skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lets see if VLC has finally added sane output support...
/me checks http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=av

Nope. sigh

[X11, SDL, FrameBuffer]
These are all basically dumb framebuffers.

[XVideo]
Ahh, the X Video Extension... from 22 years ago. It only accelerates some specific parts of the process such as the final colorspace conversion.

[ASCII Art]
I assume they mean libaa. How last decade. Besides, everybody knows the Cool Kids all moved on to libcaca's seductive ECMA-48 color escape sequences anyway. :p

In all seriousness, I've used mplayer{,2} because it brings my CPU usage down into to the <1%-2% range on most videos thanks to pretty much all of the work being done on the video card by way of VDPAU. How much do I care about this? Well let's see:

(100% == one fully ussed core of my old 3GHz Core2, gpu is a 9800gtx)
video is: 1280x720 23.976fps h.264 High profile L4.0 (no audio)

CPU usage w/ vdpau: mpv 2.8%, /usr/bin/X 5.2%
CPU usage w/ x11: mpv 10.4%, /usr/bin/X 36%

[aside]Wow; it seems mpv has improved the software
rendering engine. mplayer{,2} used to be about 10% to 15% higher![/aside]

Even on non-Nvidia hardware, the software has always had a very strong focus on efficiency. Their GL output drivers are great, and even the bad, old Matrox G200 I was stuck for far too long was fully supported. I wouldn't have been able to watch some videos without the hardware-assist.

There are other reasons I've always liked mplayer too, but the fact that it actually plays the videos that were a slideshow in vlc (and most other players) made the choice obvious.
Allow SECURE_TOKEN to be set via environment variable and it to be rotate-able.
Actually, mostly in an informal matter, we have in fact received many test implementations from maintainers of frameworks directly. If you go through the pull requests, you may recognize some folks. I don't want to name drop though.

I had in passing asked a few if they would be willing to apply an "official" indicator next to their rows. But the response had been uniformly "not interested." Maybe later I'll ask again. :)

Thanks for the notes on the MySQL configuration. There are a lot of gray areas in setting up the configuration, but we do seek recommendations such as these. Aside from concessions we've made to the matter of running a benchmark, the overriding goal for configuration is that "production-class" configuration is preferred.

I'm not an expert at InnoDB tuning, so you might tell me that "innodb_log_flush_at_trx_commit = 1" is not typical for production environments, in which case I'd want to make a change. But if it is typical for production, I'd like to keep it as-is.

If the point is that other databases do not have something comparable, that speaks to the point of the linked blog entry. These things are not directly comparable, feature-by-feature. We would like Postgres and MongoDB to be deployed in a typical "production-class" configuration, but that may or may not be feature-identical with MySQL.
I assume you were being sarcastic, but in case you weren't:

We don't have folders, you can't move the icons around, you can browse by category[0], and the layout (other than the fact that we have icons in a grid) is completely different.

Because we lay icons out in a grid, we're copying Apple? Come on.

[0] http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/258/8/d/slingshot_col...
"Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy"

How can this guy be so sure? More importantly, how can WE be sure? It's all secret.
Even though I don't really agree with him, his slam here was great:

> Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into.
The thing that this OP-ed misses is that the fear around this surveillance is that once we're done with terrorism, the "haystack" of data will be searched for tax fraud, drug deals, etc. If the writer of the op-ed could address those fears, this would actually be an enlightening read, not just a boilerplate response from someone in the intelligence community.
How human rights law applies in the current digital environment
Not in the bitcoinj library they all appear to be using, no. That, in turn, uses bouncycastle. Bitcoinj is not explicitly seeding SecureRandom, I'm reasonably sure.
Sec. 1.2 (c) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-c...
I disagree that you can avoid using these services, because I don't think that things like public schools are a service only to their direct recipients. Even families that can afford private schools for their children benefit from living in a nation with a high literacy rate. I'm not a 'customer' of my city's social services, but I benefit from having fewer people bottom out and end up on the street.
When URL Shortening Results in Longer URLs
ECommHub is Looking for a Senior Dev
Unicorns, ponies and rainbows please.
That's the lib, if you're bored enough to keep diving

https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/
I don't think we do. There are lots of chemical reactions in the world, happening all the time. ~99.999% of them don't then beget further reactions. The rest are the ones we refer to as 'life'. I'm not sure if anyone would ever need a more complex idea for life than that.
I agree but in the same way that the original elite Facebook paved the way for today's Facebook behemoth, I imagine a successful elite e-stitution (c) will legitimize the concept, which will pave the way for something with more universal appeal.
> This is done under tight and well-thought-out strictures. I witnessed firsthand the consequences of breaking the privacy rules of my former organization, the National Counterterrorism Center. As the center's deputy director, I had to fire people, good people, and remove others from their posts for failing to follow the rules about how information could be accessed and used.

