skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That just drives home how much simpler things have become with no SLA IaaS. Instead of spending 20+ hours racking an east coast/west coast pair of small cages or perhaps just 2 full racks each, you can save time and money by going with simple and glitch proof scale out systems driven by one button provisioning of hundreds of low performing vms. As an added bonus if your san or ethernet collapses you can safely sleep through the pager - somebody else will undoubtedly post the problem on their well monitored support forum.

Let's not forget the capEx advantage - It's not like the Obama organization can afford heavy five or low six figure expenditures on infrastructure when who even knows if they'll be able to raise a series A or will even be around in a year.
Maybe! But by that metric, it would be impossible to catch scams - isn't it always simpler to assume that everyone is telling the truth?
[Ranted Response] AppGratis is Not a Black Hat Marketing Company
Hey Eoin,
Could you explain what benefit this may have over livereload itself?
You keep thinking of dictionary attacks as being based on a verbatim English dictionary and I keep telling you that they're not. It's a refined dictionary with common terms used in real life passwords. However I do completely agree with your point about adding a number of more words. Passphrases are definitely another option, proving the service in question doesn't impose a restrictive maximum character limit (it's idiotic practice, but some do)
> It's ugly. It doesn't look nice in the slightest. It doesn't scream to me "Boy, this looks like an awesome user experience. I better try it out!"

Why is it ugly? What, specifically is wrong with the UX?
Many current elements of modern languages have been wontfix'es in them for many years.
Thanks for this explanation. I misunderstood your statement to mean "technically" impossible to trace, rather than "realistically" impossible. I understand much better now!
I'd suggest that the elites from all societies have a ferocious sense of entitlement. However, some are better at hiding it and coming across as harmonious members of society.
I did read the report and disagree with you.

The pilots where inexperienced being in a violent thunderstorm with computers giving intermittent false information. There were no outside visual references. It was a complex set of circumstances that converged.

I have a pilots license and I agree that sitting on a couch, reading the report in retrospective there were cues that could have been interpreted differently, there were procedures that should have been followed more directly and other things that could have been done to prevent oneself to get into this kind of mess in the first place.

BUT. Would I have performed better in the same position? I don't know. Reading crash reports is for educating oneself so you can perform better in the next sticky situation or spot problems a mile away.

Can this attack in the original article crash airplanes alone today? Definite no.

Can it be evolved to play a part in some other foul play sometime in the future? I would not underestimate the inventiveness of people.
>My Gmail address is really generic (my first name and a number), and I too get signups all the time - I even currently have two different people's bank accounts sending me email.

We've seen the same. Of all places you'd think (hope) that banks would have a handle on such things.
Call girls chase cash in Silicon Valley
It might make sense to cherry pick jQuery features and build your own jQuery — if you absolutely need it, and absolutely can’t carry the whole library. In other cases I think it’s mostly just bikeshedding.

jQuery is there to minimize surprises. Native API is magnitudes faster — yes. It is also divergent across browser runtimes. Then you code for special cases and test by hand, now you’re building your own jQuery.

Maybe we have better things to do.
No, not strictly true! ($) has a compiler hack to let it handle impredicativity.

import Control.Monad.ST

infix 0 %
(%) = id

runST $ return () -- :: ()
runST % return () -- Type error!

Couldn't match expected type `forall s. ST s a0'
with actual type `m0 a1'
In the return type of a call of `return'
In the second argument of `id', namely `(return ())'
In the expression: runST `id` (return ())
Ask HN: Why would a government have created bitcoin?
I've long suspected bitcoin was created by a government. Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, yet there have been zero leaks from the reviewers. Pools of crypto guys who don't leak stuff are usually employed by governments.

The part that puzzles me is why a government would do this. I can imagine several possibilities:

1. To finance their own black operations.

2. Because they thought digital currencies were inevitable, and they preferred bitcoin to some potentially more malevolent form. (Could bitcoin have been worse from a government's point of view?)

3. A friend suggested this: because they felt their currency would never become the standard reserve currency, and they felt it was better that no one's be if theirs couldn't be.

4. A variant of the above: the US did it because it seemed inevitable that the dollar would eventually lose its place as the standard reserve currency, and better to have it replaced by bitcoin that the yuan.

I realize some of these explanations are pretty far fetched, but so is an individual cooking up bitcoin as an intellectual exercise. Whatever the explanation of bitcoin's origin turns out to be, it will probably be pretty weird.

Anyone have opinions about these possible explanations, or other ones?
Disregarding if Facebook Home is a good: Android is rapidly evolving into directions no one would have imagined 12 months ago.

