skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been kicking around the idea of building a visual programming language for about a week, so this article is well timed for me.

Let me throw out a counter hypothesis, please feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.

I can imagine that, when you have to build a complex program out of a bunch of boxes, and it gets to the point where a simple for-loop requires a bunch of boxes, that the whole program would be way, way too complicated.

This is the same problem if you wrote a java app, only it all fit in a single file, and every class of the java frameworks were also defined in that file-- it would be a massive file and damn hard to understand.

So, I think the same solution should work for a visual programming language: Modules (as they're called in erlang) or Classes (in Java etc.)

So, at the highest level, your program would be a small collection of boxes with lines between them. Maybe these are the major features of your app.

If you clicked on a box, you'd be drilling down into that level and you'd see how that feature was built. And it would be composed of a series of boxes- each of which was probably akin to a module or a class.

And if you clicked on one of those boxes, you'd be down into that module or class, and it is also composed of modules or classes.

You could drill down this way, until you ultimately got to the lowest level boxes which are akin to lines of code or components of a line of code in a text based language.

I think that would be visually easy to manage-- you'd only be dealing with a relatively small number of boxes and pipes at a time, and conceptually drilling down and pulling back is someting that I think non-programmers would be able to understand.

(Plus drilling all the way down would be something that programmers want to do, but non-programmers (the presumed target of a visual programming language) might not care about.)

Second hypothesis: If it makes no sense to drill all the way down, then at some point, when you drill down you're dropped into text based code. Thus the higher levels of abstraction could be done visually, but the components themselves could be done with text-- sort of a hybrid approach that might give the best of both worlds.

Thoughts? (and I'd love pointers if anyone knows of a system like this that is open source.)

Also, If I did try to build this thing, it would be my first ever language. I'd love to have a checklist of the basic components of a computer language that I could work form... otherwise I'm afraid I'll implement what I need and probably miss something, or do it wrong. But havent' found any good guides so far.
Nice word. Thanks
Check http://www.saylor.org . IIRC their courses allow you to go at your own pace. They offer many courses including but not limited to CS ones, and seem to use Khan Academy / OCW material.
Intel CPUs recently got native encryption functions, is ARM expanding or are RISC architectures 'finished'?
Would you care to provide some evidence for this claim?
Teleportation is teleportation of matter. So AFAIK you can't call it quantum teleportation, for the same reason you can't call travelling along the road "road flying," i.e., flying is travelling above the ground, not on it.
Appetize: a library to easily capture a demo of your iPhone app
(argh)

1 point by alecco 2 hours ago | link | parent [dead]

Initially I didn't like the idea. But thinking it better it might be actually good. The big PC bottleneck nowadays is DRAM. A big on-die/stacked memory at many times faster bandwidth and lower latency could be a game changer.
And anyway, nowadays the usual advice to clients is to max out the RAM on purchase since it's a mess to replace (be it a non-technical user or a datacenter cluster with critical uptime) and the specific configuration of RAM will become pricer per GB in the mid term (because the market moves constantly forward to different versions).

And also note one of the main reasons some algorithms run faster on GPUs is the memory bandwidth bottleneck. If Intel gets rid of the BW problem it's a level game againsta Nvidia.

This move would allow Intel to have some custom performance tricks. For example, memset multiple GB in a fraction of the time.
It's not just startups. Why does Google get away with this with their "Name Here wants to chat" invite emails? I have an address that at this point must have received hundreds of these emails, none of which have instructions on how to block them. Partial example: http://cl.ly/image/3y3D0f2r0W0q
I believe the general theory is relative line numbering helps you when in normal mode. If you want to manipulate a chunk of lines, sometimes you revert to counting them then doing something like <n>yy. With relative line numbering the counting is effectively done for you.

But to me, I try to avoid counting arbitrary lines and instead try and do something like y/<unique marker> or ya{ or whatever.
> two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love [...] trying to see it makes your eyes well up with tears from joy

That's way more creepy than I expected. I don't think I want to hear this guy defending CP any longer...

Also, comparing "rape and CP" to "murder and jaywalking" is inane. He is implying that CP is a petty crime.
It worked for Apple
What I don't understand about Tumblr's iOS app is how they managed to make the dashboard slower, while making everything else native. It literally takes a minute to load the initial content (http://nuut.co/post/31000290048/new-tumblr-app-im-keeping-my...)

At least previous versions got the dashboard right.
I read Section 316.2(o) – Definition of “Transactional or Relationship Message”. It would appear I'm allowed to tell you about software updates, forgotten passwords and the like without including an opt-out link. These are termed transactional or relationship
messages and are excluded from the definition of commercial electronic mail messages.

