skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jedi Knight 2 And 3 Source Code Released
I don't code Python so as an outsider it always seemed strange that almost all code was written for Python 2.x - like 3 was unanimously rejected from the community. Can anyone shed light on why this is/was the case?
Interesting. Maybe as the push to Python 3 gets more forced, more active-legacy code will be upgraded?
Tons of changes in 3 making it backwards incompatible + nearly 20 years of legacy Python libraries
Virtual Chassis Technology
The EX8208 supports Juniper Networks’ unique Virtual Chassis technology, which enables two interconnected EX8200 chassis— any combination of EX8208s or EX8216s—to operate as a single, logical device with a single IP address.
It's not that broken. It's still not trivial to clone them like swipe cards.

The thrust of that paper is that using special equipment it's possible to use a genuine stolen card to do a non-PIN transaction, and that banks will often claim that PIN was used in a card-present transaction in order to avoid refunding money.

In the UK at least, and with a credit card, the bank is legally bound to return the money pending investigation, regardless of the circumstance.

(I agree this doesn't help with the BTC situation because chargeback is still a possibility)
They are not emotional labels, they are simply facts.

Government is by definition;

Violent; the state claims a monopoly on violence and employs the use of violence when forcing compliance with its edicts.

Parasitic; the state functions by siphoning productivity from a captive populace and channelling it into the activities of the state such as bureaucracy, war and the continued maintenance and expansion of the state and its power. In the absence of a productive body there can be no state as there is nothing for the state to parasite from.

Extortionate; the state obtains money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion.

Now you can deny these all you like, but the simple fact remains that all states share the above characteristics. It's not a matter of opinion or viewpoint, those are simple facts. Disagreeing with them does in fact make you ignorant to the reality of the situation as it stands regardless of how uncomfortable that might make you feel.
It clearly says, "the prediction is just categorical and is not an ‘image’ itself."

From the article:

>Neural decoding is performed using pattern recognition programs, also known as “decoders,” that learn statistical relationships between several pre-specified visual images and the corresponding brain activity patterns. Although this approach can predict which stimulus is presented among a set of pre-specified categories (e.g., horizontal or vertical grating), the prediction is just categorical and is not an ‘image’ itself.

In other words, this similar to saying, "Reconstruction of password using CPU activity" and then being able to tell which of a pre-specified list of passwords was used, based on clocking the CPU.

This is not exactly reconstruction.
I would have to say: "nopes...", on this one ;)
Curious: what's a handheld 1211?
What if my FB account will be disabled? ;-)
This is so wrong.

Bitcoin is excessively volatile now, and probably will be for a while. This is due to many, many reasons related to its age as a currency. The exchange rate will never be stable, but will not always be so volatile.

Regarding deflationary monetary systems, there is much debate. However people exchange things of value when there is mutual benefit - when something I have is worth more to you than to me, and vice versa, we will exchange as it is mutually beneficial. If an asset is appreciating, it affects what value I give it and for what I am willing trade, but it does not disincentive trade - it only changes the value calculation.

If I have $100 that will probably be worth $90 in 5 years, I'm willing to trade it for something that adds about $90 of value to me over the next 5 years. If I have $100 that will probably be worth $110, I'm willing to trade it for something that adds $110 of value over the next 5 years.

I think the anti-deflation argument is entirely bunk, and inflation has dire consequences for those who have fewer assets and education to protect themselves.
Ask HN: How does one get into contracting for financial institutes?
I've been trying to get into some contract developer roles for financial institutes in London. I must've applied to about 10 different roles and haven't heard anything back. My CV/Resume is one of an experienced developer (12yrs) but just don't have any/much finance experience.

Yes - I've considered the possibility that I'm shit (I'm fairly certain I'm not). But other than that how does one get into contracting for financial institutes?
How many is a lot I wonder? I guess that's even harder to figure out than how many are idle. If it's approaching a few % of the idle coins it could become significant to the BTC economy.
Show HN: Mixbolt - HTML5 DJ app I built in my spare time
All code WAS written for 2.X, because 3 was either not around yet, under constantly changing flux (before release proper, and to a certain extent for a couple of versions) or the subsequent killer: Not enough libraries that you might depend on, worked in 3.0 yet - as it was written to be deliberately incompatible by removing legacy and old ways of doing things.

IIRC most of the big packages have finally moved over so it'll just become less of an issue over time.
Google Glass presentation at SXSW 2013 by Timothy Jordan
The great thing about DR plans is... when implemented correctly no one should have to risk their life avoid using it. He didn't say that one of his servers was running a little hot (which happens, a lot). He said there was smoke and the acrid smell of something burning. Which means that one of his components actually got hot enough to ignite.

If you're not ready to use your DR plan it probably means your DR plan is inadequate to begin with. Why the hell do fire drills? Even cruise ships do drills. God forbid they pull their passengers away from that very important game of Texas Hold'em.

