skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "intending to make an explosive"

That is a meaningless statement by itself, and "making an explosion" does not merit punishment in and of itself. You may as well say "Stan was clearly intending to make a fire (A small one, but one nonetheless). ...intentionally creating a fire on school grounds definitely merits punishment)" What do we mean by fire? Did he set his desk ablaze, or did he light a wooden splint? "He intentionally set a fire" gives us no basis to make a blanket judgement.

Explosions do not inherently merit punishment, just as fires do not. The massive range of intended harm and magnitude that could be encompassed by the general description "explosion" or "fire" means that these acts cover everything deserving of "a stern look from the teacher" to "lock them away and throw away the key".

Edit to add: When I was in 10th grade my physics class was making alka-seltzer rockets in the football field. A few of us threw a bunch into a 12-oz pop bottle and blew it up. We got an eye-roll from our teacher; it wasn't even considered worth a comment.
Agreed. There were a number of times I intended to do something that was similar to this, and even at school without supervision. I was punished on occasion, I was rewarded at other times. This does not make it a felonious offense. I am grateful today to the educators I had at the time who understood I was intelligent, curious and, frankly, stupid. If they had done what this school has decided to do to Ms. Wilmot I would not be where I am today. I hope the spirit of justice will win out and allow this student to continue to study and learn, become a contributor to society, and hopefully make many more intended discoveries in her life, without a felony record or imprisonment.
Class is about power and influence. When everyone has two houses, a boat, and three cars, favors (political favors, jobs for kids at their parents' friends' companies) are the de facto currency.

People who earn a paycheck aren't upper class.
Prices are never going to be matched, and why should they? Things made in China are cheap simply because they have a huge population of people desperate to work, so they can exploit this and pay them a fraction of an American salary and have them work under much worse conditions. Until you are prepared to work for the same money in the same conditions, don't expect the cost of something made domestically to ever be the same as if it were made in China.
> Presentation matters. Criticism wrapped in vitriol becomes just vitriol, and vitriol wrapped in criticism still doesn't become good criticism.

As if it would help you prove your point, that's completely braindead. What you describe is just a different form of shooting the messenger; you don't like the way they said it so you ignore what they said. For example if I point out your solution is N^2 and you're an idiot for doing it that way instead of N log N you may not be an idiot, but the solution is still a bad one.

If vitriol is the motive for the criticism then by banning the vitriol you've also lost the criticism. This is really a huge problem for Hacker News; by banning unkind critics they've lost a lot of actual criticism. The result is HN exists in a bubble of trends and fads because the people who take glee in deflating them get banned.

> [GitHub Gracious Helps Female Programmers Cower in Fear]... author in this case had to go with the most needlessly inflammatory, mean-spirited, and downright asshole-ish comment possible.

This is a good example, but not of what you think. The content of the blog is reasonably and calmly presented, but if you throw that away because of the flame title then you've lost that.
Does anyone have any links to better articles on this situation? I feel like we've only heard one side of this from the media. Now, the media could just be portraying the truth or they could be distorting the facts. Here are the questions I've yet heard answered:

The actions were performed before school started (apparently). I call them 'actions' for a specific reason.
Were these actions sponsored by a teacher?
Were these actions an actual experiment?
Were these actions performed within a science lab or somewhere else on school grounds?
Were these actions associated with any curriculum the student was studying at the time?

Right now I feel that this could have very well be the scientific community rallying around someone who could've been doing something very dangerous that wasn't sanctioned by the school. I would love some answers so I could know whether the charge is fair or not.
As much as I like Haskell, if your goal is to make Bayes' rule as simple as an if statement, I doubt you can do better than quantum computer emulators.

Say the probability of being a User is 1%. You can initialize your variable, X, to a superpossition, with 99% chance of being clean, and a 1% chance of being a user.

Now, the function, f(x) for the test is such that:
f(user) = (99% positive) + (1% negative)
f(clean) = (1% positive) + (99% negative)

Take y=f(x).
Now, look at the quantum state of your machine (this is why we are on an emulator). Each of the 4 potential states have a certain probability associated with them.

The (theoretical) slowdown of using a quantom emulator is the fact that as the size of your memory increases, you have exponentially more states to deal with. But, because we would need to deal with the same number of states any way, this is not actually relevant.

I should also mention that using a real quantom computer does not provide a (trivial) speed up to this prosess. This is because, while the quantom state contains all 4 possibilities with some probability, when we go to measure it, we will only see 1 of the 4 states. Not only will this not give us a probability, but we would need to re-run the computation to measure it again.
Could anyone explain: why is gemini sooo much faster then the others in these tests?

