skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We do our best to make sure no patient goes without an update for too long, but are a bit constrained by our operational capacity right now (part of the reason we're fundraising).

In Madeline's case, the surgery is taking longer than anticipated because she had some unanticipated dental issues that her doctors wanted to take care of before they operated.

Because of limited resources, we usually prioritize sending "final" updates over "preliminary" ones, but you're right that in Madeline's case we definitely need to prioritize keeping her donors posted on the reason for the delay.

As Chase mentioned, this kind of crowdsourced spot checking is exactly why we make all of our records public. Thanks for bringing this up!
I always go through and delete government and ISP certs from my computer's cert store.

On OS X, you can do this from Keychain Access.
Well, you can at least remove those from the trusted cert list manually, but it seems like insanely bad juju for ISPs to have their CAs installed with the browser. I wonder if that's worth opening a bug on the Firefox tracker.
Alain de Bottom on Pessimism
This is an old video i was recommended today, and i really and enjoyed and thought I should pass the torch to my fellow hackers.
My point is not that this comment is unhelpful. My point is that it would be better if the reason for this comment's existence were eliminated. I.e. that the removal of unnecessary complication in the system is an even more laudable goal than commenting well.

Obviously, both will have a part in any well written an maintained system. But the person I'm responding to held good comments up as the most important aspect of system maintainability, and that is simply not the case.
I'm not quite sure how you got the idea that he let anyone touch his computers out of his post: he said a default CA by Firefox.

There are a number of ISPs that are also CAs that are installed in many browsers by default.
Yes and no. A year ago, I was thinking of renting out rooms in my home to my sister and two others (her friend and another person). My sister ended up getting sick, so she wasn't able to live with me. I did get a roommate however 6 months ago. So, that's a step in the right direction, but it seems very tough to rent the other rooms out. I usually have someone agreeing on living here only to find out that they chose another place instead.

I started getting fed up and have decided that this place needs to be filled now or I just need to get rid of it anyway I can. I've been lightly thinking about doing that for a while, but now that I have a working prototype online (and may more to come), I need to move a lot faster.

It is maddening. But, I suppose that the start up life can be this way. The ultimate goal is to be able to get this thing off the ground, so that's something I just have to do. I just want to get rid of this thing and focus on building this product. It is my first home, but now is the time to part ways with it. I will be making calls this week on how to move forward.
'notion that developers need to either become spectacularly successful through starting companies or die trying'

Agree. You missed the option of having a side-project that pulls 20k-30k a year without much additional effort after launch. You can have your stable job, too!
It's one of the worst features that they run. I've gotten good enough at guessing which is "Ask Stack" from the headline that I don't click them anymore, though.
Am I the only one genuinely afraid of clicking any of cables with keyword SECRET ?
I don't think this is MCMC. The way I read it, monte-carlo was mentioned with regards to the idea of searching widely and sparsely. This is counter to the more targeted idea of MCMC, which generates a bunch of correlated samples to more efficiently sample the distribution.

Another reason to suspect this is closer to genetic programming is that they talk about mutation and fitness. I got the impression that the algorithm searches a space of program trees via mutation, without keeping a population - so no crossover. If they did use MCMC it would be as a very specialized form, such as simulated annealing. Also, the Monte Carlo technique used in Go is with tree search, not MCMC.

I find it amazing that randomization works so effectively, we must live in a friendly universe. Many real world problems tend to have enough exploitable structure that the idea of saving effort on optimization (xor measurement) via randomization is a powerful one.
Probably an unintentional optimization/side effect of using the GPU for some drawing path.

Regression tests are fun!
> When a currency is experiencing deflation it makes sense not to spend it. In that world, keeping my money under my mattress is the soundest investment strategy.

A does not imply B.

If the currency deflates at 1% but you could invest at 2%, your mattress isn't the most sound investment strategy.
How to be sarcastic, courtesy of NBC's Community
https is no longer "rigid and costly" in a technical sense
On a recent website I did my own tests and saw a 2.5% increase in request speed (between http & https). Basically if you aren't a super huge site you aren't going to see any difference. I use https on all my sites, it's just simpler in the long term and you circumvent a lot of problems with security.
Disney's stance on this is incredible when you consider that they have profitted greatly on the back of public domain works.
And here's your annual reminder of the upside-down-ternet
http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
Check out "Document sets to search" at the top of the search tool.

It looks like you select "The Kissinger Cables" (1,707,500 diplomatic documents from 1973 to 1976) and/or "Cablegate" (251,287 diplomatic cables, nearly all from 2003 to 2010)
One of my favorite bits of Zapier happens when you want to wire up services they don't support: they actually ask you for an email address to notify you when they do support it. And yet almost nobody else does.

