skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the article, this line really hit me, "Are we morally required to intervene"?

I'm not sure. Here's a slightly open documentary (around the 44 minute mark)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaqbVSEPfRc

Even with all the brainwashing, they somehow feel the nationalism to fight through the "bad times" and find time to feel happy with smaller things in life.
I've always felt happiness is differential. To a North Korean kid, happiness from a sumptuous meal is equivalent to getting an iPad in the US? The Kims are enforcing the "Ignorance is bliss" ideology by censorship. Is that morally correct, I'm not sure but it's something we can ponder about.
When talking about big numbers, I would definitely consider up arrow notation as standard notation.
You are spot on. I was at Microsoft during one of these protocol discussions. I worked on a popular (and contentious) directory product for whom interoperability (or lack thereof) was the product's bread and butter. For the mid-2000 release we were embracing XML goodness from the W3C. XML was in style in the same way JSON is today. We settled on WS-Transfer and IBM's WS-ResourceTransfer extensions because, frankly, it didn't matter what we picked so long as it was XML.

Well, we worked on the release for 2 years and then 6 months before shipping our VP decides that decision posed too big of a risk for IBM gaining 'the upper hand.' He made a point of blaming people for the decision he had approved years ago. We then had to rip out a perfectly good and tested implementation of WS-ResourceTransfer, design a replacement, make it an industry standard, and finish with the original schedule. We came up with something 'different' called MS-WSTIM ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd302851.aspx -- fun fact, I got stuck writing most of those docs).

After the change our principal technical architect spent the next year going to conferences talking about the technical merits of how MS-WSTIM exceeds WS-ResourceTransfer in oh-so-many ways. He supposedly worked to convince minor players to adopt the new 'industry standard.'

The whole thing was a sham. MS-WSTIM is WS-ResourceTransfer by a different name. It just wasn't IBM's, and like so much at Microsoft, politics reigned supreme. I would be surprised if the same were not happening here.
Yes, there's exactly the same problem as with Freenet. Because same plaintext encrypts to same ciphertext there is huge problem with that. If I really don't anyone want to know that I got this data, that's failed scenario. It makes things easier for service provider, they don't want to know what they're storing. Just like Freenet's data cache. But if I know what I'm looking for, I can confirm if my cache contains that data or not. Therefore this approach doesn't remove need for pre-encrypting sensitive data. Otherwise it's easy to bust you for having the data.

Edit: GNUet quote:"The gnunet encryption scheme is remarkable in that it allows identical files
encrypted under different keys to yield the same ciphertext, modulo a small
block of metadata. These files can then be split into small blocks and distributed
(and replicated if need be) across hosts in a gnunet system to balance load."

http://grothoff.org/christian/esed.pdf
Efficient Sharing of Encrypted Data - Krista Bennett, Christian Grothoff, Tzvetan Horozov, Ioana Patrascu
Thanks! I wonder why he didn't just link it in the blog article. Your comment should be more towards the top, I just had to spend a few minutes clicking around his site to get to that article.

To Mr.Minimal: The archive link only shows last month, so I had to hover the subtly-bolded numbers in the calendar box to be able to browse older titles and hope for the best ... I feel like I must have missed some completely obvious way to navigate your blog?

(edit: the above remark is intended as constructive criticism--I tried my best wording it as such, but reading it back, that maybe didn't quite come out right)
I heartily agree that good code makes sense on it's own.

One of the things which good code and inline documentation (comments) do not communicate very well is a high level overview of the architecture of the application. In my opinion, it is better to describe such things using external documents and diagrams.

The same goes for the deployment procedures and the way the servers are laid out as well as dependencies. For example, the place I'm currently at had no documentation what-so-ever for the libraries and modules necessary to run the in-house web application and, consequently, it took us more time than it should have to figure out what needed to be installed when we moved to a new server.