I believe that the way these test are setup slightly advantage gemini, and more broadly java. Since they do not measure memory usage, or tasks that make memory usage critical, which is something JVM sucks at.
Fine: they are almost certainly rising-upper-middle-class. Which is far different from working-class, or service-class. The point of the article is that, because of the frenzy for housing, and the absolute inability of Silicon Valley to allow high-density housing, teachers, manufacturers, and other laborers are being priced out of the community. Which will mean worse quality of life for higher pay: people will need to commute 1.5 hrs+ to get to $15/hr jobs instead of $10/hr jobs, though their take home pay (after commuting costs) will be about the same. Which is a really shitty situation, for everyone in the community. The solution is to stop having such restrictive zoning laws, and allow high-rises in the Valley.
My guess is it's bad targeting parameters on the part of the company or whoever is placing ads on their behalf, but it's equally possible that you picked up an attribute that they are deliberately targeting against, without your realizing it. (E.g. you're on a VPN running through DC.)
Ten Responses to the Technological Unemployment Problem
Wouldn't this be easier if both numbers were just represented bitwise, and the float were converted to integer that way? Seems more straightforward to me.

Floating point representation works by having "exponent" bits, and "mantissa" or fraction bits. Also a sign bit. For explanation's sake let's say we have a single precision 32-bit FPU. IEEE 754 single precision is 1 sign bit, 8 exponent bits, and 23 mantissa bits. The exponent bits are subtracted by 127 to yield the exponent.

So, the basic formula is:

(-1)*sign * 2^exponent-127 * 1.mantissa

So right away, if exponent < 0x7F, round to 0.

If exponent > 9E (for 32-bit int), round to infinity.

Multiply

1.mantissa * 2^exponent-127

This will be a power of 2 so there's probably a fast bit-shifting method for this. I'm just too lazy to look up how this should be done.

If exponent > 0x96, the exponent's too big to represent fractions of 1, so you're done.

Otherwise, you're within 1 number. If the remaining decimal < 0.5, truncate. Otherwise, add 1 and truncate.
You're absolutely right. The plank time is just a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe. This is comparable to how very fast moving objects needed more than Newtonian physics to describe, namely relativity, or how very small objects needed quantum mechanics. It may be that that new physics is discrete, but at this point we have no idea.
Agreed. When first I encountered these differences with xcodebuild I found it incredible that the IDE and command line builds are not based on the same backend (indeed the IDE could just wrap the command line tools if well-designed).

Every project's main build should be scriptable -- for reproducible releases, continuous integration etc. I wonder how Apple internally builds things for release when something this simple doesn't work (maybe they don't use OCUnit?).
I was not familiar with this type of explosive device, and this one one of the first things I found. I posted it because it has some good information including:

- a video of one being detonated

- information on the dangers of using these devices

- some historical background

- a list of cases where this type of explosive was found

direct video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbaiCdX1XWc
China creating new flu strains to dismay of senior scienctists
Will. Do. Grazie.
Americans (I am one) have the fantasy of a classless society, but we're every bit as class-oriented a society as India or the UK. It took me years to fully realize this.
So if it's just about money, what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country, but happens to be poor in his old age? It's insane to call him working class, just because he's poor. Just like it's insane to call someone like David Beckham upper class - everything about the man is still working class.
I imagine that the abstraction of the reason is probably similar to the Fight Club quote about automotive recalls:

" A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

It's a similar thing with politics.

Just change A out for either people in the voting body or lobbying body, multiply by B, the probable percentage of A that you'll lose with a specific decision, then multiply by C, the amount of money (weight of a specific vote) that the specific entity would lose you.

If X is enough money/votes to win the next election, then business as usual. Of course one could say that Obama is done after this term anyway, but I have a feeling that the PTB have their best interests in favor.

edit: You've gone and deleted your post. The general gist of the question was: "What are the political forces in play causing him to change his mind about GITMO?"
The investor topics on HN likely won't be from an investor's perspective. Quora is quite formal, so you'd get more "investor to general public" posts than "investor to fellow investor" posts.
We have a hyper-sensitive populace and so-called educators and "authorities" that are continually trying to nanny-fy the U.S. Thirty years ago something like this would have been laughed at as jr. mad scientist kid doing what jr. mad scientist kids do.