Nobody has to ask Google for permission what they are gonna do with Android -- no one had to ask what they are doing with the web, either.
Is this a joke? A huge percentage of the web is running with Jquery. Jquery targets a different set of audience - Ones that want to do more stuff with less code. This type of audience doesn't care about performance (mostly) because it helps them get things done.

Think of it this way - Everyone loves Ruby on Rails. But Rails IS slow. But that doesn't mean I should re-write my code in just plain C, just because it is fast and Rails is no longer needed according to a bunch of bloggers.

I think this argument is not about Jquery and is about frameworks in general.

In my humble opinion, I think [1]

$.ajax({
url: "test.html",
context: document.body
}).done(function() {
$(this).addClass("done");
});

is better than:

function ajaxFunction() {
var ajaxRequest; // The variable that makes Ajax possible!

try {
// Opera 8.0+, Firefox, Safari
ajaxRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (e) {
// Internet Explorer Browsers
try {
ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
try {
ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
// Something went wrong
alert("Your browser broke!");
return false;
}
}
}
// Create a function that will receive data sent from the server
ajaxRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (ajaxRequest.readyState == 4) {
var ajaxDisplay = document.getElementById('ajaxDiv');
ajaxDisplay.innerHTML = ajaxRequest.responseText;
}
}
var age = document.getElementById('age').value;
var wpm = document.getElementById('wpm').value;
var sex = document.getElementById('sex').value;
var queryString = "?age=" + age + "&wpm=" + wpm + "&sex=" + sex;
ajaxRequest.open("GET", "ajax-example.php" + queryString, true);
ajaxRequest.send(null);
}

[1]http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ajax-javascript.php
All the words he is using are in your dictionary but you don't have all the combinations of all the words in your dictionary. If you have "Apple", "Baker", and "Charlie" in your dictionary, it doesn't help with "Apple Baker" or "Apple Charlie".
I think a list comprehension is clearer than mapping some sort of lambda construct.
It is unfair of jnbiche to close discussion by simply saying sour grape, but you seem to be too determined - maybe even evangelical looking at your nick - perhaps its something to do with leftist ideology?

In any event, the article raises two points.

1 - the currency is deflationary.

I'd argue that it is an inherently stable currency no different than gold. Many economists may say that a hard currency is not a good basis for an economy, but many economists say it is. That includes Hayek who won a Nobel for his theory of how best to allocate resources.

So to say that bitcoin will fail because it is deflationary is at best an opinion. You're free to hold it but that hardly makes bitcoins a scam.

2. Something better may come along.

That is basically saying bitcoins may fail, therefore it is a scam. In that case, most of the companies YC funds are a scam. They too disproportionately reward the founder and the first employees. You may say but they create a hard product of value or offer a service. Firstly, I'd say bitcoins is a product. It is not tangible, it is only 0s and 1s, but it is a product created out of applied mathematical theories and formulas and computational power. I'd also say it is a service for obvious reasons.

Even assuming you disagree with the latter points, lets go back to the YC funded company. Lets say they create something like google - a service - facebook - a service - wordpress - a product. Lots of people invest in these - making the founder and first employees rich beyond means - then something better comes along. Are you suggesting google is a scam? Oh but google has value. Say who? It provides a service - so does bitcoin.
Alcohol Use, Anxiety Predict Facebook Use by College Students
It was closed with the message:
"I'm closing this ticket while the discussion is going on on the libraries list. Please reopen, or open a new ticket, if a positive decision is reached" [1]

The discussion itself [2] is basically bikeshedding at this point.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7434
[2] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2012-November/018...

I took both of these links directly from lelf's comment in this thread.
Number 6 seems like the odd one out , there are plenty of businesses that were successful because they kept figuring out how to get things done cheaper and passing those savings on to consumers and undercutting the competition. Or companies who ate their margins to lower prices and gain market share.
The 'best' introductory book for learning Haskell is Graham Hutton's 'Programming in Haskell'. It focuses on the essentials of the language, and its clear, spare presentation is in the spirit of Haskell itself. And it is accessible to everyone.
Did anyone else notice the blue narwhals in the Staging and Testing areas? What's up with that?

Edit: D'oh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Narwhal (disappointed it's not an easter egg)
Celebrating Doctor Who Electronic Music Pioneer Delia Derbyshire
No different than the person who discovered a gold mine.
>batteries add a massive cost to user solar installations

SolarCity will install a bank of Tesla Motors Li-ion batteries for grid backup and load shifting. This would be financed over the course of the loan (typically 20 years), not all at once. http://www.solarcity.com/residential/energy-storage.aspx
Wow, just heard about this. I can't imagine installing an App and having it completely muck up the notification bar, look and feel and more for the phone.

If all you do is use Facebook on your phone then I guess this is magnificent.
Can acid-state be ported to Javascript?
>Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, yet there have been zero leaks from the reviewers.

