skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice -- the transparent paths are effective for showing the explored area.

Lately I've started sharing code from my papers -- is your code available? Matlab code is easily shared at MatlabCentral: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/... (my page).
There are a lot of people protesting the current multiparty proportional system in Bulgaria. They don't like the coalitions, the lists of candidates as opposed to individuals, the indirect election of prime minister (biggest coalition appoints one).

However I am very skeptical that changing the political party structure changes much. Aren't in the end the Republicans and Democrats just two big coalitions of movements that tolerate their coalition partners? If you had a multiparty system you'll get a liberal party, a conservative party, a far-right party and maybe a libertarian party. And they'll form long-run coalitions just like they do in multiparty countries.

In a multi-party system you are still probably voting for the lesser of two or more evils. In Bulgaria between 4 and 7 factions in parliament so its definitely a multi-party systems, although parties like to place themselves on a left-right spectrum and ally accordingly.

Did it have attack ads in all the elections? Absolutely! Ads target everyone, including smaller parties, to get votes from them and create guilt-by-association to their actual or potential coalition partners. You obviously don't target you partners, so thats why a right-left divide seems to appear... so you can claim you get a two-party system, you just have the primaries during the actual election.
The biggest problem the public has is not knowing what to do about it. People seem to finally grasp that voting is useless. Understandably they don't want revolutions and violence, because they have things to lose. And because they can't see any way out of this mess, they become apathetic.

Of course, only a little step is required: understanding that all this is done on their own [tax] money. When the world wakes up to this truth, the first thing it's gonna do is stop paying immediately.
The problem is that in a prison most of the people there are going to be criminals, and will end up socializing each other in ways that act against reform.

Though another part of the problem is that whenever you have a justice system anyone singled out by it as a criminal is going to have an easier time being trusted by criminals and a harder time being trusted by non-criminals in the future.
This sums up more or less why I ditched Rails altogether.
I don't think it is designed to replace fopen().

They can't say it, but it is designed to replace FoxPro and Access, or more generally: a local ODBC connection.
The Android version of BankID seems to work well on the sites that has enabled it.
Given that NSA internal controls seem to be less than commercial best practice in high security settings, and yet people (probably correctly) assume NSA is superior to known science in many areas, there are three reasonable scenarios:

1) NSA actually is fairly competent overall, and feigns incompetence as a way to let people bypass legal controls when "useful".

2) NSA is actually incompetent overall, and people like tptacek who say they're wildly beyond the open world are wrong. They obviously have a huge budget and legal protection (legal or illegal) to do whatever they want, but a lot of what someone would want to do is something even I could pull off given the NSA's level of resources.

3) NSA has really fucked up priorities, and for some reason (limited resources, cynical political calculations, expediency, etc.) put all of their effort into offense and none into defense, not even from their #1 threat (insiders). Maybe they also put too much faith in the vetting process and external shell and less on protections within the chewy center. This was pretty common in the commercial world 10-15 years ago (when "use a firewall and AV filters" was the leading security advice). If NSA actually went backward from the 1980s when they strongly believed on internal controls to actually cross over and be inferior to the commercial world, we're kind of screwed.
What research result surprised you the most when doing your user experiments? Can you suggest an experiment you'd like to see at http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com ?
I asked around speculatively and got great response. Right now we've got exactly the team we need, and I'm not too worried about hiring in the future.
I love query planners and optimisers. However, here's where I get a bit bemused: as it states in the article, a query planner must often go on incomplete information. Therefore you have to know the underlying assumptions built into the planner.

This is where explain/execution plans are great. Unfortunately, even these aren't completely documented. SQL Server is not bad, and Postgres is not only well documented but you can read the source. Oracle is often a basket case - there are literally thousands of undocumented parameters that you can set, not to mention underlying data views that also haven't been documented. In fact, there have been whole books trying to unravel the Oracle CBO, but even the most obscure often admit that Oracle fix optimiser bugs which can cause an impact on query plans.

In some cases, you must implement hints, because there is no way of catering for all queries under all loads based on all possible data distributions. Sure, you can add a variety of different types of indexes, histograms and other statistics to try to influence the execution plan, but at the end of the day sometimes you simply have to add a hint to force a particular sort of join, etc.

I guess my main point as I muse on query optimizers/planners is that none of them are perfect. It occurs to me that one of the best so far is actually Postgres, but alas - they don't allow for hints.

