skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I respectfully submit that this attitude should be considered harmful, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it stifles intellectual curiosity into a subject that is still an open book

Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276

It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing.

While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though.

EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.
My heart has just sank into the pit of my stomach.

I am coding a very similar app, right this second.

I'm going to stop and have a scotch.
Tell HN: DuckDuckGo (ddg.gg) blocked in the UK by High Court(?)
Short form of DuckDuckGo site has been blocked in the UK, at least by EE and Virgin Media ISPs (two different sources).

"We have been ordered by the High Court to prevent access to this website as it operates unlawfully. This is a legal obligation that we must comply with. The Court has found that the site and its users infringe copyright material in the UK.

EE does not monitor customer's activities [sic] nor will we disclose personal details or any information about our customers to any third party unless legally compelled to do so."
You're joking, but I'll attempt a serious point:

To call that "productivity [that has been] lost", means that there was productivity that should have happened and was somehow stolen.

Sure, there was "productivity potential" in those moments, but that's true for every moment. E.g when we're sleeping, making love or eating. We do we think we should be productive almost every second of our lives, or we "lost" something?
Because a sensor provides an entropy source, not a whole CSPRNG. Most modern CSPRNGs have interfaces to feed entropy into the system, but CSPRNG designs do more than simply route entropy from one place to another.

This is a really common misconception people seem to have about cryptographic random number generation, and a topic Ferguson and Schneier do an extremely good job breaking down in _Cryptography Engineering_.
While I still have my facebook account, I've completely stopped posting updates. The number one reason is my dad and auties and uncles turn every post I make into a family conversation and theres nothing lamer than having your party photos discussed by your parents
You make some good points. I've been in this field for almost 40 years -- I can remember a time when having a dedicated floating-point processor was seen as an unnecessary gimmick, only available at extra cost. Much has changed, and I think what constitutes a normal set of mathematical functions is changing as well, for a number of reasons:

1. Better math training in school.

2. More kinds of applied math problems being routinely evaluated by Python and other languages.

3. More available memory and storage capacity.

All of which argue for larger math libraries with more functions and classes of functions.

> Presumably, most Python users don't need anything beyond what a financial calculator would provide, and anyone else should head to numpy.

I would normally agree, but the argument has been made in this thread that numpy can't be installed in some environments -- environments that easily support Python, but that don't accommodate numpy without great difficulty.
i want to make a big garden with SVG images of the flowers so yes i want that munch stuff on one site.
The User can drag and zoomin and out.

The smoothness is okay in Chrome but in Firefox is just terrible(linux)
While the mirror test isn't a positive test for consciousness, for a species not to be able to pass the mirror test indicates that their 'mental model' of the world is lacking in something that would seem to be a necessary component of self-awareness and (therefore?) consciousness.
I added a crumpled paper effect to a web browser once, the result was very cool:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sean_mcdirmid/archive/2009/07/27/a-w...

I'm not sure if it was useful though.
Oooops! :/
I'm no Facebook fanboy, but to the criticism about what happens when your friends share incriminating posts, I exasperatedly say: quit complaining and learn to use your privacy and sharing settings.

The issue of bullying is a serious and valid criticism though. I'm glad social networks weren't a thing when I was a teenager.
It seems like it could be done with a service offering public key info, and using key signing and web-of-trust to keep the keys reliable, and encrypting in open source client software not provided or updated by the mail service provider.

That still leaves the service open to being strong-armed into sending you malware. And, of course, your mail headers are in the clear.

But, apparently, to the Lavabit people, what I've outlined here isn't sufficient, and the implication is that the NSA and/or FBI has ways of compromising all email providers no matter how they operate.
Yea, I'd imagine it to be a shinier version of hushmail with lots of sketchy marketing thrown in...
>Imagine that Seinfeld was still being produced to this day.