I probably wouldn't EPO a room for a server on fire, either -- just kill the rack, which takes slightly longer.

You fail to understand how fires start or why they spread. I mean why the hell do datacenters spend millions of dollars on fire supression when an IR cam and a handheld extenguisher is just as good, right?
I'd have to disagree that a tagger would be more likely to be involved in violence simply as a result of being a tagger.
Kudos to you!

I can see that this is really really simple stuff (single page client side only), but it's genuinely executed very well in terms of appearance, usability and functionality.

I think we could all learn a little something from this.
Laser Light Zaps Away Cocaine Addiction
Self-assembling furniture 'grows like popcorn'
"The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real..."

Yes it is. I think part of the problem is that during the interview and interviewers themselves can answer questions like: "How would you inject here xxx using Spring" (or whatever) and the developer can say something like "I'd use the @Value annotation" and that's basically all the interviewer also happens to know, in his very particular OO+XML+Hibernate+SQL hell.

Yet none of them have basic computer science skills.

Part of the problem is all these people who think that plumbing frameworks and APIs is "programming" while it's just code monkey'ing.

At one point we should get back to the real basics: I know my computer science stuff and I could actually write frameworks and APIs.

We should focus more on interviews that tests basic CS programming knowledge and understanding how you create a framework, not how you use one... Because obviously people knowing enough as to how to create a framework know how to use one.
Well, nothing new.
In Java a lot of code is still written for Java 6.
C++11 is not even fully supported from compilers
And Windows Xp still have more than 30% of market share.
Of the charges he faces, one sticks out to me: "possession of data with intent to commit a computer offence". That sounds absurdly broad and is another of these catch-all laws that enables prosecutors to press charges against almost anyone with a computer. Have uTorrent on a hard drive? You are in possession of data with the intent to commit a computer crime. Intent is arguable, of course, but in Australia that may well be enough to get you arrested and have search warrants issued that could lead to other problems if you happened to be on the radar of law enforcement.

I was under the impression that the US had the market cornered on this type of nonsense. Apparently we have competition.
According to the abstract:

Here, we present a neural decoding approach in which machine learning models predict the contents of visual imagery during the sleep onset period given measured brain activity, by discovering links between human fMRI patterns and verbal reports with the assistance of lexical and image databases. Decoding models trained on stimulus-induced brain activity in visual cortical areas showed accurate classification, detection, and identification of contents.

So it sounds like the fMRI patterns are associated with words via verbal reports from humans, and the video is simply generated from image databases by using those words. In other words, they classify the fMRI patterns based on how well they correspond to various words (measured while the subjects are awake and giving verbal descriptions of images they're looking at), and then the program measures the subjects' fMRI patterns while they're dreaming, determines the strongest 'word signals' in the patterns, and selects images from a photo database corresponding to those words and assembles them into a video based on how strong the similarity score for each word is at each moment in time.

It's interesting, but the video seems like more of a "reenactment" of a dream than a prediction. It doesn't look like you can infer actions and occurrences within a dream from this. But this is all just my interpretation.

edit: This is a fundamentally different approach from the one used in other research (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo mentioned elsewhere) in which image data is statistically regressed on fMRI patterns generated while the subjects watch those images. That approach allows for a much more precise reenactment/prediction of the actual images being dreamed.
Forget What Your Customers Need; Branding Is About What They Want
He lost me after the first two words of the main text. I've yet to find an article that's remotely interesting after starting out with either Myers-Briggs or Sapir-Whorf.
An Introduction to Dart
Would you pay 1.4 million dollars for pizza?
I'm not saying that the antitrust laws are written the way I would write them if I were king, but they are rational, if you understand where they are coming from.

They prohibit independent actors from colluding to form a monopoly, but they do not prohibit a company from being successful enough in the marketplace to become an effective monopoly. However, if a company IS that successful, then the laws restrict what the company with monopoly power can do (for instance, they cannot leverage that monopoly to increase their power and market share in a different area of business).

My guess is that funding a nonprofit, something like the EFF or the ACLU but focused specifically on providing legal representation to those sued by patent trolls, would probably be allowed under the law as long as the nonprofit assisted ANY company attacked by a patent troll, not only contributors. If it assisted only contributors, perhaps it could work as some sort of legal insurance policy?
Thanks! I was also inspired from this: http://a5.gg/
Sort of the same idea; simple, elegant..
1-3-5.com is just a GitHub page ;)
I've been following Surf Air since it was little more than an idea and a Twitter account. Awesome to see a new idea like this to aviation.
The Silent Partner (Jason Goldman of the Twitter Clan)
If you consider government to be formed of the people, rather than an external entity, then your view of these things changes.