Do they even sell those little chemistry labs in a box that you could buy 30 or so years ago, or has "homeland security" deemed that dangerous?
Factually, all code emitted from emscripten is JavaScript. It may look funny with all the bitwise operators that are barely ever used by web developers, but it's just JavaScript. It doesn't run correctly in Chrome right now because they have issues with their JavaScript environment not supporting large numbers of variables for a given context. It doesn't run in IE because IE doesn't support webGL. Both of these will be fixed in the future.
This reminds me of Dan Miller's 7 Areas of Success:

Career
Financial
Personal Development
Physical
Relationships
Spiritual
Social

As he often says on his podcast [1], you must be making continual deposits of success in every area, and career is only ONE area. For example, if you experience a temporary "interruption of employment status", the first thing you should do is start an exercise regimen (if you don't already have one).

Each one feeds into each other, and I know after a particularly terrible day, I personally feel a hundred times better after a challenging CrossFit workout with friends.

[1] http://www.48days.com/category/48-days-podcast
I don't like to sound negative, but it's hard to ignore the obvious. This technique is absolutely pointless because MongoDB and tmpfs actually are doing the same thing, i.e. nothing. The kernel does all the work. Both of them are mmapped regions, only MongoDB maps to its own files, while tmpfs maps to the system swap.

Basically you're wasting RAM and introducing yet another moving part. What happens then is: on each "write" MongoDB touches a page in RAM which maps to a block in tmpfs file which maps back to the same RAM page which maps to a block in a swap.

Why? If you have enough RAM to hold your working set, just use MongoDB directly with async writes and you won't be blocked by disk I/O. You will get blocked by the global DB lock, but that's another story.

EDIT: edited the sequence of mappings.
Just to make sure this is clear: bigint libraries do not use strings.

A well coded big int library will use an array of ints. When an overflow is detected (the processor has a flag for this) you expand the array appropriately.

Some libraries don't wait to detect the overflow, in fact they compute how many bytes are required for a certain operation (easy to do with bitmasks) and allocate the appropriate size ahead of time (this is useful if you overflow often)
In addition, let me offer some recommended reading: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It rearranged my thinking about a lot of things. I've written a lot about it on blog, but this: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/on-what-makes-peop... is probably the most useful summary.
The only thing I heard about (I think, don't remember that well) newLISP was a statement that the language lacks lexical scoping because the author didn't know how to implement it.

Is it true (I mean dynamic scoping)? If so, why was the choice to exclude lexical scoping made? Is it practical to write a bit larger apps/scripts in newLISP?
This is actually very old demo ported to the browser. The original Epic Citadel was/is an iOS demo released in September 2010. It runs well on an original iPad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Citadel

Comparatively, this runs a little sluggishly on a MacBookPro8,2 (early 2011).
A ton of mainstream product advertisements got pulled from conservative radio after Rush Limbaugh did that whole Sandra Fluke thing. That was spearheaded by change.org.
Rhetorical DDoS goes both ways. In fact it even goes more ways than both if you consider the amount of straw-manning that goes on amongst propagandists.

Frustration may be true but is merely an excuse for individual's behavior. It doesn't make the position valid or the rhetoric any less destructive to discussion. Your dog might chew a hole in your couch. You might say it's because he has separation anxiety. Which is true but there's still a hole in the couch.

For me, the solution is to give women in particular the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like this. It makes these discussions a hell of a lot more fruitful, and I've learned a hell of a lot since.

The solution to what? The benefit of the doubt when? Which discussions? Where has there been denial of experience?

How about giving the benefit of doubt to any party who presents their view reasonably? return0 was not attempting to shut down discussion. He was not attempting to invalidate or shout down any particular lines of reasoning. He was not attacking anyone. He considered shantanubala's point but remained unconvinced and sought further argument.
TransformativeMed - Seattle
(http://transformativemed.com/)

We're looking for a full-time developer who wants to help make high-quality medical software that's being used in hospitals around the US.

It would be great if you have experience with any of the following (but these aren't requirements):

* jQuery
* PHP
* PostgreSQL
* Unit testing (QUnit)

Our office is in Seattle, WA - South Lake Union.

Right now we're a small startup with around 5-6 employees.

nik.nyby@transformativemed.com
As long as people have some use in productivity, and need to work to eat (limiting price elasticity of labor supply on the low end), technology won't produce long-lasting unemployment, just, under ceteris paribus assumptions, long-lasting reductions in the ratio between the market-clearing price for the average unit of labor and the value of the total output of the economy.

Technological change can be classified as labor-augmenting, capital-augmenting and labor-neutral change. You seem to be claiming that all technological change is capital-augmenting.

There's been quite a bit of research in this area, and your claim is overwhelmingly refuted... in fact, Daron Acemoglu has multiple research projects purporting to show that most technological change is labor-augmenting.