Thanks for the book recommendation, seems like a great one judging by the reviews. It's always useful to learn more - will add it to my 'to read' list.
Well, they could have. Unless you're generating original content. This is the problem if you are sharing nothing something which is not 100% original on block level.

This is just the reason, why sensitive data needs to be encrypted before deduplication.

OFF System is also one interesting approach to this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem

These are more or less "funny" work-a-rounds to the actual problem.
I have no use for money, Bill Gates says
This is what choice is about. Like the start screen? No problem. Don't like the start screen? Use one of the many start menu replacements.
There'll be plenty of cases when the content is inherently infringing. Cam copies, for example. Additionally, if there's a jurisdiction where a DVD rip of Dora The Explorer is not considered a fair use, they may start pounding Mega to limit this jurisdiction's access to the file. This sort of thing.
Not true. Windows 8 runs regardless of whether Secure Boot is supported.
Analyze HTTP requests with tshark
Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts.
Well, you said "encrypt", what do you mean by encrypt? What's the key? In the Freenet's solution, they encryption key for the data is the data, not any random or user provided key. So the same plaintext is always turned in to same ciphertext. Which we all know, it's very bad idea, it ruins encryption. In this case, it's quite easy to spot out all of the users having the same content in their account.

This is only reasonable method when ever you can assume that every plaintext is unique, which also makes point of deduplicationg data absolutely pointess.
Agreed - China has a Communist government, but with a mostly Capitalist economy. Deng Xiaoping's 1992 catchphrase - "To get rich is glorious" (致富光荣) - unleashed a wave of personal entrepreneurship that continues belie any socialist tendencies. That said, the state's grip on industry, and barriers to entry for business, are still high.
Lessons Learned: Teams and Failure
> Humans represent time vaguely rather than precisely. Computers tend not to.

Hi. A colleague of mine is working on a large medieval dataset than contains many dates and recently explained this concept of vagueness to me. What's the standard way for dealing with this in MySQL for instance, how do comparisons and orderings work for a collection of vague dates?

You're saying ISO 8601 can do this, and MySQL can talk ISO 8601?
This response destroys the Atlantic’s reputation: blame dodging, inability to see why Scientology is an inappropriate advertiser, and self-aggrandising behaviour are all on display. What a pathetic magazine.
> Your competitors are often subsidized entities, sovereign governments, or extremely well politically connected.

Was that SpaceX or Armadillo?? Highly doubt it. However you are somehow right as it is probably a pita to compete in a highly regulated market if you do not have the power to bribe, err lobby some politicians :)
Hyperdex 1.0rc1 shows a lot of promise but calling it a release candidate is premature:

- the unit tests use an old api and schema -- they flat out don't run

- the disk storage primitive was recently replaced, in its entirety

- the network protocols are undocumented

- the schema is undocumented

Most of these items are fine in a project in development, but with the current state, I wouldn't consider it a candidate for anything but discussion as a research project.
Whenever one of these "inside NK" articles show up, I am more impressed by the arrogance and the ignorance of the commenters than I am by the stories.

"OMG they're brainwashed, do we morally have an obligation to intervene" says one smug commenter.

Well, my friend, look at Times Square. What is it? It's a fucking AD clusterfuck. Companies, ads, fake artificial and as plastic as it gets. And yet, no ads on NK's streets... That is so refreshing to me.

What is so inviting about capitalism? Go to Reddit and read the first page: booze, artificial and superficial crap and social problems all over the place. People have iphones and fancy cars but they're socially sick, alone... It may be terrible in NK, but who are you to be criticizing them? Just because you have iphones and an Audi in your garage, what we're seeing today is an ever more lonely society whose only escapes are booze, pot and superficial pleasures like buying something and showing a photo of it online.

These comments here...the top one says "it's all fake". WOW good thing it's not as real as silicon tits or mcdonalds sandwich photos! Those are real! And your TV ads, and your promissed dream, those are all real too! Nevermind that you bailed out banks who robbed you and you are now getting sued by those banks! THAT is reality folks, poor North Koreans who live under a terrible fake regime that fools all of them!