By that logic, It would seem I'm also allowed to make you login to change the settings by which I notify you of these things. While it would be nice of me to provide such functionality to my site, it does not appear I am not obliged to do so under law.
On my team, 6. On another team, 20ish.
In my experience, pretty much every business closes for one of three primary reasons:

1. The business runs out of money and/or available financing.

2. The owners decide the business isn't returning enough to justify further investment of money or effort.

3. There's some irreconcilable difference of opinion between owners, leading to an impasse on a critical decision and dissolution of the business.

I'll read the blog if you decide to write it, but I have a suspicion the vast majority of stories would boil down to one of those three primary factors.
There are a lot of colors in white
The answer to your thought experiment is: I don't know.

That's the only correct answer, and the reason why you shouldn't use ECDH for long-term sensitive information. It's still a method based on computational difficulty. There's no proof that there's isn't an algorithm that could efficiently break it on currently existing classical computers. One could be discovered in 50 years, tomorrow, or might already be in use in organizations like the NSA. Even if quantum computing wasn't progressing in leaps and bounds (if you look at what is being done you might be very surprised), the possibility it presents is still there.

Again, I'm not talking about credit-card-transactions here. I'm talking about critical information that you don't want to gamble with. ECDH, however good it is, is a medium-term gamble and practically certain to be broken in the long-term.

The only truly safe alternative to QKD at present is the simple one-time-pad (a.k.a. Vernam cipher). i.e. The sender and receiver physically exchange random bit strings. In Canada we still see government agents carrying handcuffed briefcases around on commercial airlines a lot, and that's probably what they're full of. It may sound ridiculous to do this because you're relying on the loyalty of those agents, but security is ultimately a people problem no matter what technology you throw at it.
If I wind up on some mailing list and there isn't a very easy way to unsubscribe via link right in the email, I immediately and without guilt mark the mail as spam in my gmail.

I recommend everyone else do the same and if everyone did I think the fear of being put on gmail's global blacklist for spam would be a far more effective deterrent than the laws alone.
Why should everyone be "satisfied"? What if a similar percentage of the population has a knack for fresh brains?

Maybe that is what all those zombie movies are about: crime prevention.
I agree with you, but the problem the parent poster is pointing out, is that YouTube is a private site. Google should be able to do what they want. If they do something stupid (and I agree the copyright bot is stupid), then it's their own problem. In theory, a competitor could do a better job at not repeating goggle's mistakes, and beat them in the market.

It's worth mentioning that copyright bots are not even required by law. Google could be complying to dmca requests without automatic take downs. They're going beyond what the law requires because they want to be in Hollywood's good side. So a competitor could still be legal without the bots.
Whether your learning a foreign language

In the front page, it's "you're"
This is awesome. I just made an ebuild for it : https://plus.google.com/110857536631648345380/posts/4NeGmXfM...
My opinion: Anytime you share code by posting it publicly, you should always be prepared for negative feedback. In some cases that might be the whole point of posting it: you want to learn from your mistakes.
I agree, the title is misleading. And, I see a big fan on the board.

The "low-end" Raspberry Pi, not including the monitor, draws a maximum of 3.5 Watts = 5 Volts DC x 0.7 Amps

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=50...

And, RPI doesn't have a fan.
It would depend on how the slower RAM was treated. Boosting the memory to support memcache for example would seem to make sense.
Indeed, I should have been more clear. What I meant that despite there being a huge market very few are encouraged to commit these crimes to satisfy the needs of the market.

The market is mostly based around crmies that would have been happened anyway. There are some exceptions like possibly Luka Magnotta who while he did not do it for the money might have done it for the attention. But people like him a rare.
Maybe not observable effects. There so many tiny things that must be in our genes that switches that affect anatomy are probably a small percentage. For example, the way people's laughs sound or the fact that almost everyone is attracted to paradisiacal places are probably influenced by genes and not just culture and nurture.
They should be satisfied if it comes at no harm to others and the alternative is harming others. Isn't that kind of a no-brainer?
1,817 random samples is not a good way to represent a population of 300,000,000+. What kind of audience is represented by someone who would take a random poll on the internet? Probably someone who is not that tech savvy, skewing the already small sample size.
As someone who is intensely interested in memory and mnemonics, I always welcome new tools. The site looks great for being build in 24 hrs and I like the idea of a web-based tool for memorization. However, I do think the offer could use some work. As some other people have pointed out, SMS, email and Push notifications might get out of hand very quickly.