More impressive (although this is, to be fair, a low bar): they do not try to stick you on a mailing list or anything like that.
I don't know where the authors got "rigid and costly", but I think it's just BS... 2008 was a long time ago though, so maybe it was slightly more challenging then.

When Google went over to SSL for Gmail, they said
"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that. "
http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/google-switch-ssl-cost.html

That, coupled with the general availability of cheap and free CA signed certificates makes the claim pretty baseless.
We would PAY you to learn Ruby on Rails!
I am the founder of OpenDomain - we let open source groups use domains for FREE. We are looking for someone to learn Ruby On Rails to promote our domain RubyRails.Com - contact me AT Ric
Here's where it was introduced: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378882

Interesting comment on that thread:

> This CA was singled out as a CA that signed an excessive number of intermediate authorities (252) which together only have issued 4164 certificates in EFFs talk at C3. This is, by far, the highest number, the next contender is GTE Cybertrust with 93.
http://www.quora.com/Ember-js/Which-one-of-angular-js-and-em...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147035
> SSL virtually requires buying certificates so
> small/hobby sites won't use it

startssl.com offers free SSL certificates valid in almost every browser, good for one year. I've been using them for my own site with no problems. Certificate cost is no excuse for continuing to use unsecured HTTP.

> it involves multiple round-trips and latency is never
> going to go away

Assuming reasonable protocol design (somewhat problematic for HTTP/1.0, better in /1.1 and SPDY), additional round trips are only a factor for the initial connection setup. Later requests can re-use the existing SSL session.

> part of what makes encryption work is that it's
> computationally hard on today's hardware

Encryption is based on being computationally expensive for a third party. The computational load on the communicating parties is negligible, particularly with modern CPUs. From http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.ht... , Google experiences CPU overheads of less than one percent:

> On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts
> for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of
> memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead.
I'm not sure how it is in the US, but in Australia getting a $400K mortgage when you're in your 20s is not uncommon. Real estate doesn't get cheaper, and it's much harder to buy when you're in your 30s with kids and a single income facing a now $500K mortgage. Sacrifycing debt for freedom does make it harder down the road.

I'm 29 now, but when I was in my early-mid 20s I had no problems working a day job and then coding nights and only sleeping a few hours. It's more painful than having no responsibilities, but you have that sort of energy when you're young so make the most of it.

Nowadays I'm actively rejecting promotions, more staff and more responsibilities as I've reached a point in my career where the pay is good and takes only 40 hours on a normal week. That leaves a lot of room for side projects whilst still laying a good financial base for the future.

So I agree with the OP's response except that you should consider waiting until you have implemented your idea and have a proven, consistent revenue stream from it before you up and leave. It may take a year to get to that stage, a bit of pain - but nothing worth doing is easy.
You'd find some books on nature-inspired computation to be interesting, since you've reinvented some of the parts of it:

http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/
http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/metaheuristics/
I hate this sort of advice that's centered around passion. I don't think you have to be passionate about programming necessarily, just passionate about accomplishing something meaningful while having the requisite problem solving skills to get the work done. I think someone with an analytical mind, who is at good problem solving and enjoys accomplishing STUFF will probably come to love programming if she or he throws themselves at it.

The kind of person that knows already that she loves programming probably already has a job as a programmer.
Some don't mind volatility as long as (a) the long-term expected gain is positive; and (b) the return is uncorrelated with more traditional investments.
Ah the joys of getting Watcom C to work with PMODE [1] before PMODE/W made it easier.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE
Any of the hundreds of different advertising services that feed into the exchanges that are carried by the major networks. There's likely no direct connection between who sold the ad and who made the deal with this ISP to let them serve that network. H&R Block probably had no idea their ad ever appeared on Apple's site.

http://blog.inuvi.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/LUMA-Landsc...
Chardin.js
No, he did not: typing rm -rf / into a root shell will delete the OS and your home directory.

It is a little more complicated than that, but the complications do not really affect very much. Last time I installed Debian around 2005 the documentation encouraged me to give /home its own partition, in which case rm -rf / will not get it. But on OS X the default is to put everything in one big partition and I kind get the feeling that Linux has moved that way, too. And even if /home is on its own partition, there are many ways for the malefactor to get /home, e.g., rm -rf /home.
The standardization of chess set design
That is smart! I will add some before and after comparisons to the site for the next update.
It's public domain now, but if you don't trust the law to let you read and write freely, use Tor https://www.torproject.org/
Free responsive wireframes (GIF)
Future of CSS layout: CSS Grid
> The upside of HTC First: will be the first HTC device to have native Android UI - if you turn off Home.