How about those North Korean jails eh? Horrible gulags! Nevermind that the world's largest carcerary population is in the United States of America. And the death penalty? It must be terrible to live under a regime that straps people to machines that kill them in barbaric ways? Oh my God, NK is the evil empire!

How about those children faking studies?? That's awful! It's better to live in a country where children don't even fake it! Crack, pot and god awful music prevail in our schools, our children are grabbing machine guns to kill each other and you find it funny to mock those poor North Koreans!

I feel sick to my stomach to see where our society is and how stupid and ignorant and brainwashed YOU are to accept the immoral, indecent and corrupt state YOU live under and then go on to criticize other countries whose people are just as honest and decent as you. Their regime is failed and so is ours - you are no better than them, never forget that. You have an iphone, they don't, that is all you're better at.
I'm pretty sure it is also illegal to distribute software in such a fashion in the EU
Yes, that's exactly what the author is saying. But believing something, doesn't make it true. In this case, the question is whether or not these things that our brain isn't fit to cope with do really have more power over us than we think.
WebRTC is being develop by IETF and W3C both of whom have very strong preferences for royalty-free (and otherwise RAND-Z/RF) standards. Why would you imagine they would pick an MPEG codec?

Maybe the low-delay wideband voice and audio codec also developed by IETF under the same requirements (both technical and royalty-wise) would fit better?

And, on the topic at hand, have Microsoft made any public statement about their support for that codec, despite the fact that it was co-developed by their Skype purchase? Only vague murmurings that the alternative standard discussed here shouldn't be "tied to a single codec". Note the masterful misdirection that would make you thing that WebRTC was "tied to a single codec" when in fact you can use any codec you like, you just have to support Opus (best in class, yet RF) and G.711 (old and busted for legacy interop) to help ensure interoperability.

The fact that the simple logic of this seems somehow underhand to you is a testament to the great political job that Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and others have done in the web codec arena where a codec, which could never be adopted under W3C rules, has come to seem like the obvious choice when really it was a bold attempt to subvert the W3C into not specifying a royalty-free codec so that a royalty-encumbered de-facto standard of their choice would fill the gap that was left.
Wow, such a interesting life and career just from browsing her Wikipedia page.
Sbt-stats: An SBT Plugin For Source Code Statistics
How to Start Learning Computer Programming
Have you considered if you the expertise for Space? Elon Musk is a physicist by training so he can also be the chief designer - any mistakes there and it is essentially his fault. If you have millions to invest, would you trust someone to do the designing, knowing that a single mistake on their part might mean you lose all the money you put into the rocket?
Theoretically what is the size of the smallest rocket that could reach LEO?
To support schema evolution. Of course it's up to you to write code that can actually handle missing fields, but once you have a required field in a message, you can never remove it.

From the docs:

"You should be very careful about marking fields as required. If at some point you wish to stop writing or sending a required field, it will be problematic to change the field to an optional field – old readers will consider messages without this field to be incomplete and may reject or drop them unintentionally. You should consider writing application-specific custom validation routines for your buffers instead. Some engineers at Google have come to the conclusion that using required does more harm than good; they prefer to use only optional and repeated. However, this view is not universal."

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto
They answer your question (from the TOS): "You must maintain copies of all data stored by you on our service. We do not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of data or the services will be bug free. You are completely responsible to remove all data prior to termination of services."

Reading their TOS makes me not want to use the service (but thats true to any other "cloud storage" provider aswell).
There seems to be widespread confusion about WebRTC already adopting VP8/Webm as a mandatory-to-implement codec. No such decision has been made. Though the two furthest along implementations (Chrome and Firefox), which also happen to have about a billion users between them are both pushing VP8 which might make it a defacto standard anyway.

They (IETF WebRTC) have adopted the Opus audio codec as mandatory-to-implement, which isn't officially part of WebM (though apparently Chrome 25 can play it in that container) as it's far more suited to real-time communication than Vorbis.