1. We know from these leaks that is little to no practical control over access to all communications data, only a process that could simply be ignored without oversight. Andrew Liepman does not address this at all.

2. Liepman makes no argument whatsoever as to why a warrant is no longer required to get access to our 'hay', as he puts it.

3. It's fairly established the US is collecting the actual contents of private communications as well as meta data, Andrew Liepman strangely limits his discussion to metadata (which is also sensitive but less so).

4. Andrew Liepman is publicly arguing for the abolition of the forth Amendment, and perhaps other parts of the US constitution, and perhaps also the United States itself. We have no idea whether Andrew Liepman is planning violent action against Americans, and need to arm ourselves with the tools to protect ourselves from men like him who seek to do harm against the United States of America.
But exactly 0% of Minerva students will come from those quintiles if the tuition is 20k with no aid. Unless they take out loans, of course, but that puts them in a much worse position than if they attended a mainstream elite school, which are all very proud of their widely publicized "no loans" financial aid [0].

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/09/pf/college/no-loan_financial...
At blog post https://cryptocow.com/?p=201 we've been experimenting with using sensors to upgrade PRNG's, and we frankly can't understand why this isn't been used natively in Android RNG implementations... It's trivial, easy and tremendously increases the RNG quality.
Pretty gross that you're using your friend's brain tumor to pimp your startup.
You can't call a university "elite" that doesn't have any history. Where is the multi billion dollar endowment? Where add the scads of important alumni? Where is the name recognition among ordinary people?
I wonder when the well-connected neighbourhood white knights will get access to that information, and at that point we'll truly be in Hell. Voting records are currently anonymous, but what of our personal opinions? Some publicly identify as a certain political persuasion, but privately they identify another political persuasion.

For example, there are people who truly believe in communism but any public endorsement of it is dangerous, and others adhere to economic conservatism but their feelings extend farther towards libertarianism.

What about when our neighbours attack us based on our online conversations? It's not as uncommon as you could think, gerrymandering and the electoral college already stir up seething and venomous hatred of The Other Party(TM).

It's not a matter of if the NSA's treasure-trove of information leaks out, but when.

Imagine for a moment if Zimmerman were as evil as the media paints him, and, instead of callously shooting the Treyvon boy, he queried the local PRISM data distribution centre. He could instead engage in a smear campaign against the young man. In retaliation, Treyvon's allies gather data on Zimmerman that indicates he's a bisexual and he's a swinger with his wife. These "data wars" may seem far-fetched, but lately I've been feeling a bit more paranoid than usual.

How about job discrimination? Surely your public online activity can directly influence the kind of jobs you can get, but the private online activity could permanently damage your career prospects. Vetting processes nowadays check for a variety of red flags that are unrelated to activities that pertain to your job. Imagine if your entire browser history -- including the things you say, in addition to the websites you visit -- is indexed and stored in perpetuity. And it's all completely outside of your control.

Now let's take this a step further. The TSA manages a no-fly list that is well-known for false positives, and victims have no recourse over this at all. Now imagine that false positives occurred during job vetting processes and your job application is silently denied because someone else's unpleasant online activities were accidentally linked to your own. Again, you have no control over this, and you also have no recourse. There is nothing you can do to remedy the situation.
It worked wonders with specially "optimized" drivers for 3d mark back in the day.

I think it is the exact opposite - a benchmark is wonderful in showing a product weakness but you should be very careful of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law this.

And old joke back in the day with 3d mark enthusisasts was "I tried this 3d mark thing but after 8 hours still could not find the second level"
The end of books [1894]
Simply adding `gem 'unicorn'` or `gem 'rainbows'` to your Gemfile will give you unicorns or rainbows, I'll investigate ponies, thanks.
> By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of fitness adaptations we can crudely quantify (group A had adaptation X and was more successful as a result) but can't explain (in a rigorous, falsifiable way). The reason is that nature (natural selection) is "smarter" than we are.

Also, the Turing test -- the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer program might pass as human if accessed at a text-only terminal -- tells us that our idea about what counts as a conscious being is pretty limited.

> A set of traits for which we can test.