What's my main point here? It really comes down to the fact that the ideal for database queries is to allow for a declarative syntax ("give me all rows of product x that are over $100") without having to worry about the mechanics of retrieving the data, it's just not entirely possible. You really need to give developers and database folks the ability to nail down the actual mechanics of data manipulation.
Epic Games' Tim Sweeney and AMD don't see eye-to-eye on hUMA
> I'm just interested in stuff like this as long as their are large groups of starving people in the world.

Why? Soylent has no rational relationship to any solution to any of the problems that cause people to be starving.
The web log files of the three largest B2B purchasing platforms for gastronomy products in Switzerland. And http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-8-Windows-XP-Market... (first link in Google)
I don't disagree with you that "good" freelancers should care, but that doesn't change the fact that (in my experience) most do not. That being said, most of my experiences were with "low price" freelancers, which probably has a high correlation with that fact.
> having understandable English accent

Do you mean American mumbling accent or International English accent?

If the later, I fully agree and this apply the most to US citizens.

Last week I was having beer with two friend (one US one Canada) and a guy from LA came by, and it was completely impossible to me to understand one single word in his sentences (except for "fuck" and variants, which convey no meaning). He didn't seem to imagine that other people are different.

By the way, I'm French, living in China since 10 years, my English is rost because I use much more Chinese, but I usually can understand and make myself understood in International English.

For me the "hitishu" would have been obvious.

There is one thing behind this chitchat: English do not belong to UK or US anymore. It belong to the world. (Reasonably clear) Indian English has as many rights to life as have German English or Texan English or Aussie (which could well be the hardest).
Yeah - I was just checking in on progress for Chromecast coming to the UK, and came across this news. Bummer - think I'll stick with my (jail broken) Apple TV for now.
Apparently they employ pre-brainwashed employees (Mormons).

Edit: okay, that was offensive to Mormons, but they do apparently employ a lot of them. If one group is overrepresented, so will their views (which might diverge from the rest of the population).
Perhaps I'm a jerk, but I don't feel bad when non-technical people get taken for a ride when hiring people for a tech-startup. I have no business trying to start a hair salon on the cheap, so why should I feel sorry for someone who feels that he can make a go at something that requires highly talented, seasoned workers?
Maybe somebody will make a virus using an XP exploit that does nothing but patch the known exploits, propagate to other XP machines, and then delete itself.
I wish I could use it in the browser in a future proof way.

Web SQL Database rocks.
NYTimes obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/nyregion/red-burns-godmoth...
/Unspecified/ vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Fucking great

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-2463

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2013-2463

http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7u/jdk7u-dev/jdk/rev/b79d56eee... -- 4 month old fix
Facebook publishes its first transparency report on government data requests
It's wrong that it's "improper" to use the term "variable" for Haskell variables, since it is an established usage. This usage of "variable" occurs in the very first paragraph of Church's first paper on lambda calculus from 1931 in the motivation for the whole project!
I'm currently working some freelancers on my HypedSound relaunch. The designer and frontend coder both worked on hourly billing but everything was very well-defined. Since the backend is a much more complex scope, it was hard to define hours, and I'm working with a 'variable scope and budget' that we're shooting for. I wasn't ready to commit to hourly billing. Luckily, I have an advisor looking over all the code, which I think is essential as you mentioned. Whether it's a language barrier, technical barrier, or incentive barrier to good communication, you should have someone technical on your side even if they're not doing the coding.
Anyone planning to leak sensitive documents likely already knows how to change their mac address
Even though the article make this impression it's not illegal in Germany to criticize your political opponent as long as you're not telling straight lies.
What a terrible article. There are very few actual justifications for the arbitrary claims the guy makes. Even some anecdotes (especially non-personal ones) would be better than this guy's random assertions.
3D shading with box-shadows
And Greenwald doesn't present himself as impartial.

And impartiality is not required for a journalist to have legitimacy.

And "impartiality" as practiced really means oscillating between voices of Republicans and Democrats and no one else, making the conversation always inherently pro-government.
X is now scheduled to die.
Here in we see why marketing matters. A product marketed as a supplement to help round out a diet that's affected by age, jaw-being-wired-shut, chrons..., that the company is willing to cop to[1] as "yes it's designed to fully replace food" on their website's faq is positioned very differently than a product marketed as "100% food replacement, oh and maybe we'll save Africa" with heavy notes of fuck-the-establishment and some questionable understandings of how people eat[2].

[1]actually abbot and the like will advertise as being a full meal replacement... for situations where people have medical need and are being monitored by a medical staff, which is to say, in situations where problems might be caught and addressed.