Aside from leaking their identities (for reputational reasons) I am having a hard time thinking of anything these hypothetical reviewers would be motivated to leak. The best I can come up with is, "The main architect of Bitcoin hates the U.S. government, and his main motivation was to weaken it by depriving it of tax revenue."

As to why they are not leaking their identities: they run the risk of being kidnapped and tortured for their BTC if everyone knew who they were -- since (from the point of view of the average Bitcoin-literate thug) it is highly likely that those who got in on the ground floor of Bitcoin hold a lot of BTC.
I have searched harder! I can't find any of my USB sticks. I'm assuming they're all together and I tidied them up. I don't feel like I've lost them (hence no panic), just that I don't know where they are.

Though I really didn't comprehend they were worth so much. The last time I looked they were GBP 750. Am now leaving the keyboard to look again.
This might make sense if you contrasted "scripting" to something a little more specific, like "system" development. However, creating a "programming" v. "scripting" dichotomy makes no sense IMHO. Ruby & Python are programming languages that can also be considered, informally, scripting languages.
Finally all important pheripherals for smartphones in one device. Sliced Dock.
IIRC jQuery 2.0 will have the option for custom builds.
Thanks! expand-region and multiple-cursors run in the same vein in that it takes some functionality Vim already offers, and makes them a little easier to use to the average user. I'm a pretty new and definitely average Vim user myself, and remembering just 2 keystrokes to select some region of text is definitely much easier on my brain muscle than having to remember the dozen of text objects offered by Vim as well as other plugins. Maybe one day all of them will be burnt into my muscle memory, but that simply isn't the case today and expand-region helps me remain productive while learning. :)
Study Supports Theory On Texting And Shallow Thought
Solar uses only the energy that comes in on an annual basis. With fossil fuels, we get to use the stored energy of millions of years.

Solar has a much lower EROI than oil and coal.

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

Nuclear has a better EROI. One question is if we could build enough plants before an increase in energy prices due to scarcity. That would make investment much more cost prohibitive.
the endless debate continues...

choose two:

a. fast execution of the code on the machine

b. fast code generation by the programmer

c. fine-grained control over every aspect of the code

I know which two I'd rather have, esp in the long run.
And if there are less future owners who are willing to buy then it decreases in value.

You make it sound as if there is a set amount of buyers and transactions and the only way bitcoin can have value is if its price goes up which isn't the case.

As long as people are willing to accept bitcoins as having value then people are willing to buy it at a certain price. What that price is is determined by the market. It isn't necessary for bitcoin to either go up or go bust.

"old money is paid back from the new, and the value increases only on the hope that you can involve more new money."

Old money isn't necessarily paid back from the new. Money has already exchanged hand. Those that hold bitcoins hold a value of whatever the market considers worth. That may be 0, that may be 1m. That isn't any different from anything else. I.e. those who have dining tables hold such a value as the market is willing to pay.

And of course the value increases only if more people are willing to buy than sell i.e. involve more money.

What exactly is the ponzi part?
Bitcoin isn't the people promoting it the loudest or a company in need of good PR... it's technology.

I made a similar comment recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535940
Agree 100% on just showing the real code. Don't tell me what a monad is, tell me a problem I can solve with it. (I've made my own attempt at http://m50d.github.io/2013/01/16/generic-contexts.html )
As an aspiring business guy, my biggest problem seems to be accessing information about different models.

Say I want to build a web community around a particular kind of video game. Estimating the value of that market is pretty damn opaque to an outsider.
How Guantanamo Bay's Existence Helps Al-Qaeda Recruit More Terrorists
Me neither. But look at the mainstream, the youth. Mobile, FB and picture sharing is the new mass media.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is FB's first step into building an own mobile OS (or own distribution) since the main task of a mobile device is still communication with close contacts -- and that's all Facebook is about.
The Philosophical Breakfast Club
Google's Schmidt: Drones Will Require More Government Regulations
I'd never before seen the xkcd what-if site. Totally engrossing.
I don't think you can tell if they aren't doing that. Large bitcoin transactions are fairly constant.