If we chose a set of traits that we thought identified a conscious person, we could just submit the set to a computer for blind simulation. My point is that consciousness is more complicated than simple behavior, however complex.

It is said that elephants pass the mirror test, meaning when they look in a mirror, they apparently realize they are the source of the reflection. This test has come to be a crude measure of consciousness and self-awareness. But I could easily program a robot to imitate the external behavior, without any real sense of what it was doing, or anything resembling consciousness.

Consciousness is more complex, and more subtle, than most people realize, and we really haven't even begun sorting it out.
Don't forget: police protection, fire protection, military protection, paved roads, functioning traffic signals and signs, groomed parks, trash collection (some places), up to sixteen years of education, enforcement of workplace safety standards, financial protection if you become suddenly disabled, a legal system in which to resolve disputes.

Those services make up a fairly small portion of government spending. The really vital portions [1] are even smaller.

Most government spending is merely wealth redistribution.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2011_US_total

[1] Vital: protecting the US from Russian invasion. Non-vital: drone strikes on random Pakistanis. Vital: protection from bandits. Non-vital: war on drug users.
This must be some new weird change with the most recent version. The version I use has F as the fullscreen button, and either F or ESC will exit fullscreen. And the controls auto-hide.

That's why I stick to the 1.1.5 version!
I have not seen mutations, I'll check it out, thank you.
The Physics of Light and Rendering, a Talk by John Carmack
Bogons: Do not let them in or through your networks
Privacy: Where is the line? - A curious youth's question
The author writes that, even though abuses are possible, they aren't happening and won't happen because, not only is the intelligence apparatus not interested in the mission-irrelevant data which could be abused, but those in a position to abuse are policed internally to ensure abuse doesn't happen.

Assuming this is all true, here's a thought experiment: in the event that this was no longer true and abuses were occurring, how would the public ever know? Since this entire process is impenetrably opaque to anyone on the outside, the public has only the assurances of those folks running these programs.
I don't know -- I'm using a 3 year old version where the windowed and fullscreen controls are almost the same. (the only difference is fullscreen doesn't have "shuffle" or "playlist")
It is not possible unless the user voluntarily associates his personal information with that mac address.

It is possible to harvest this information covertly. Up until iOS 7, it's possible for any iphone app to get your mac address. So if you also provide your personal information, an app could covertly associate them.
Google launches charity app to funnel $1 at a time toward good causes
Your comment doesn't really have any "picking apart". You just pose a few questions and frame the article's author as someone not be taken seriously.

You can't argue against someone simply by saying "what you said is crackpottery".

I found more value in the article than your comment.
This is Parrot: Clean up your MVC views (Parrot vs Razor)
After decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters.

It might be as simple as "it's alive while it's a functioning machine." A disassembled car is just parts and can't drive/be-alive, but assembled it is a car and can drive/be-alive.
Insights from lukew on instant gratification.
Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't help you to program robots, for example.

I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of "Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person, down to every atom, but is not conscious. I think that is complete nonsense.
Can anyone whose familiar with this space (decentralized, encrypted networks) give a quick run down on the different technologies attempting to solve this problem and their status? Diaspora, MediaGobling, Bittorrent etc.

Also as an aside it feels as though these are all tackling the problem at too high a level. Perhaps we need a new protocol at the TCP/IP level (maybe thats what this is I haven't fully digested it yet)?
I had forgotten the UK has its own data protection act, thanks for the reminder. I hope you're right, these represent everything I didn't like about the plethora of security cameras in London (part of why I no longer enjoyed living there) and multiply it by 3.
I'll post a small anecdote, which I promise is not an exercise in narcissistic banality.

A couple of my friends attend Green College[0] at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I crashed in their residence room for two nights during a cross-Canada road trip at the end of July.

The short time at Green College restored my love of higher education, which had been flagging toward the end of a drawn-out CS degree at the University of Calgary. Every morning the students meet for breakfast at a hall in the center of the residence compound, between 7 and 9. This is much earlier than my usual wakeup time, which hovers between 10 and 11. Green College has students from a wide variety of disciplines, and discussions accompanying the meal were a general mash of ideas far outside what I would ever encounter when hanging around my school's CS labs. It was a joy to participate.

The experience very clearly communicated to me that this is what I've been missing. Education in a vacuum is horrendously dull when compared to all these ideas bumping into each other around the breakfast table. It's inspiring; without the social aspect, school is reduced to jumping through hoops and learning the secrets behind magic tricks.