We, the people, reserve the use of violence to those we collectively appoint to help run our society. This is necessary in order to protect the rights we grant ourselves. How would you propose to protect what you see as your property rights without violence? Oh that's right, it's only violence when other people do it, not when you do it.

We, the people, impose taxes (extortion! LOL) in order to provide collective services we all rely on.

And I disagree both that democratic government is parasitic or that expansion of the state and state power are necessarily the aims of all democratic governments.

So I absolutely can and do disagree that all states have those characteristics, that your ideal stateless existence is free of them or that all of these things are necessarily negative. Sorry. It really is a matter of opinion and viewpoint.
I've been in about 60 countries. After a while the novelty/new perspective feeling diminishes. I don't really think it's worth the effort to see all countries. What's a country anyway? Mostly borders. People and cultures are a different thing and tend to spread differently over borders.
That's a really unusual approach. The union has to represent the interests of the WORKERS, not the companies they work for, but one could argue that the workers benefit by not having their employers profits sucked away by patent trolls. At any rate, I can't imagine small technology companies encouraging their employees to form unions for ANY reason so I doubt it would be popular.
As a Rubyist it also seemed strange to me. As soon as Ruby 1.9 became stable, it was embraced by the community fairly quickly. Ruby 2.0 has only been out for a month and there are already projects that require 2.0. In contrast, Python 3 adoption still isn't finished, and Python 3 has been around for several years longer than Ruby 1.9.

I guess that the incompatible changes in Python 3 don't really help. Ruby 1.9 introduced incompatibilities but they were fairly minor and easy to resolve. The biggest incompatibility was probably the introduction of string encodings. Python 3 introduced a stricter string encoding system and changed syntax in some ways. Some of the syntax changes make it very difficult to write code that is compatible with 2.6, 2.7 and 3.0.
I like to initialize the connection to the database in my app.js, and create a global variable to each of my app's collections. The collection variables are then always usable throughout the rest of the app, so I don't have to connect to the database or find the collection again.

Is there any reason to not do it my way? I never see it shown that way in examples so I wonder if I'm missing something.
Difference being that new versions of java, windows, c++ compilers work with the existing software.
complete and utter scam
Shadow DOM and web components probably give you the document root context you need for that example to work.
Friday Freak Out – Instagram Eyeburners
Selfies, food and cats. NO! NO! NO!
I think you are completely wrong: in your characterization of the left, in your characterization of the right, and in the ability of governments to affect the use of bitcoin. But you've got an interesting viewpoint, so you've got my upvote.
"I can totally reach into the back of this gigantic, flesh eating machine to move that widget a little bit to the right. Management might give me a raise for saving them money!" -famous last words of a former factory worker.
One has to wonder what counts as a "country," and when you can say you've done them all:

As for least favorite, well, I was served goat in Somaliland
in a situation where it was difficult to decline.

As far as I know, Somaliland is a bit of a 'limbo' state, it isn't universally recognised and many see it as just a region of Somalia.

If he visits Somaliland and counts that, did he also visit Transnistria? And if so, how low down the list do you go - do you then have to visit every self-declared nation-state all the way down to Sealand?

The list that fascinates me is the amateur radio DXCC list of "entities" which count separately. Many of them are dependencies of other countries, a lot are uninhabited (I might book my next holiday on Peter I Island or Scarborough Reef) but there are currently 340 of them: http://www.arrl.org/country-lists-prefixes

It's all really interesting stuff!
Everything he's complaining about is a feature in Google Now. Google Now does know where my house is based on where I stay during the night. It figured out where my girlfriend lives, and tries to route me there sometimes. It knows where I work. It knows when I'm expecting a package from eBay, where I shop, where I go to eat out. Based on those signals, it probably knows how much disposable income I have. This is just Facebook getting jealous over how well Google has sucked all of this data out of it's userbase.

As an aside, Google Now is pretty awesome, and I trust our Google Overlords to not use my personal information for evil.
I know there's a lot of this kind of advise out there and I find most of it works fairly well. I think that for people who have a problem getting things done, the main issue is just not having any way of tracking things at all.

I don't follow any methodology as such, but one thing which did help me was reading a tiny bit about the Pomodoro stuff. Basically the thing which absolutely kills my productivity is context switching. i.e. starting one thing, then breaking off to do another. What I take away from the Pomodoro stuff is that I should not work on anything for less than 20mins and that time should be carved up into 20min chunks.

In practice all this means to me is that I try not to get distracted by other things and if somebody attempts to get my attention I'll get them to wait until I've completed the thing which I'm at task on.

