skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trouble is, there is no reasonable in doubt anymore. Copying and digital archiving both rely on the premise that there is no manipulation. Lossy compression always seemed to be OK because the image quality was reduced without changing the integrity and structure of the image. This will essentially destroy credibility of digital records. Every shyster and hack lawyer will pull this as defense in court.

Also it's not like there is a reference implementation for encoding JBIG2 everyone uses. We're talking about proprietary libraries which do the compression. These libraries are compared using performance indicators like speed, memory usage, etc. This gives sloppy crap implementations an advantage, because (and I'd bet on that) when the implementation was chosen, the deciders didn't even have the idea that a compression could actually manipulate the document content. Automated testing of compression algorithms is hard, because by design there can never be 100% proof, as the output image is different from the input image. If the comparison is broken, the test will fail to identify errors.

The critical failure in the design was thinking that some sort of algorithm performs equally or better than the human brain at recognizing text in low quality. This is - up to now - not the case.

Text won't be a big issue as mistakes are kinda easy to spot. Also it's less probable to have image fragments that seem similar but really aren't. The Algorithm isn't really smart, it's mostly just pattern matching due to performance constraints. Thanks to kerning (variation in distance between individual Characters), I doubt that swapping of Words or sentences will occur a lot, unless the threshold for reaching significance in the comparing algorithm is higher than the guy was while designing it.

The real trouble starts when looking at numbers. Numbers are usually typeset monospaced, right aligned and/or in tables. The possible variations are pretty low, each digit represents 10 different possible meanings. Text documents are usually scanned at a pretty low resolution, because for a human it's still possible to distinguish between characters and numbers, even when a lot of information is lost. As already mentioned, algorithms cannot do this.

The next problem is: We can spot mistakes in text because there are syntactic and semantic rules which we more or less understand. While reading, our subconscience validates the input, obvious errors will pop out. When it comes to numbers, there is no such thing. A number cannot be validated without additional knowledge. And as document processing is one of the labour intensive tasks, mostly executed by minimum wage clerks, there is no way in hell a mistake would be spotted before the documents are archived for all eternity.

Let's put on the tinfoil hat for a moment:
If someone wanted to really fuck up a company, they could just flash the printer/scanner/copier firmware, changing parameters of the compression.
ALT.NET Sydney Vids: LINQ Rx Extensions, Converting Rails/ASP.NET MVC to HTTPS
Videos from ALT.NET usergroup in Sydney, covering LINQ Reactive Extensions Framework, and converting a website from mixed HTTP/HTTPS to HTTPS only, when using Ruby On Rails & ASP.NET MVC (covering HSTS as well)
For a more intuitive explanation and history of transfinite cardinals and a cognitive analysis of their development, see writings by Rafael Nunez, including these two papers:
http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/SingaporeF.pdf
http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/TransfinitePrgmtcs.pdf
Lovaash Online Stores - for artists
I think that's the finer point that's missed when Slashdot (or most of Reddit) is brought up: "troll culture at its very core".

Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.
This program automatically saves songs from Last.fm and Pandora to iTunes
It's like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time.

So great.

Couldn't agree more.
I used it for a year before I signed up. Lurking is always a good way to gauge a community. I have the context. I just despair that the site is leaning more towards the political and further away from the startup tech. I could be wrong, but any time i'm looking for frameworks, tech, innovation, HN isn't my first choice like I would expect.

Having said all that, This is the one site that I visit >20 times a day.
We're living '1984' today
If you emulate the way the MRI parses it, sure.

For example:

# Is this some_method with an empty block, or an empty hash?
some_method {}

# Is this a regex or a comment?
#
# It depends how many arguments "whatever" takes, and you
# don't know that until you run the code that defines it.
#
# Interpretation is implementation-defined. It just so
# happens that the MRI determines that the below ISN'T a
# regex because it has a SPACE character just after the "/".
whatever / 25 ; # / ; raise SystemExit.new;
5 Reasons the Word "Success" Should Send Shivers Up Your Spine
God says...
the same species, derive from nature
a much more remarkable distinction of genius, than what, antecedent
to custom and education, appears to take place among men. By nature a
philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a
street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from
a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of
animals, however, though all of the same species are of scarce any
use to one another. The strength of the mastiff
Only question, when are you starting a kickstarter, or where can I buy one? Great work!
First time I've heard of hipsters "broadening" someone's mind.
I agree.