For the video codec, they were going to call for consensus (basically on VP8 vs H.264) but Google mysteriously suggested that the decision be delayed on the day before it was supposed to have happened, claiming to have something in the works that would solve the whole problem to everyone's satisfaction.

My wild guess (given the fact that the VP9 encoder and decoder is now available to download from mainline codebase and is beating x264 and H.265 objectively and subjectively [1] for pre-recorded content--and I'd maybe guess that even VP8 beats H.264 for standard WebRTC use cases) is that they're working out some behind the scenes political deal with other industry partners to jump straight to VP9, either by getting all relevant parties on board regardless of patent sabre-rattling, or by working something out with patent holders to neutralise that threat. Both are a bit wild as I said, the more boring explanation is that Google feared losing the call for consensus and had something brewing to sway a few swing voters but didn't have it ready in time.

[1]: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1611395#post1611395
I don't think flying a UAV from the south side of the border would be the wisest move, considering the tension between the two countries.

You might set off a diplomatic incident.
It's really a good question and I have been wondering about this for some time too. I can't really offer anything valuable except that Google is a great success story:

"Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, the co-founders, spent nearly a year searching for a chief executive before settling on Mr. Schmidt almost two years ago. In the words of Mr. Brin, who is now 29, ''He was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man,'' a counterculture techno-arts festival held annually in the Nevada desert." from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/business/in-searching-the-...
UFC: Belfort KOs Mid-level Bisping: Calls-out Jon Jones
Ok, I'll do. I will assume that we already have the image in an 1-dimensional array, each element containing an array of the RGB values. Then we can convert it to grayscale with one line of python.

gray = map(lambda p:sum(p)/3,IMG)

If you want to test it, you can use this 3x3 sample image (or just load one):

IMG = [[5, 5, 5], [6, 8, 9], [94, 123, 4], [54, 5, 32], [44, 3, 3], [34, 234, 33], [5, 5, 5], [6, 8, 9], [94, 123, 4]]

The result will look like this:

[5, 7, 73, 30, 16, 100, 5, 7, 73]

If your image happens to be loaded into a 2-dimensional array, use this:

gray = map(lambda row:map(lambda p:sum(p)/3,row), IMG)

Sobel is slightly more complicated, but can be written like this (you'll need a larger sample image though):

width, height #width and height of our image
IMG #2D array of our RGB values
sobel #result image
# The actual filter starts here:
for x in range(1,width-1):
for y in range(1,height-1):
sx = IMG[x-1][y-1]+IMG[x][y-1]*2+IMG[x+1][y-1]-IMG[x-1][y+1]-IMG[x][y+1]*2-IMG[x+1][y+1]
sy = IMG[x+1][y-1]+IMG[x+1][y]*2+IMG[x+1][y+1]-IMG[x-1][y-1]-IMG[x-1][y]*2-IMG[x-1][y+1]
sobel[x][y] = Math.sqrt(sx*sx+sy*sy)

A total of 5 lines.
And I have to thank you, because I finally just learned what convolutions are while doing this.
"Space company" and "Space flight company" are not necessarily equal. We (GrantTree) have some clients who are trying to do things ancillary to the raw, unforgiving problem of space flight. For example: http://www.noughttwosixty.com/Nought2Sixty/About.html

Not to comment on that specific company, but my point is that space offers far more opportunities for companies than just the problem of how to get there.
That 30k is the total prize package. The 1st place prize is still 10k.

More on the prizes here: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MatchDetails&rd=...
To a lot of people, Twitter isn't a 'web page' per se. Countless consumer devices have Twitter clients that do not in any way resemble a web page.
License of the toolchain?
dating limited to any given group of people is just so backward it's amazing they'd try it for scientists. If you're university educated and are dumb enough to think only other university graduates are educated, you'll disregard lots of great people that have learned by say, reading on their own, and would also have a lot to offer. Reinforcing these artificial boundaries is just absurd.
> Certainly, and importantly, this is totally irrelevant to India.

