful. I don't profess to understand the 12 steps (and not to trivialise by comparison) but I guess counting the number of successful days of not doing something in a chain becomes reinforcing e.g. when has a smoker actually stopped smoking?

Or alternatively is the payoff a reward e.g. "Dont eat a donut for 6 days if then eat a donut else try again"
The Abercrombie and Fitch Brown Pants Fiasco, "Splogs," and you
So, with a clever use of a macro (and assuming you use reference-counted smart pointers or have another way of persisting variables at that time on the stack), you can totally make a fire-and-forget closure in C++. Our solution involved declaring inline classes with some minor stringification magic to guarantee uniqueness.
What if they are not found guilty? Does the Government pay it back from Social Security?
Right. I mention that in the post, I guess I could have phrased the title better.

The larger question is "why was it flagged?" There was a lively discussion on the topic, and it seems very relevant to the startup scene. The fact that this topic would be considered "not worthy" of HN speaks volumes by itself.
There's no legal basis for the MPAA to bear the cost of storing the data. The MPAA is not even a party to the proceedings, which, by the way, are criminal and not at all civil.
Curious about other tips that mobile app developers have - what are we missing, what's working for you?
Can anyone explain why 25 Democrats + Bernie Sanders (Independent) voted against the bill? http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/senate/2/55?r...

Do they want to protect unsophisticated investors from being tricked? It seems like it's a really positive movement in support of small, innovative businesses.
I'm certain that anyone asking to snoop through your Facbook knows they are doing something "wrong" - maybe they don't understand the full implications, but I'm sure none of them would be stupid enough to put the request in writing.
Thorium has some potential advantages and some disadvantages. Overall it's a mistake to imagine that it's some sort of nuclear energy free lunch.
Discovery and personalization are not compatible with each other. So if you use Google search as a discovery tool, then personalization hurts.

There is no alternative. Maybe DDG but results are not so good.
I was just having a discussion with my 10-year-old son about this, you know "talk to your kids about Facebook before someone else does?".

The guideline that I came up with is "don't post anything, anywhere, that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper".

Now all I have to do is keep drumming that message into him for the next three years.
I believe it is closures that capture context, lambdas are just anonymous functions, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_function

vs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_science%29

A lambda function with all its variables bound is a closure iirc.
People with legitimate file can't access them now anyway, this would not change that. I'm just proposing a way out for Carpathia while the case is decided in court.
While I'm obviously uninvolved, there are several reasons why turning them off might be a hassle. Primarily is that if anything is encrypted, the encryption key is currently in memory and the disks are already open - turning the servers off might require reentering details.

Alternatively, in a setup of this size, I imagine there'd be no end of redundancy configurations - RAID for individual disk sets, DRBD (/a SAN equivalent) across servers - turning them off would turn all that HA tech off. Meaning that, when you try to bring the system back up, the redundancy implementation might say "oh no, I've lost x peers from my set of n" and fail itself completely.

Shrug. I've no doubt explained it badly, but there are good reasons to keep them running. It's not just a case of "pop the hard drive out and use it elsewhere"; the logic associated with keeping 25 petabytes of data would also have to be restored to its current state.
I'm an idiot, I guess. I actually understood all along. I recognised that the initial score for new submissions would be monotonically increasing, but the graph's x axis was throwing me, by making it seem as though a single story over time had its score dropping, but that's not it. If it were flipped horizontally, I think that would be more intuitive, maybe, since it might capture "these later (further-to-the-right) bars are newer stories" instead of stepping back. Or maybe not, and I'm just an idiot. :)
Security Alert: Safari for iOS 5.1 vulnerable to address bar spoofing
Facebook Buys 750 IBM Patents To Defend Against Yahoo
I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized access" and wipe all the data.

They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?
The overhead of a reverse proxy in terms of latency is essentially zero. Just think about it like this: with HTTP sometimes you need to wait for some extra packages to go back and forth. These packages need to travel over the Internet. You can trade in these packages with packages, which travel though your loopback device. Seems like a good bargain to me.

Also to make benchmarks, it helps to have a working product first.
Apple's iOS 5.1 Safari Browser Vulnerable to Address Bar Bug
It's fair to ask about their exit strategy and plans for growth, to get a sense of how they're thinking about their company. At this stage I wouldn't expect their plans to have much more than a tenuous connection with what will actually happen, of course. You're learning more about them than you are about the future of your company.

It's a really good sign that the founders have successfully done this before, as long as they're continuing to build on and play to their strengths. If the founders' first startup was in a field they knew intimately (accountants building accounting software, say), but now they want to get into something completely unrelated (say, 3D printing), in my opinion that's a bit of warning sign. Previously successful people are susceptible to hubris - 'I did x, so I can do anything!' Often false. Still better than completely inexperienced founders, I think, but by choosing something they know nothing about they're canceling out a lot of their advantage.

Yes, people at startups generally work long hours - that's a fair assumption. But there's a dividing line between long and soul-crushing that varies from person to person.
Why you should never argue in 140 characters or less
But isn't that sort of illegal, too? Invading someone's property to find something incriminatory, and then to accuse them of what you found? If not, then they could just randomly visit anyone's home and try to look for pirated software or music.
Usually you wont find a flag pole on private property in the cities and it's clearly far, far, far, far, far away from e.g. US levels of showing the flag, but it's hard to picture a Schrebergartenkolonie[1] without a german flag (even the wikipedia picture show one: [2]). Same is true for private properties where flag poles are more common (rural or costal regions).

I agree it's not a custom, but it's not definitely no taboo.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)#Germany

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kleingaerten.jpg
seems to me that one of the main ways SPDY speeds things up is by sending of hints and attached content all in one connection. If you are proxying over http, you can't have access to any of the domain specific information, and thus you won't see hardly any of the SPDY benefits
I'm a bit scared that there might be "rockstar" nuclear engineers out there.
It's actually not bad - it's likely too complex to make it responsive all the way down to mobile, and they have a mobile site for that function, but it fits perfectly for those browsing on different screens.

I just wish they'd make it fixed width. The site's barren on my wide monitor.
I hate to say it, because I'm as sympathetic to this ISP as anyone else. But this is what insurance is for. Big single customers are risks. Surely someone out there would have been willing to write a policy to cover unforseeable things like this.
I'm not sure what your point is, unless you think theres some sort of gaming of the system. If HN users did like the article it wouldn't have been flagged.
You want to pull 1,103 server's disks?

The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)? Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.

Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For enterprise gear we are getting most quotes ~ $300 AUD a disk, for consumer gear its ~ $130. Most servers are running at least 2 disks... that $286K worth of disks alone if your talking cheap - low capacity disks, not including labour to change the disks and test the hardware before you deploy a workload to it.
Only 10% of consumers would consider banking with Apple, bizarre study finds
Cool feature addition, but few of us even have Android 4.0 on our phones. I'd be lucky if the HTC Thunderbolt has it in 2012.