How soon we forget. HTC did make a little phone called the Nexus One. Prior to that they also made the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream.

That being said, I don't know if the HTC First will really have a native Android UI underneath. It could just as easily be "Sense themed to look AOSP" like the (US) T-Mobile G2. That probably depends on how much Facebook cares about what's underneath.

Edit: Apparently HTC's OpenSense SDK includes lock screen APIs (see http://www.htcdev.com/devcenter/opensense-sdk/lock-screen/lo... ). That seems like another argument for a Sense-derivative.
> I got the impression that the algorithm searches a space of program trees via mutation, without keeping a population - so no crossover.

My reading is that they're generating programs of gradually increasing length using markov chains (because the original superoptimizer work was generating random programs of progressively greater length until one worked). So not really a classic GP scheme at all.

> Also, the Monte Carlo technique used in Go is with tree search, not MCMC.

Monte Carlo tree search, right. That connection was drawn by the blogger, not in the paper.

> I find it amazing that randomization works so effectively, we must live in a friendly universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
As always, there are many reasons.

1. While specific operations are three or four orders of magnitude faster than the old computers, the underlying operations are only small multiples faster. When the computer salesmen of the world quote numbers, they are the most optimistic numbers possible. MIPS == Misleading Information Provided by Salesmen... a definition that goes back 30 years or more and still is being practiced today.

For instance, when a CPU is rated at 3GHz, it means it can do 3x10^9 NOPs a second, but a missed branch prediction will stall the pipeline for tens to hundreds of (3GHz) clock cycles. Tens if the target of the missed branch is in L1 cache. Hundreds if the target is in SDRAM in a closed page. Excruciatingly slow if the target has to be swapped in off of disk.

Another example is (DDR3) SDRAM: it is rated at a phenomenal number of GB per second, but that is only because (a) the GB/sec rating is only if it is streaming sequential data perfectly and (b) it is a lot of bytes wide. If you look at how long it takes to get the first byte of data from SDRAM on an initial (non streaming) transaction, it is not that much faster than the old PC-AT (8MHz clock).

Disk drives are similar: the rotational speeds have not increased significantly. The actuators move faster and the data transport is faster, but if it takes 6mSec (10,000 RPM) worst case for a bit to show up under the read head, it isn't that significant if it is 1nSec or 1uSec to get that byte to the CPU.

2. Computers are doing more, and that ain't necessarily a bad thing.

3. Aggravated by #1, the assumption that computers are essentially infinitely fast, computer programmer have become sloppy either through carelessness or through the use of libraries (time to market, y'know). An interpreted language cannot be faster than finely tuned assembly language... except it is practically impossible to do the amount of things expected of a computer today, all coded in perfectly optimized assembly language, and get it done before the computer is obsolete (and the programmers go insane).

tl;dr: The speeds quoted by the computer salesmen are assuming a perfect world. High speed caches cannot hide all the imperfections of the real world.

Mel's blackjack on a RPC-4000 will beat a 3GHz Xeon processor running a sloppy program written in an interpreted language... but it will only ever run on a RPC-4000 and it is impossible to "fix." Ref: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
an annoying thing about HTTPS is that it requires you to serve each domain name from a separate IP address, and that can be somewhat costly.
Wouldn't you know it, the CMA Communications (the ISP mentioned in the post) website is not accessible via HTTPS. "View My Bill" and similar link you off to a third party domain.
> This is an unwise claim to make, since x86_64 speed is a moving target, and what is fast today will not be 6 months from now.

It's pointed out that the optimizations can be changed.

Nature-inspired techniques are very good at updating solutions in dynamic search spaces.
That was great.. Thanks!
> startssl.com offers free SSL certificates valid in almost every browser, good for one year

True, but the last time I tried them the UX was a nightmare.
Now, actually follow the wikipedia link and read it, to see Simons is a professor of maths with important contributions to the math behind string theory.
I have the same problem with these "cybercrime" laws. With most other laws, I can rely on intuition to guide my judgment ("if I hit this guy, I'll probably get in trouble"). But I have no way of knowing what kind of data is illegal to access, have in my possession, or release to the public.
Acing a College Design Class by Failing at Design
If you ignore IE+Windows XP, you can safely use SNI.
You would be surprised, especially if you're in-demand talent, i.e. iOS.
Back in the good old days, Data Science used to be called Statistics.
This stuff is fun:

Commercial Opportunities in Iraq Oil Sector:

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973BAGHDA00111_b.htm...

Earliest record for Megabyte

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973OECDP12963_b.html

Opening up a 50 kilobit connection in moscow:

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976MOSCOW16762_b.htm...

US shipping a Graphical Display Unit to the USSR in 1973

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973STATE229113_b.htm...