India is a huge (by population) with a similar start point to china also a huge (by population) country, they have some similarities in their culture, but a large defining difference is their way of government, and there reactions to "The West". It isn't totally irrelevant, and meaningful comparisons can be made, but they must be considered.

> Historically, communist countries have had terrible standards of living; this is extremely well documented

You mean "Historically (Except China)"... That's like excluding the US when talking about Democracy.

> ...but we've got a few more examples of that working out, than we do of communist regimes working out

Actually I think you'll find the poorest nations are mostly democratic (of some form). [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage...
> However you feel about copyright

Hm. This makes it sound like your point stands regardless of personal ethics; as though

> profitting off of the distribution of other peoples work, without their permission, is not something that should be encouraged or tolerated

is a provable, obvious, non-debatable stance. I don't think it is.

I don't think profiting off it changes the basic ethics; if something is morally okay to do as a hobby, it should generally be morally okay to do as a business until proven otherwise.

I wouldn't agree you always need the permission of someone upstream to share ideas or content. That's something we can discuss. Don't make it sound like you have the answer sheet in front of you.
No one is better than anyone else, but the western world has a key critical freedom that the people of North Korea don't have; freedom of speech.

People have a problem with the tight grip the generational dictatorship has had over the country for years, not its people who live under it
A Brainfuck CPU in FPGA
> Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty.

I think you are confusing communism with capitalism... The nations that at any point had slavery, were capitalist. Capitalism itself can only exist in "surplus value" scenario, meaning someone/thing is being exploited.

abject poverty, only exists because abject wealth exists. Abject wealth is a result of capitalism.
An opensource project for creating an information ecosystem with feature phones.
User Guide -- https://github.com/abhardwaj/voicex/wiki/User-Guide

VoiceX is an open source platform designed to create an information ecosystem for people in developing world, with low-end feature phones that can't connect to the Internet, to generate, manage, retrieve, and search information.

Background:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/anantb/files/voicex.pdf (a little old paper -- the actual product is much different)

Feel free to use it:
Or simply a feature that existed prior to the other folder.
Evolve or die. I am the “old school developer” but that didn't stop me from staying up to date with technologies and trends. DIY developers are good to some point. You will never build anything large or build efficiently if you don't understand that not only DRY has value, but DRO as well (Don't Repeat Others' work).

Nobody blames the “old school developers” for not building their own computers like probably the “very old school developers” did. Computers are taken for granted and are obvious tools of the trade. Well, today frameworks and API are that tools.

As for developers not understanding of how stuff really works - they were always there. There were always people whose skills were limited to installing PHP-Nuke or osCommerce, adding some modules and changing frontend code. Don't confuse them with software developers.
| You realise this is a platitude, right?

So is pointing out that there are some small villages in China that live in poverty.
Jesus. Each time when I read accounts of North Korean travels, I almost feel ache in my stomach picturing the eerie atmosphere, and then a sense of relief and appreciation of my immensely comfortable life in comparison.

On the other hand, "ignorance is bliss" as they say. And without any reference framework in sight, they may actually be happy...
I try to refrain from making emotional political statements on this site but I cannot resist.

> Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange.

This is essentially advocating a visit to a huge concentration camp which is still in operation. The abuses that go on in this country are beyond belief. This whole article brings about a feeling of sickness in me.
>What I would definitely NOT do is pull out my rolodex and "contact every colleague I have client-side and agency-side" (this must be hundreds if not thousands of people)

meh. In almost certain likelihood the guy didn't do that. It would make him look childish to his contacts and would waste a bunch of his time. Why do all that work when he can get the same effects (scaring the guy and telling him to fuck off) just writing a tweet?

Much more effective. Though it does tell me never to do business with Campbell.
Hmmm - advice for beginners that does not mention Python or Ruby but rather headlines with C++ (admittedly caveated)? Sorry, cannot endorse.