I don't get the obsession with Seinfeld. It wasn't funny even in it's day.
Until Facebook decides to "forget" your settings, move where they are found and opt you back in again.
Have you taken a look at their ThemeRoller?

http://jquerymobile.com/themeroller/index.php
On the September iPhone Launch
Stolen BitCoins Lead to Discovery of Serious Android RNG Flaw
Unfair Platform Advantage
Funny? Yes. Telling? Yes. Archetypical example of a newsfluff story that shouldn't be on the front page of HN? Yes: it's a story that basically said "NO NEWS HAPPENED".

I flagged, hopefully others will too, before we have another stupid argument about how much of a traitor you are to the founders ideals by not agreeing strongly enough that the TSA should be abolished.
Thank you for your info!
I will look into the links!

Basically what i want to do:
A big view of a Garden.
The Plants are SVG images for better and cleaner zoom.
When the user is zoomed into the view he should be able to drag around the garden.

The ALOT thing was intentional that's why it is BIG
One issue with Economics, as an undegrad major its denial or downplaying the utility of 'fiction'. ie, it treata fiction as the wrong half a dichotomy: truth:fiction == rational:irrational. Yet real world problem solving requires not just deduction, but imagingation (ie, possible alternative priors from which to base deductions). Like any good crime detective ;). TLDR: fiction-->imaginitive pre-visualization-->creative problem solving. STEM and wanna-be STEM subjects like econ are good for benhcmarking discrete problem solving, and for providing technical priors. for that there is no doubt. Its just not the whole picture of problem solving (esp. dealing with people, etc).
Doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the editing I've been doing. This just changes a few colours and CSS properties. However it has a full page of assets I can use, so that solves one tiny problem of mine haha. Thanks.
Spring was made by a core member, there is also rails/commands. You might see this feature or not...

Queues will be an interface for things like Resque to implement, not an implementation itself. I maintain Resque too, it'll be a good story to use the two together.
I once attended a conference and Jesus College, Oxford. I got the same feeling that you did, just the dining hall experience was way beyond what I ever experienced at UW.

But these experiences are quite expensive. It is not clear that they scale to our current egalitarian and pragmatic educational system.
it's so exciting to me that this community has some interest in consciousness. my background is 'hacker', but looking forward, I think consciousness is highly relevant (soon, we really will be able to hack our own brains, and when that happens, I think we'll care a lot about consciousness theory).

anyway, I've written some blog posts with some thoughts on this topic that I'll throw into the mix:

http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html

http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretati...

(note that these posts were written maybe six months ago)
I love articles like this. Thanks for posting this; good hacks :)

In the same vein, though I can't find the video for it right now: http://www.khanfu.com/m/plain/29/event/1978 (this was also presented at Defcon 21)
Odd because the growth of Instagram would suggest 13 year olds also like to comment in a way that is not disposable.

It's almost like 13 year olds are people too and don't operate as one homogenous block. I really think it would be better for everyone to stop pretending that they understand what EVERY 13 year old needs, wants or does.
And what is wrong with 'it emerges from neural activity'?

really, it is quite an adequate solution for a species with our current level of philosophical and scientific understanding.

That doesn't mean it is right, and doesn't discount potentially other options such as something that, despite my own strong scientific background, I have a fondness for through buddhism and meditation - and which is mentioned in the original article - that there is just one consciousness we all share in.

despite my fondness for this, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex neural network is supported by the evidence that shows that damage to the brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness.

Therefore, the idea that consciousness in LIFE doesn't require the brain, or vice versa, is simply mysticism and denying the truth that we all experience

I agree with you that consciousness is quite a mystery, but in terms of the ultimate mystery I feel very strongly that the question of life, consciousness and why there is something instead of nothing is a question that goes together and that they are all intricately linked
> Their messages are disposable nonsense

Like most Facebook status updates? :)
Baidu Baike focus on native stuff like Chinese celebrities, idioms etc, unlike wiki, which is much more internationalized.
I'm very impressed by this! Awesome work, congratz on the outcome!