Note: I haven't looked at the bitchain and am guessing that you can't make assumptions about large holders from the bitchain alone.
Reeally? Reeeeally? Did you remember the mess with rubygems?
The scientific community seems to be welcoming Julia open arms, given its performance improvements over Python, if you look at the rate code is being ported to such a young language.
Being part of a business is a serious thing. You cannot play with others life, investment and risk people losing jobs because someone is slacking. You need to gather with your partners and talk him/her seriously.
JQuery is an enormous API, so it is implausible that it is an implementation of the list monad. Some aspect of it might be the list monad. If so, which?
The libraries are quite huge, for blue collar developers.
I don't get the fragmentation argument here - there is nothing about Facebook Home that prevents it from being used on Android 2.x - all of the functions it uses are available there. The choice of Android 4+ is simply to make development easier. This is exactly the same as choosing to only target Chrome and ignoring IE6, which many new developments (Google included) now do. The whole argument about the differences between Android and the Web in this case simply don't hold up, as it's exactly the same situation.
I agree with your general point about the value of abstractions, but jQuery is rarely the bottleneck where DOM manipulation is concerned. Most of the execution time in browser applications is spent rendering/reflowing content. It's only sane to use the DOM API once you've shown that the jQuery JavaScript execution is a significant portion of total execution time relative to reflows.

An interesting side note here is that the Rails analogy remains somewhat apt, in that much of the execution time in web applications is spent in the data store.
Thanks, Mark. Much appreciated.
bring your reasonable arguments instead of insulting the people you argue with, please.
> I never said Randall calculated the entropy per character[.]

You said:

> You're still thinking in terms of brute force attacks but actually dictionary attacks are more common as they rattle off the 'low hanging fruit' much quicker.

But the entropy calculations assume the attacker has the word-list. There is no low-hanging fruit, here. Strings generated by the algorithm are lowest-hanging, but they're all at the same height, and that's the number of bits calculated. The only attack is a brute force attack against word sequences.

It is obviously true that anything that's not going to be checked is going to be stronger than anything that is, but the correct assumption is that your key generation algorithm is public, and building something to attack Randall's algorithm plus punctuation is not significantly harder than building something to attack Randall's algorithm as specified (a few extra bits, to be sure, but adding another word or increasing the list you're drawing from will be more effective).

Incidentally, producing a literal dictionary is likely to be way slower than drawing words from the dictionary directly, since 1000 words will fit in memory and maybe even cache, while a trillion phrases is going to barely fit on disk.

> [C]ompletely random passwords, while harder to remember, will be more secure.

This is certainly the case, for a given password length. But the important point the comic is making is that we shouldn't be worried about conserving password length but about conserving memorability (and perhaps ease of typing), and for a given memorability the phrase is likely to be more secure.
5. It was a small project at a federal agency, unappreciated by top management. They had access to experts who could keep it quiet, but there was no particular political agenda behind it.
they run the risk of being kidnapped and tortured for their BTC if everyone knew who they were

Doesn't any rich person have the same risk?
Definitely a good starting point. 23andMe is leading the charge in consumer facing genomics. I wonder what it would take to compete with them?
And this is why I'm happy to be working on computers now, and not in a wet lab. And I never even had to work with any of the scary stuff...
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
As to #4, the United States is usually in denial about things like the dollar losing its status as the standard reserve currency. If a government is behind bitcoin, you have to give them credit for it.

Some people think the US government invented crack cocaine to fund CIA operations. Who knows...
I felt like the article did a good job of explaining the potential replacements, but failed to make a convincing case for why the perfomance benefits outweigh the simplicity of jQuery. There's a conversation to be had about balancing those two, but this post makes the implicit assumption that performance is king and never really addresses the tradeoffs between performance and simplicity/familiarity.
There's also an Addon (https://github.com/mozilla/towtruck/wiki/Addon) which is basically equivalent to a bookmarklet like this where you activate the bookmarklet every time you load a new page. It's only intended to trying TowTruck out (like the bookmarklet).
Actually I think it is even worse than that.

I would say "kids today often don't learn about compiler design and computer language's history".

Given my CS background, it baffles me how languages get mixed with implementations or language runtimes with VMs in current discussions.

I started coding in the mid-80s, we lacked the information access kids have nowadays with Internet, and yet most of us were quite aware what language design was all about.
A File System All Its Own – specialized for SSDs
Stop redirecting people to the NSA website. Simple.
Yep, the only reason why I wrote this was because of the missing live feedback functionality in existing Vim features, and it's the one feature that the plugin can't do without. I'm certainly not advocating that this be a replacement for regexp or macros, but for certain small tasks like quickly renaming a variable inside a function, it's much easier on my brain.
Your original intent remains intact because I don't think anyone here knows what the original intent was. How is labeling humans as "apes" dangerous?
The DNC does the job of folding any successful and reusable parts from the campaign into a continuing technology stack.
"This is going nowhere. You're stuck at making the current submodule system work, not answering my questions, diverting conversation, repeatedly asking the same stupid questions, labelling everything that I say "subjective", and refusing to look at the objective counterpart (aka, the code). It's clear to me that no matter how many more emails I write, you're not going to concede.

I'm not interested in wasting any more of my time with this nonsense.

I give up."

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22051...
After reading about the risk in the work of a chemist , i wonder: what prevents automation for safety becoming common place?