I think you have to consider that most people are using tools like Anki to memorize larger sets of data rather than the names of a few people or a nice quote. Tools like push notifications and text messages are just not an efficient way to digest that much information. I wouldn't mind getting a quote pushed out to me a few times in a day, but compound that by 100 or more items to memorize and suddenly your phone is blowing up every 3 seconds. No bueno.

If I were in your shoes, I would do away with the push, email and SMS notifications altogether. I like the idea of clipping items from around the web, because that actually solves one of the biggest pains of using Anki, which is organizing and typing all your items into the program (assuming there isn't already a stack available). You could even allow users to "clip" to a specific notebook to better organize their items.

Instead of sending notifications, I'd create a spaced-repetition mobile app and/or web app that allowed users to access their clipped items. That way, users can access your tool at their own discretion, but still get the benefit of having a tool to gather their information.

Anyhow, that's my 2 cents. Great job and good luck!
Capture a demo of your app with Appetize with just one line code
The new quad core ARM boxes are actually quite good. My own personal use case is different but as a Gentoo developer it's nice to see something like Firefox "only" take 3 hours to compile. Which is really good when trying to debug issues because an mx51 it takes 18-20 hours.
I was thinking I'd write the same thing: "I love these 'smallest X' posts". I was thinking of the Muppetlabs "smallest ELF file" article, in particular, and Russ Cox's Zip file that decodes to a zip file (turtles all the way down).

But won't there always exist a few people who just happen to have a talent or obssesion for the details? What name do we give those people? The word "hacker" is taken, and has a more impish, generalist connotation. "Engineer" has way too formal baggage associated. We need another word that means about the same thing as "docent", I reckon.
Not just shock videos, but propaganda videos of things like IED or sniper attacks in certain warzones as well. The ability to distribute those videos plays a non-trivial role in why those attacks are carried out. Blowing up a car or two for the sake of the act itself isn't worth much, but the propaganda value of those videos shouldn't be underestimated.

If I were inclined to think that banning those videos would actually do anything to prevent people who wanted to see them from seeing them (I do not), I would assert that banning those videos would disincentivize the acts.
Security by obscurity is very, very effective in the short to medium term, especially you're paying attention to people hacking around it and are continuously evolving your defenses.

Also, they've intentionally chosen a domain where full security isn't possible, mostly due to circumstances outside their control. Remember, they captured a huge new market mainly through the sophistication of their anti-fraud systems. So security through obscurity has to remain a major tool for them.
It explicitly states on their content guidelines page they do not accept content publicly accessible from the web. Otherwise people could just publish Wikipedia pages.

The author should check the guidelines before going on accusatory rants.
The author has been around quite a long time, but he is better known lately for his (perhaps intentionally) counterintuitive opinions and goofy predictions. I think, sadly, he is going more for pageviews than credibility.

But to answer your second question, "Amazon next week will announce two 7-inch Kindle Fire models, one with new hardware and the other an updated version of the original, CNET has learned. That's counter to rumors it would launch a larger version." Oops. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57504515-94/kindle-fire-won...
Yeah, really our main constraint was the 24 hours, and getting this to MVP stage. Really interested in getting more feedback though. If you take a look at the comments under http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_... with my username and you can read a little about how this kinda developed. We're still trying to figure out whether there's a compelling and sticky feature set that we can build a meaningful, mainstream service around.
I appreciate the sentiment, but the trouble with these sorts of black-and-white claims is that they aren't always realistic.

For example, if I've been taking money from a customer, then I am required to keep appropriate records of that, for example for tax purposes. I must not completely delete that user from my database, no matter how much they ask me to or how willing I would be to do so absent the legal/regulatory requirements that I have to meet.

Having said that, I think serious ethical problems start to creep in if we allow genuine obligations like that one to start getting blurred. After all, if I have to keep some personal data on file because of my tax obligations, there's no harm in keeping the rest as well, right? No-one will ever know unless we get hacked, and we're 100% confident in our security so that's never going to happen. Similarly, if users are signing up using an e-mail address as account ID and I send the required legalese documents to them at that address when they sign up, I might as well send them "news" every few days as well since they obviously don't mind hearing from me. And hey, I've got a cookie there to handle someone logging in, so no harm in having another one for analytics, and if we're going to do that, we might as well let advertisers use tracking cookies as well because no-one cares about privacy any more and they're all on Facebook anyway.

I suppose the trouble is that all of those things are probably already illegal, at least in my jurisdiction, and any start-up willing to do them is probably just as willing to sign up to any friendly-sounding "pledge" and then completely ignore it. Put another way, I'd be happy for any business I run to commit to a realistic pledge along the lines you suggested, but then we wouldn't be doing the sorts of shady thing you're trying to highlight anyway, so I'm not sure anyone gains anything from it.
I can't decide whether to focus on the interesting aspects/potential of your tool, or the fact that you circumvented the concern I presented, but thanks for the answer nonetheless.