If you don't reflexively agree with knee-jerk libertarianism you are persona non grata here.

A good way to ensure that new facts are not discovered, that new scientific discoveries don't happen, and that people don't listen to you, is to make things political.
yes actually, it would - without any really working online distribution system, no amount of money can force W3C to implement DRMs since there is point.

but that would also keep netflix off the web/tv, which is what, I presume, you and many do not want to see happening (since obviously, if they disappear, getting content is even harder than it is now)
Quality is the best business plan
Two viable parties are plenty enough if they are real parties and not a collection of people that use different-colored jerseys to play the same game. Unfortunately, right now majority of voter will vote for "their guy" almost no matter what, which lets "their guy" very broad license on any bad behavior. If the voters would say "either you put a leash on NSA or we're not voting for you, period" - then things may have been going in different direction. But voters don't do that - if you see, for example, how many voters of party A supported government surveillance when party A is in power and when party B is in power, the difference is depressingly significant. Because if "our guys" do it, it must be good, but if "their guys" do it, it must be bad. That's how we get into such a mess.
And-- Vagrant has expanded a bit and now can build out a few different types of VMs, including VMWare images and AMIs for Amazon EC2.
How do you think gpg works?
I think this is all true, and I try not to confuse the inevitable drift of the zeitgeist away from my interests with a value judgement of the site as a whole. Things change; raging against the dying of the light isn't really worth the heartache; some place else will arise, organically (e.g. not through a "Show HN" link) and those of us who want to move on, will.
I'm not saying we should stop trying to advance technology, but how much have we really progressed if we end up with space colonization and cold fusion, but the average first world worker is still a creatively suppressed wage slave struggling to stay out of debt and the average third world worker is still a borderline real slave struggling to fulfill basic necessities?

A set of priorities that is humanist in nature and puts quality of life before advancement would lead to greater output on both sides of the coin. We know in the case of open source and experimental hacking, for example, that a driven and intelligent person's productive capacity is enhanced by additional free time, not decreased.

Put humans first. The technology will follow, and it will be better and more sustainable technology.
NSA Surveillance Tool Allows Real-Time Access to Your Internet Data
Thx, didn't know about Richter. Lamonte Young is the other composer that's usually grouped with those guys.
Moonshot: If locations had memories
These attempts at brain simulation perplex me to no end.

Simulating a lump of tissue is definitely useful, it's when they start talking about simulating a complete brain that I get lost.

A brain doesn't happen overnight. It is the result of a long developmental process encompassing embryology, learning and experience acquisition.

How do they plan to wire the whole thing?

Micro- and macroscopic connections are well understood, it is the so-called meso-scale (in between) that is troublesome.

There will never be a non-destructive way to do extract the information of a live brain, and I'm not sure there will ever be a way to extract it at all. The current methods[0] allow to extract either the wiring or the genes expression.

[0] http://www.brain-map.org/
No, we are not.

Our world is still very different from the one painted in Orwell's novel.

Also this article is mixing all kind of stuff together.
this is true of all commercial leases; If they think it's hard for you to move, well, "market rate has gone up"

That is the thing, though, generally speaking? it costs a /lot/ to fill a space. 10% of the total value of the lease is not unusual. So they try to get you in with a low rate, then jack it up later.

Personally, I think a setup fee, then some sort of guaranteed low rate ongoing (maybe tied to the local price of electricity?) would make more sense. It's less costly for all involved if you sit at the same datacenter forever; it's just that the way that these things are sold, the owner of the data center wants to 'capture value' by raising your rates if it's hard to move.

The owner of the datacenter also wants to start you out with a low rate, for the same reason; if they can get you hooked so that it's hard to move, well hey, they might break even the first year, but after year two or three, they are looking pretty good.

Personally? I find this really frustrating. All parties, when working to maximize their own value, actually waste a whole lot of value for all involved. It's an example of capitalism destroying some pretty significant value.

You see this in almost all cases where switching service providers is expensive (and, I think, it's one of the reasons why "the cloud" is so appealing.)

Personally, I really like the idea of a 'condo' model for the data-center, and for renting in general. Yeah, you'd end up paying $100K+ for your rack, but it wouldn't take very long to make that up, and you'd end up owning part of the organization that controls the whole datacenter.