The idea of forming a close-knit community of students then transposing it to cities around the world has me grinning. Were I younger and capable of meeting the admission requirements...

[0] http://www.greencollege.ubc.ca/
Nope, not him. Googled a bit and I was thinking of John Howard in 1985. Apparently, it wasn't a bus, but a custom dragster and his helmet was a match too :)

And here's his bike - http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=8bqd1t1
I've been looking for a shader guide that ramps up in complexity just like this. The interactiveness is just the cherry on top! Can't wait to see the rest.
The value in any educational institution is derived from the ability of its graduates to go out and create value for the rest of the world. I only skimmed the article, but I felt like it completely missed this point. People pay more to go to Harvard and Stanford because they believe they will earn more when they graduate. People pay more for Harvard and Stanford graduates because they believe they will create more value for their firm. This is why every educational institution in the world touts its notable alumni. If Minerva can't create this perception, it won't succeed.
So do you hire someone from your cable company to program your DVR as well?
How Semantic Search is Changing End-User Behavior
HHVM is moving fast - Namespace support arrived. I heard reflection compatibility with PHP.net needs some work. They are fixing bugs that prevent top PHP project from working.
Propaganda-filled statist bullshit. Appeals to authority, and uses ridiculous examples to justify it.

> But I worry less about what happens to this one man and more about the damage Snowden has done — and could still do — to America's long-term ability to strike the right balance between privacy and security.

The only valid balance is 100% privacy. A government that violates its citizens' privacy is not acting legitimately.

> Ever since Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked top-secret material about its surveillance programs, he and the U.S. government have locked horns about the nature of those programs.

He's trying to rephrase the story to be one of Snowden vs. the U.S. rather than the U.S. government vs. the people.

> Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy, not just because it respects privacy (which it does), but because it simply doesn't have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.

If it's archiving them, it has all the time in the world, and can search through them at later times and forward information to relevant agencies. And we already know this happens with the DEA and IRS, so his argument here is even more irrelevant.

> I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected.

It doesn't matter how many attacks they believe they have foiled, that doesn't justify dragnet surveillance. Nothing does.

> Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

Trying to sideline the issue by suggesting ordinary people only talk about irrelevant things. What about journalists, politicians, political activists, and people who commit victimless crimes? As noted in a fantastic article by Moxie Marlinspike, laws can't be overturned without people breaking those laws: drug laws won't be overturned without people breaking the laws and using the drugs and wanting them to be legal, etc.

> Unfortunately, during the Snowden affair, many news outlets have spent more time examining ways the government could abuse the information it has access to while giving scant mention to the lengths to which the intelligence community goes to protect privacy. We have spent enormous amounts of time and effort figuring out how to disaggregate the important specks from the overwhelming bulk of irrelevant data.

"Trust us. We have a policy." Not everyone is guaranteed to always follow that policy, and it's a secret policy, with no legitimate oversight.
Android's SecureRandom uses BouncyCastle prior to 4.2 and OpenSSL in 4.2+ ( http://android-developers.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/security-e... )

It'd be interesting to know what the bug is and if that bug affects Bouncy Castle and/or OpenSSL as well, or if Google screwed up the glue code somehow
Agreed. Hard to believe someone would do this.
The things that make a language good for embedding are the opposite of what you want in a general purpose scripting language

I'm not sure I agree. What you want for embedding is something small, fast, and easily interoperable. What you want for general-purpose programming is powerful, composable abstractions. Lua meets both sets of criteria. It does so by means of exceptionally good design. The fact that it doesn't have the same object model as some other languages doesn't really prove anything, does it? Every well-designed programming language deserves to be thought of on its own terms.

Not having a featureful standard library, on the other hand, certainly is the kind of tradeoff you're talking about. But (a) is it so important to have a standard library as opposed to just pulling in the libraries one needs? and (b) you may be overestimating the difficulty of interfacing with external code in Lua. It's much easier than with other dynamic languages. "Too damn hard" seems an overstatement.

The big question with Lua is whether it's better enough than its peers to overtake them in any area other than embedding. If it is, we should see some sort of killer application of Lua. There is momentum toward an embedded-web-app style a la OpenResty, but also still a high barrier to entry; for one thing, it isn't well documented.
> But the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it.

Ok. Go on. Better late than never, right? Or is the condescending paternalistic boilerplate you stuffed this op-ed with your "good story?"
Here are two resources that are recent and more tutorial, introductory and/or applied than the OP paper.
https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/bartosz/understanding-algebr...
http://bentnib.org/interleaving.pdf