The ease of this tool is inversely related to the need for it. i.e. — the more complex/high volume your inbox, the more you suffer while trying to set it up.

Maybe it would be worth implementing some "starter rules" or a "wizard" that allows the first-timer to leverage many basic rules at once, immediately.

It's the Pinterest approach, if you will. :) "Pick 5 things you like" and then they auto-follow 50 people based on your choices. Voilá! Good first experience.

Remember that features ≠ power ≠ satisfaction.

I apologize for the unsolicited suggestions; you hit my area of interest right in the middle. ;) Good luck with everything and congrats on getting to the alpha in the first place!
This is an interesting piece. Its true that today's weapons are designed to fight yesterday's wars. Today, we have new problems, our current weapons don't make these problems go away. In tech, this is a little bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants". etc

This argument arguably scales to life itself. When you are a kid you want to be tall. When you are a teen (and you're tall) you want to be independent. When you are independent your single (want an SO). When you get an SO, you want a house. Etc.
explorer, investigator, researcher.
Given that it is essentially community created its understandable that Amazon feels unsure about who has the "exclusive publishing rights" to it.
Brilliant design. Quickly, someone design a mashup with Google Maps + Google Web Fonts that spits out printable directions that work with this!
Did you see cantada.ca?
I have a simple rule for email that I don't want. If there is a way to easily opt-out (clicking a link, replying with "unsubscribe", or (in rare cases) filling out my email address on a form) I will do that. I should also set a rule for that sender saying "opted-out" so I can know if they aren't respecting that. If I can't do any of those things, I mark it as spam and move on. I don't care about the negative impact to your future emails by getting spam reports in Gmail. It doesn't concern me. Let me unsubscribe easily and legally.
It says "Beta launching with the following companies in Seattle" so I'm assuming you are only accepting applications from those companies at the moment?

How will you verify the person works at these companies, or that they are indeed working professionals in the future (once the scope presumably expands)?

One thing bugging me is that if all people have to go off is a photo, this could effectively just become a "pretty girl gets 1,000 date requests, not so pretty girl gets none, or some but only off sleazes" kind of service - not nice, but unfortunately it is the nature of us to mostly be attracted to people who are physically attractive when we have no more to go off.

Also, how do you know these people are matched at all? They could be completely unmatched - it only takes a few bad dates at the start to kill off this idea through people saying how terrible the service is.

Apart from these issues, I like the simplicity of the idea.
This essay is a great example of sapping an argument of its power through dilution. At various points he argues all of the following:

1) the law is too broad (innocent teenagers)

2) the law is not broad enough (should cover murder too)

3) the wrong judicial standard is applied (strict liability)

4) abridging free speech is fundamentally destructive

These are four totally distinct elements of our legal structure, each with vastly different potential solutions. They are bound only by the fact that they are critiques of the current legal system.

To try and take in all four at once leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible solutions.

If he believes no. 4 then nos. 1-3 are immaterial. And even if he sells you on 1-3, none of those are good arguments for abolishing the law. In the end, the essay loses its power because he is not presenting a coherent critique.
Doesn't stop them from offering many public domain classics.
Who is harmed by "virtual child porn"?
Executive escalation departments are not the CEO. I served some time in customer experience before going into quality and then PM. UE and CE are very important to me. This letter does not have the ring of a typical escalation path.

Either he discovered the issue on his own or someone else within PayPal escalated it to his attention. Either is a good sign. The former path indicates a CEO who is actively listening to users and is deliberately making time to gather user feedback outside of normal channels - a very good thing for any CEO worth their salt. The latter indicates that someone else within PayPal or closely tied to PayPal had the good sense to escalate it to the CEO's eyes - that person deserves a promotion (he/she probably has some relavent skills that PayPal really needs at the moment).

I just don't see this as a typical CEO apology. It's personal and the wording actually suggests something more than a typical CEO response - I've seen a few.
Distributing videos of criminal acts for popularity does seem to be rare.

However distributing videos of acts of war (or terrorism, or freedom fighting, or whatever you want to call it) for popularity (propaganda) seems to be immensely popular. Youtube and especially LiveLeaks are full of these videos. Everything from IR videos from helicopter gunships blowing up people at night to telephoto video footage of snipers shooting people driving along roads.
Just on a point - http://www.truffle.io/about - you seem to have left the content of a past ventures about page on here :)