I don't do anything by strict structure, so everything's subject to changes, but I try to be careful to allocate a minimum amount of time to things and I try to make a todo list. In my private life I use toodledo, which gives me decent views by due date/urgency/context/folder. At work, I'm using a mix of Gmail stars, Gmail tasks and proprietary apps, though in the past I have just used a single .txt file.
A Place Where Old Computers Go to Live
Thanks! Great comment!
Python 2 and Python 3 are effectively different languages in the way that VB and C# are different languages. Does it seem strange that some people code in VB when C# exists?

Python 3 isn't just a little bit incompatible in a few places, it has widespread incompatibilities and is therefore effectively a different language.
"Sure he's a tyrant, but he's our tyrant"

This is exactly why I look forward to the rise of cryptocurrencies; protection from people like you.
Indeed, let's look at some remarks from some leading "thinkers" on deflation:

> Deflation rewards the prudent saver and punishes the profligate borrower. The way a society, like an individual, becomes wealthy is by producing more than it consumes. - Doug Casey

Moralistic pseudo-economical bullshit. Want to know some scandalous borrowers' names? Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Warren Buffet, I could go on. The last sentence is so wrong it hurts; a pro-capitalist economist should know very well that, in a market economy, production equals consumption. Shame on him.

> Deflation puts a break–at the very least a temporary break–on the further concentration and consolidation of power in the hands of the federal government and in particular in the executive branch. It dampens the growth of the welfare state, if it does not lead to its outright implosion. - Jörg Guido Hülsmann

Holy fucking shit Batman, you just did not make the case for deflation based on your pet political fringe worldview. For the record: one, the "executive branch" is not a monolithic entity, and the central bank is quite independent from say, the president; two, what you call "nanny state" is my "minimum decency and human rights state", so thanks for the monetary coup d'etát; three, what about constant, steep deflation favouring by nature the concentration of power into a oligopoly of capitalists. But I guess, since it's a oligopoly of capitalists, it's all OK.

> George Selgin rightly distinguishes between malign demand-driven deflation which is an unfortunate secondary effect of a central bank-manipulated, inflationary malinvestment phase and benign deflation which is the result of an increase in productivity.

Yeah, dude should also talk about malign deflation that's designed into your currency. Nothing to do with increased productivity, incidentally. One wonders whom these leading thinkers lead, and where...

Really, I'm most sympathetic with the notion that lowering prices will increase demand. True, however, we're interested here in the matter of lending and borrowing, which is, in my opinion, very worrying. Of course, I'm not an economist, so I might very well be wrong. However, these gentlemens' arguments do nothing to persuade me.
what exactly would you like to do? work as a freelance developer? what languages do you code in?
Wow. Former Windows phone exec to head Amazon’s mystery mobile project
It was not a rejection. Python 3 (project name Python 3000, just to give you the kind of scope we're talking about) was always expected to be a long and rather arduous migration, because it "cleaned up" a number of things in backwards-incompatible manner: the stdlib was reorganized, syntax was added (and removed), semantics altered (the basic string of Python 2 is a bytestring, in Python 3 it's a codepoint sequence and implicit conversions were removed from the language), shuffling between keywords and regular symbols, etc... It might have been even more arduous than the core team expected, but most of the community has been aware it'd take a long time from the start (the initial planning alone took ~30 months: the PEP3000 was created in April 2006 and Python 3.0 was released in December 2008, and as far as I remember Python 3.0 was not considered a production-able Python, more of a "stable" version for experiments and discovery in real-world settings)

Things were moving very slowly at the start, some features were backported to Python 2, others were reintroduced (in Python 3.2 and 3.3) and compatibility packages slowly appeared as people started experimenting with porting strategies and methods.

Since the second half of 2012, things have started picking up steam as bigger packages have started their migration effort (often as single-source, which is now considered the best strategy when possible) which is starting to solve the chicken-and-eggs problem for end-users (applications can't switch until all their dependencies are compatible)[0].

Python 2 will stick around though, there are 20 years of Python code which won't run as-is on Python 3, and may never do barring significant rewrite.

And of course Python 3 may yet be rejected by the community, although it definitely seems to be gaining — rather than losing — steam. The biggest problems in the long term will probably be in the Scientific Python communities.

[0] A few pretty big names are still Python 2 though, Werkzeug and Flask are big ones for webby stuff, the official-ish MySQL adapter is an other one for many, and a bunch are not considered "production-ready" state or side-packages are missing e.g. Django 1.5 is the start of Django's transition but many extensions such as South or the debug-toolbar are not p3-compatible.
Expensive Urban Real Estate Is a Consumption Choice
Can't shed any light on this, just wanted to add a 'me too'. As a perl veteran, I've been meaning to learn Python someday, and I figured I'd wait until the 'new' one became the standard, saving me from worrying about all the random incompatibilities. Maybe I'll only have to wait a few more years!

...makes me wonder if anyone had the opposite thought: A python programmer thinking of learning perl, but waiting until this newfangled perl 6 became the standard. I wonder who'll end up learning a new language first?