Romanians love Columbo:

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974BUCHAR01611_b.htm...

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974BUCHAR01912_b.htm...

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974BUCHAR01936_b.htm...

https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974BUCHAR02356_b.htm...
Out of curiosity, which service did you try to sign up to use?
Oh, I wasn't really suggesting it's simple. I don't envy anybody in that position, and hope anybody thinking of walking away from such a situation does so on good advice. I know two people who've done this; I don't know the low-level details, so perhaps it was necessary for some definition of "necessary", but the next few years will be interesting to hear of, regardless.
NXDOMAIN used to be hijacked by Virgin Media. But it certainly is not any more, unless their DNS service changes significantly across the country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992301 :)
Verizon DSL is moving to Carrier Grade NAT
What metric are you using to compare performance?
How is that data gathered? Is it from a phone-home feature that apps (games?) built with Unity3D have? If so, I doubt that's a representative sample.
I love how they thoughtfully go ahead and provide a headline-ready name for the data set now.

"Cablegate."

At this point the Watergate should just assign rooms scandal names ending in -Gate instead of room numbers.
Hi to you as well, always nice to hear from you! Tell Kriti hello for me as well!

The fact that I'd worked with Nick and Scott before was a huge determinant, I'm not sure I would have been willing to leave my great job for an unknown team.

Hopefully we can get CodeCombat off the ground faster than Skritter, but who knows. I posted that link in the article and our poor Nodejitsu server suffered inordinately and we realized our design is atrocious. Keep on iterating. :)
Toosell blog | Way to Measure for Pet Clothes
I am for sure interested, I have been looking for someone to trade with. I do backend dev, config mangagment (chef etc), and have been a linux system admin for 10+ years. I am looking for logos/random design work. anthony@coderindustries.com
I could see google bringing a hammer down on them if its true that they are overwriting ad space on certain websites.
> The $1 billion in PAC money in 2012 seems to have had very little impact on the election, other than to pump up the people who already agreed with the messages in the ads.

There are at least three ways that money can have an effect that come to mind. The first is determining who wins; this is the kind you're talking about. The second is determining who can run; the winners of the primaries in both parties have as far as I can remember also been the top fundraisers going in to the primaries. Is it sticky which is the cause and which is the effect? Of course. But I have no doubt it's an amplification.

The third way is, I think, the most perverse. Only a very narrow range of political perspectives are capable of making it to the mainstream, since they first have to win the money election in order to make it anywhere.

Frankly we have no idea what the political landscape would look like with citizen funded elections. Maybe it would look exactly the same, in which case your hypothesis that the government we have is already representative would be proven correct. Right now we have no idea, and that's why I support citizen funded elections.
If its the parentheses that get you, why not try a postfix language like forth or factor?
Sorry, I guess it's not "news." But the guidelines don't mention that it has to be. And it's not really necrobumping since I'm not reopening an old thread, just posting an article I read that I found really interesting, regardless of its age.

From the guidelines:

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
You need to check out the Tails project (https://tails.boum.org/) which is a version of Debian I believe tailored to be completely anonymous. The browser uses TOR by default, I don't even know if you can disable it. Lots of other goodies too, including making browser fingerprints pretty meaningless.

Also, I know it's technically kind of bad form but if one wanted to run Tails easily you can use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) to easily fire up a throwaway instance of Tails quickly and easily.
Usual disclaimer applies for those with a clearance: by accessing classified documents on your home computers you could get yourself in serious trouble (in theory). In light of this particular situation I don't know if anyone has ever been punished but you should be careful.
I don't mean to suggest that at all -- I think there are a variety of things we could try to mitigate some of the problems associated with campaign finance.

What I'm trying to communicate is mostly that when it comes to "buying influence", the problem is a lot deeper than any access/influence purchased via donor-driven fundraising. It's actually inherent in any arrangement where money can be used to hire people to lobby on an employer's behalf. And it's particularly unbalanced when most people don't lobby on a volunteer basis.
Watch What Happens When You Cross A Zoetrope With A Carnival Ride
why wouldn't all ISPs do this for the economic incentive? Is advertising going in this direction?
Oh boy. Glad to dodge them so far. Hoping to continue.
True, it wouldn't apply well in all situations, but if you tweak the percentages correctly, only giving the people X% of control over their taxes (maybe relative to some metric like income or education), then maybe the government could have enough of a buffer to protect against swings in public opinion for sensitive or critical projects.

But your point about the fighter jet program could actually be an argument for this type of direct democracy. Let's say the public found out that the program was causing, or somehow will cause, the deaths of thousands of innocent people in a third world country. The military could then face spending cuts, directly dictated by the people, that would threaten the program, and rightly so.