I think WebGL has a lot of potential, feel free to check out my hackish background bump mapping @

http://anthonycameron.com/lab/background-bumps
Begrudgingly; congratulations. It was my bit of fun app after a serious start-up. The scotch will have to do.
The comment mentioned extended bathroom breaks, as in, when someone stays on the toilet for longer than necessary due to having a smartphone.
The intent of the talk was also to urge caution and urgency, was the point I was trying to make.
How many people, do you think, will hear the first part of this story but not the secod?
But it's better than what we have at the moment, IMO. I'd be happier using Bitmessage now (and hoping it improved with time) rather than regular email while waiting for the perfect solution to appear someday.
In that photo Loren does look like a girl.

The TSA agent was simply performing her bit role in Security Theater, I'd say that the "transaction" went pretty well. The interaction appears to have taken less than a minute. I fail to see how he "almost didn't make it through security".
This is why it really needs to be done at the protocol level, an email provider can't change the behavior of my desktop client and the process could be completely automated for the average user.
I tend to be dismissive of the philosophical conversation. I think what will resolve the question is scientific (biological) study. Maybe math/cs theorists (AI) will get there first. But I am almost certain that no philosophical conversation we can have will give me an insight about our cognition.
I agree these behaviors don't seem psychopathic, merely selfish, irritating, and useless. It sounds obvious from your account that he is not being truly productive. You should try to have a polite conversation with him about "prioritization" to get him to stop unnecessarily writing documentation and holding meetings (actually that is pretty weird behavior). If he is wasting his time socializing instead of truly getting work done, he'll be his own downfall. The managers might like talking to him but at the end of the day, employees who get real, important things done are most valued. Perhaps you should devise a way to make that clear to your managers, maybe by being very productive yourself and subtly putting that in contrast with his work. Also you should befriend the managers too.
I've think he's got a vendetta against the US govt now. I bet he really wants to stick it to them after what they've done. Don't you agree?
> In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."

I, like you, have a very hard time understanding the logic behind this. I don't have any idea how one could go about teaching a young person to think critically by sitting them down and saying, "to think critically, do A, B, C". I'm all for experimentation, and if Nelson thinks that he can do it better, I'll gladly give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for the data. I think it's hubris of the highest order for him to say that he's going to teach people to think. What he will do if he's successful is teach people how to compete in a modern technological economy, which is certainly a laudable goal.

Taking this a step further and claiming as he seems to that the Great Books are no longer necessary for students to learn critical thought seems absurd.

Just for the record as people read my comment, I will admit to being as biased as is possible to be on this subject, having gone to both the most liberal arty of all the liberal arts colleges[1] and a large liberal arts university[2].

[1] http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission...

[2] https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/
Why “Do Not Track” Will Hurt Many Brands
You're right and I understand that. I was assuming some hypothetical attack that is equivalent to GNFS. That assumption has no theoretical basis, it's just used as a mechanism to question the ideas and get some intuition. I'm using the same line of argument used in the original presentation where they show a progression and make assumptions about what that means about RSA keys. I think that line of reasoning is odd but even under that line of reasoning the results don't make sense to me.
...and it involves table-based programming.
Setting these things on fire probably leads to you becoming the subject of investigation by the local constabulary.

I'd suggest taking some bits from a discarded microwave oven, assembling said bits into a directed microwave transmitter and blasting the business end of the bin with a few hundred watts of microwave energy. For extra brownie points you could modulate the signal so it looks like an 802.11 transceiver on steroids.

Now you only need to 3D-print a box for it/connect it in some way to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and you'll be lauded on hackaday.com!
Just so you know, writing things like "I'm a CISSP and CISM" to establish your authority in message board arguments is not sending the signal you want it to.

Patrick gave you the correct answer in the most concise possible fashion, concision being a virtue on HN. You might try thanking him instead of yelling at him.

Your question doesn't have a good answer. If you're picking based solely on security, my professional opinion is "flip a coin".
It cuts both ways:

At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all professors are also researchers. They really like research, and teaching is kind of a drag.

What learning opportunities will be available for MIT or Caltech students?

Now, admittedly, the above institutions take teaching seriously, and the students will get a great experience. But the same isn't true in many public flagship universities where professors prioritize research over teaching.