I think the big problem with the condo model is that in regular condos, usually you don't have individuals that own 100s of units, while that's not at all unusual in a data center.
> Given appropriate dynamic optimizations, there's no reason Java code can't compete with or surpass statically-typed and statically-compiled C/++,

Garbage collection.

I'm not sure I understand completely what he's trying to say though I find it hard to believe an article about "languages, VMs and optimization" doesn't once mention GC. You can heavily optimize any language to JIT, vectorize instructions, use SSE, whatever... but then that pesky garbage collector stops the world and takes 100 milliseconds...
Piratebay is offline
In light of the Freedom Hosting kerfluffle, as well as the Snowden revelations, I don't see much incentive to run an exit node.

Prior to these recent events I fooled around with setting up hidden services for my own educational purposes, but the fact that someone could use my Tor exit node to access illegal content was enough to preclude my setting up an exit on any of my servers.

Then I read about some guy in Austria who was arrested for running a Tor exit node and my decision was justified.

The problems inherent to running any sort of anonymizing service are just too many, and too serious, as we have recently seen.
The people preaching about flat income ignore that household size has decreased in the same period. And that's ignoring consumer surplus. We've collectively chosen a higher standard of living rather than less work.
bidule is fine but max/msp is much more interesting from a audio software/programing environment.
I don't think it's necessarily an issue of inexcusable incompetence: it seems like one of those faults which is obvious in retrospect but very difficult to predict. Why shouldn't Xerox use a standard compression algorithm in their scanner/copiers? That would seem to be a safer choice than writing a lossy compression algorithm from scratch. QA testing probably was on the order of 'picture looks right'; after all, why bother testing that the semantics of the copied content match the original when what you're building is a bitmap duplicator? (Of course, the OCR stuff would be tested more rigorously, but this explicitly bypasses that piece). It's not hard to see the chain of individually reasonable decisions that could lead to something like this.

The real failure is probably something more cultural: there was nobody with the discipline, experience, and power to write an engineering policy prohibiting the use of lossy compression in duplication equipment. I have no idea about Xerox's corporate history, but the evisceration of engineering departments in US giants and the concomitant decline in what one might call 'standards' or 'rigor' is an established concept.
Yeah, and because the libraries are not open source, we'll never be able to check who failed big time.
Not linked/mentioned in the article, but somewhat related - an article on working conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the UK, from Financial Times, February of his year:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab4...
I think of it as social hacking.

There are plenty of people in the world (not all of them men) who think that women should not be in education, should only be child carers, should not talk over men, etc, so if you just take the approach that you personally will be completely unbiased, then while you are not adding to that problem, you are also not doing much to assuage it.

Neutrality is all very well, but it often takes a lot more than neutrality to get somewhere if a lot of society is pushing back the other way from where you would like to get to.
Ah yes, i called out water specifically and therefore i am an idiot. Mia Culpa. Best of luck with your simulation, i'm sure that individual atom model will work out great.
Can you tell me specifically what Khan Academy's objective and how it goes about achieving it? What does KA view its role as in education?

Your "about" page says
"Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere."
Is providing free learning materials the extent of what you do?

Do you have a model of learning? What interaction do you have with the those who study learning?
Yes, that is correct. Generally the block Lanczos variant used in practice is Montgomery's [1], though, not Coppersmith's.

Lanczos was popular until a few years ago, as it requires slightly less actual matrix-vector multiplications, but since Wiedemann can be partially distributed it is becoming more desirable.

[1] http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-49264-X...
JBIG2 compression is in no way a standard compression algorithm, as the standard only describes decompression. The compression depends on the implementation. And this is where incompetence comes back into the game.
How to schedule Gmail messages to be sent later
Potential security flaw in network (digitalocean.com)
Digitalocean.com has misconfigured their network in a way that allows for anyone to monitor customer network traffic. During the process of checking MySQL replication between master and slave, I noticed there was a lot of background noise in tcpdump. It seems DigitalOcean has, using KVM and libvirt per their own recognition, put the libvirt-interface in an overly large bridge, and then kept applying more and more networks (multiple /24, it seems). While this might be a convenient way of assigning new networks to an ever-growing customer stock, it also sort of turns the entire thing into an amateur radio station (using the word amateur here to denote the activity, not the skill level of Digitalocean staff!). I do not want to be able to read what goes on with various mail, ircd, web and Microsoft sql servers, in networks far outside of my logical reach, as a customer with one IPv4. I am not an angry ex-customer. I will keep using their services, if this is fixed. I will not paste logs as that would add nothing to my disclosure, more than a possibility to exploit innocent users. I wish to encourage the community to take a few steps back and not engage in target practice, while Digitalocean undoubtedly remedies this situation (I have been in contact with them repeatedly before coming here). I hope that this helps, for whatever it's worth. This is where my involvement ends. I leave this information in the hands of the community.