A summary is available at http://economics.mit.edu/files/967
No, goodness no. Just stating that I understand. This is what my parents went through. Was quite worried about my father for a while, to be honest (he's better now).
Why We Think We Failed Our YC Interview
Ok, so can anyone recommend an established VPS provider, with a comparable management interface, and a track-record of excellent security practices?
But the key to being happy with way less money and stuff is to be secure in the money and stuff you do have, which Americans overwhelmingly are not.

Actually, Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness and Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis both point to the idea that social connections and finding meaning one's relationships are the key to being happy—much more so than material possessions.

That being said, it does appear that many if not most Americans spend too much on things they think will make them happy but don't—see Spend by Geoffrey Miller for more on this idea. It's as if we're hanging ourselves through our own failures to understand ourselves.
If you're at it, why not auto-detect the type of information?
Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable, email address and website url are differntiatable too. I would even go so far and add an auto-import feature LinkedIn/Facebook/Google, that searches for the contact's "name(+address)" online and returns the "possible" results into the right fields automatically into your database. ;)

@close.io team I don't use SaaS services except GitHub regularly, but if you would sell license your applicatoin I would buy a copy. I believe this is a good strategy when you've already a "satisfieable" amount of customers. But your mileage may vary.
Physically there isn't really a difference between new matter and old matter. Suppose that instead of moving an electron from A to B, you destroyed an electron at A and created one at B (through some kind of reaction between other fundamental particles). There isn't really a physical difference between the two resulting situations. Unlike conventional objects, electrons can't be marked or otherwise identified, they are really exactly identical. Electrons are just blips in the continuous fields of physics (electromagnetic field, higgs field, etc). If you could do the same with a complete person, then there may not be any physical difference between moving the person or "teleporting" the person. So if there is fundamentally no difference between those two things, then perhaps we should be agnostic to whether it is teleportation or creation-destruction. The really difficult questions are about the consciousness of such a person, and I think at this point we don't have an answer for those questions.
A unified messaging system
> What's the point of having these massive javascript virtual machines & webgl systems in our browsers?

Because the safety model of JavaScript has been sound for the past few years.

> How does having a separate implementation of a specification help us build a safer, more open web?

What seperate implementation of what specification? If you're referring to asm.js, asm.js is just JavaScript, any browser can run it. The "specification" is a gift to other engine implementers to super charge evaluation of compliant code.

> Is this supporting an open web?

http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/
http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2599
Same here.

European, used to an upper middle class lifestyle; went to grad school in a poor USA state, then moved to Menlo Park, CA. Pretty big shock during both transitions.

Now living in Oakland while working in SF downtown, so things are a bit more even :)
I also find it really troubling they haven't released a "Here's what we're doing different" blog post in response to the attack. Their only blog post on the matter came a week (2 weeks?) after the intrusion, which they were of course pressured to release after everyone found out via a pastebin IRC transcript... By chance I happened to sign up for my first Linode account the day before that hit HN.

I hope their silence on the aftermath is due to an ongoing investigation with feds, or something, where they can't talk about it yet. Do they think their customers are stupid and will forget the incident?

Imagine if AWS had a security breach of that magnitude. They would release an initial 4000 word blog post in grave technical detail, and then follow up with a 25 page white paper, or whatever.

Oh, and to stay on topic, I tried Linode's 2-factor with Google Authenticator and it works well.
try the flash version. it's pretty goddamn awesome.
Xamarin Evolve 2013 Keynote video
Is this crowd really that young?

My comment was a play on Rob Malda's iconic criticism about the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
Path is destined to grow slowly
People Looking Cool With Google Glass
A compilation of all the people that look cool while wearing Google Glass.
"very old"
They admitted that the encrypted CC numbers were leaked, they didn't mention if the encryption keys were stored on the same machine. The alleged hacker said that the encryption keys were stored on the same machine, making the encryption useless.
From what I can tell, much of chemistry is highly dangerous. The only real question, afaict, is whether the person knows how to correctly handle the danger.

I absolutely am OK with students doing things on school grounds not sponsored by a teacher, not an actual experiment, and generally faffing about in the name of curiosity and learning. Schools shouldn't be running on a whitelist principle.

IMO, the only reason this student should be given a felony charge is if she was planning to perform a dangerous detonation with malicious intent to harm.

Even if she was being stupid and ignorant and planned to scare her friends, no harm was caused.

Harmless foolishness should not be a felony... harmless learning even less so!
Careful, you're showing your status by failing to read the article, respond to the points made in the post, or comprehend the basic idea that class delineations vary between cultures.