That being said, I prefer being a researcher to being a teacher, which is probably why I'm not a professor.
One of the things we can be aware of is our own thoughts. If you count that as another "sense", is your statement still true? (Any neuroscientists out there: is it gibberish to consider awareness of your own thinking as a type of sensory input?)
On systems that have been up a long time or that spew lots of kernel messages, running dmesg might not give you everything (i.e. just a buffer of the last X messages), you can typically find a complete dmesg log in /var/log/dmesg, which should have a complete dmesg log from boot. I use dmesg a lot, for debugging issue, check if drivers have been loaded, kernel messages, like ops or oom, etc. Very handy!
I guess that depends on what you believe Mathematics to be. Is it a representation of reality itself (maybe the ultimate reality) or is it just a human construct? I don't know.
Michael Lewis is a great author. I'm surprised that nobody has commented on this story in 10 days. Is this a dupe?
Whenever I see tptacek tweet the current stats, I try to update this spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AscYGzcM4zJNdHR...

I've probably missed a few tweets and typo'd a few numbers along the way, but it should be mostly accurate. Note the tabs (at bottom left) for a derived speadsheet (percent of participants at each level) and a chart.
see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196334
I just checked on CMCC. zh.wikipedia.com works well enough, with the caveat that https and wikimedia are blocked (so no secure page access, and no pictures). At home, which I think is China Telecom, zh is blocked, but not wikimedia (so I can see pictures).
Ask HN: Do You Like Your Coding Style?
Hey HN,

Many of you work for companies that have their own mandated Code Style Guidelines. I wan't to ask - do you like them? Or do you have your own style you would prefer?

I ask this because I've worked on (but since stopped) a product which converts company style to your style, for you to edit. When you are done, it converts it back before you commit.

What do you think?
> I get and agree with your last two answers, but if that's the case, why has this kind of thing started popping up on a commercial scale?

It's one thing to monitor MACs flying around a network, it's quite another to defend the monitoring in a court of law or use the results in a legal action.

In the U.S., for a member of law enforcement to search a person, a house, or monitor someone's communications, he must have reasonable cause to suspect that a crime is being or has been committed by that person. Absent "reasonable cause", the law can't monitor our communications. And as I type this, I realize these ideas are probably out of date, inconsistent with current events and rulings.

> It seems to me that the laws are somewhat murky ...

Not really, they're just not enforced until someone complains that his rights have been violated. But it's also true that privacy is being eroded in a major way right now, and the law hasn't really kept up -- there are laws on the books that, once tested in court, will probably be cast out. If that's the sense in which you mean "murky," then you're right.

> I mean, you still see things like Firesheep, packet sniffing, network surveillance tools, all published with the caveat to just use for "testing".

Strictly speaking, there's no problem until and unless it's a third party that's being monitored -- that person can complain that his right to privacy has been violated, even if no use is made of the monitored communications.

In principle. :)
*Attacking them just makes them more defensive, and it slows up their journey towards us"

Who specifically is attacking who specifically?
It's less about privacy and more about people taking facebook too seriously. I'd rather have geocities and myspace back like they were... or facebook circa 2005. Or like HN, no one actually cares what you say on here, with very few and occasional exceptions. I think once you design a site to replicate your in-real-life identity and social interactions, it becomes too serious and not fun.
.NET had a gigantic vulnerability just a few years ago due to pushing an encrypted blob out to users that was CBC encrypted but not authenticated; the result in many apps was direct remote code execution. Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong won a Pwnie for it, I think.

Concern over gigantic flaws like this is a good reason not to adopt a brand new unproven framework; but, once a framework matures, it's pretty much random chance whether it's going to suffer a setback like Rails did with YAML input encoding or .NET did with CBC padding oracles.
Aren't you being a bit dramatic ? Art has long existed before copyright and research before patents. While I agree that economic returns for these activities help these fields it also has a corrupting effect. If the rules of the game change people adapt. Things aren't that simple.
Cargill had over $130B in revenue last year. Their exact profits are unknown (obviously) but probably around $4B a year.

Not bad for a family-owned business.
I'd like to add that I didn't make this. I only found it. Let's all send the author an email and encourage him to continue his work!