Best Regards, Johan Boger (also posted on full disclosure).
I would recommend looking at the Real Python courses as well, although after learning the basics from Dive into Python or LPTHW. After the introduction, it starts teaching you how to start doing practical things with Python.

I also enjoyed taking Udacity's CS 101 course which is great as an intro programming course overall.

http://www.realpython.com/
https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101
Off topic (meta): fascinatingly, the top half dozen or so comments have no child comments, at 99 points. To me, this implies that the top comments are stand alone. I this many people can be in the running for top comment, then perhaps the argument isn't one-sided and it really implies a shift in the opinion of what has happened.

(Normally, meta is discouraged, but since the initial question is meta, an I think there's a signal to imply there's a real shift, I'm commenting on this. More is needed, perhaps a dump of topics to determine of politics has really taken an unusually strong signal here, perhaps using the Bayesian methods described a week or so ago...)
Almost like... subreddits!
FWIW, I often look for political stories here just to see this crowd's comments on the subject. It would be nice if there was some sort of filter system or a few very broad categories.
One person can only post so much content. Appealing to others to change how they post content is much more effective over the long run. So no, not hypocritical... or at the very least, a necessary evil.
Slashdot always had a large number of terrible comments (four digit UID here - right from the start the site had a huge troll contingent), however the moderation really did yield a better S/N ratio if you browsed the higher rated comments: On Slashdot you earned the occasional ability to moderate, with a limited ability to do so once you did. That resulted in more careful and considered moderation and I still believe it is an unmatched model.
The most obvious sign that the money sloshing around in the Valley is bubble froth is the number of people saying "this time it's different."

It's never different.
Eh, I mean hanging out with business people who seem like they are at least partly human (and some of them technically admirable) is a good experience for me. It helps remove some of my more self-destructive prejudices.
That doesn't asnwer any of the questions.
exactly! when did wanting your country to win become a bad thing? nationalism in small doses is good!
"because more pondered or technical articles take more time to get popular, they never reach the front page."

That's a really interesting point. As much as I've generally enjoyed the quality of front-pagers on HN over the years, I am now wondering about all the really good stuff that never made it there -- whether because the posters didn't optimize the timing properly, didn't game the headlines, or simply posted material that took awhile to digest and sink in.

Overall, there's probably a strong correlation between material that makes the front page and material that this community considers upworthy. But timing plays a huge role. I wish there was some way to counterbalance the effect a tiny bit. I can think of a few -- most of which would, unfortunately, be just as likely to harm as to help the reading experience.
Also easier to be an activist and aficionado then to be a contributor.
You're being bizarrely pedantic.

If the headline had read "half of all web sites compromised" I would never have it thought it was because of some underlying fault with HTTP.
ALL countries do this to protect internal businesses. That's the nature of the game.
i started coming here after reddit changed years ago. I dont know of any other websites similar to HN... very sad if it changes too.
Np :). I'm happy to see other people love Minimalistic music on HN as well. I haven't heard of Young, so I'll have to check his works out. Anything offhand you would recommend listening to first?

I stumbled upon Richter by accident while watching a BBC Documentary of all things that included some of his music in it.
Oddly enough the folks complaining here sound like old people remembering the good old days. Any site which allows people of varying interests to contribute will eventually outgrow whoever was there before. It's inevitable, the alternative is stagnation where people talk about the same crap as their forefathers. You can't keep the little kid little forever unless they are dead. You could start a new site and try again and yet eventually success will breed change and you starting sounding old again. I'm old enough to have seen this a lot of times and it gets old too, which is kind a meta-old.
Presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. Some local jurisdictions purposefully relax it for the sake of balance. (For example, it is done in places where it is seen as much too hard to convict for rape.)
almost like every publishing media ever. the general design of HN is to be simplistic, but with the current popularity it doesn't scale.

IMO even [strictly tech] [everything else] would work, although I'd prefer a more advanced option to filter out stuff.
Does anyone have any tips on getting started contributing to open source? I'm looking to get into it but I just don't know where to start or even how to find projects where I could contribute.