[2]Don't want to eat three multi dish meals a day at 8,12,7? Human bodies have plenty of reserves to deal with out getting 100% of their RDI every single day, just so long as it averages out over a week or two.

But you still want something to keep the stomach from rumbling? Great, the supermarket is chock-a-block full of foods that need no preperation and supply a wide variety of nutrients, either in the form of specialized products (Ensure, Clif bars, various other supplements/diet products) or just no-prep food: pouch of tuna, quart of milk, yogurt, that thing of trail mix that's clearly just muesli with extra peanuts, sack of pre hard-boiled eggs. Whatever.
The return of nftables
> ... numbers in general, not particular numbers. And the human brain is not naturally suited to think at that level of abstraction.

This is so wrong (at least as a stereotype).

All throughout my early education I HATED arithmetic, and found almost everything about it mind-numbingly boring and repulsively repetitive. At that point in my life, I hated math. The moment I encountered algebra though, it was "love at first sight", and ever since I've absolutely been fascinated and engaged with every type of high-level math I encounter (the more abstract, the better). And not just "fascinated" in the "I like it" sense -- math, CS, etc. is more easy/natural to me than most humanities subjects, by far.

So although I can only speak for myself, I quite disagree with any claim that the brain isn't naturally suited to abstract thinking. While I know not all people think the way I do, certainly quite a few do.
Hackers Target Java 6 With Security Exploits
What would fairness have to do with the success of a startup? Put two founders on stage at a conference and the audience won't be fair either. Extend that to other events, web video, TV appearances and other audio/video media. He's not in a position to change other people's prejudice with his investments.
I agree, a lot of this sounds like he just found bad freelancers. I have been contacted in multiple occasions by people who wanted to launch their own startup and wanted to hire me to write it, but it was clear that they didn't have all the business details ironed out. I advised them to get feedback first, then try for an MVP based on that feedback, and then come to me for implementation. They were all very happy with this, because it's good advice they hadn't considered, and it's free.

Also, working as a freelancer right now (although in a more long-term role), I definitely am concerned about code quality and the thing I'm making working well, because I'm the one who's working on it. Writing unmaintainable code on purpose is not only unethical, but it comes back to bite you in the ass when you have to maintain it. Thankfully, I have no shortage of work at the moment, so it wouldn't be my dream job to have to work on an unmaintainable mess, much less so when I created it.

I disagree with the article a lot.
AllThingsD nears split with Dow Jones
Memories of positive associations get written onto DNA
Ultimate HTML guide for bloggers and writers [infographic]
My initial reaction to this headline was, "Orwellian doublespeak at its best," which is of course the hoped-for response.

On second thought, I don't see why this matters. Facebook transparency matters only to Facebook account holders. And it's free to create an account if you don't have one.

Getting mad over this would be like getting mad when the government releases electronic data sets, which of course means you have to have a computer (and computer savviness) to access them.
Headline made me come here to learn how to best fluff a CV. Left utterly disappointed ;)

Let me try to answer the question: The issue is probably, that with most softer CV skills are way harder to determine for the true level of mastery of an applicant. Most larger organizations might anyway be only interested in one particular element of your CV and take the rest as decision making support supplements. Unless the applicants where specifically applying for SSH, Linux or PHP/Zend jobs it might be just "stuffing" to signal that they have some idea of the subject and are willing to further develop their skills in that direction.
To answer another part of your question "are there technical constraints..", our research has mostly been inspired by practical challenges in micro and nano robotics. At such small scales, it is difficult (presently) to do onboard computation and these robots are generally controlled by a global field that is electric/magnetic/photonic/chemical gradient/gravitational etc.

The 'move without pushing' might require a state change (temperature dependent viscosity?). Perhaps we could use 3D robots that have shorter length scale in some direction than the others, and flip them sideways for flowing. Any suggestions?
UBS allows you to open a bank account in Germany and connect it to a Swiss account. You can setup automatic transmission of money from German account to Swiss account every 15 minutes or so.
Expatistan.com creator here.

No, we are not affiliated with numbeo in any way. As far as I know, they collect all their prices in their website, just as we do in Expatistan.
Seems like the project started on Olimexino board, which has the Arduino layout, and that's where the name probably comes from. Why they didn't keep the layout is beyond me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP2Wo2_RVgo

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/STM32/OLIMEXINO-STM32/
The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it would be easy to move to another pod.

This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now.

This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or at least present, because if it isn't there already it might never turn up as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time for similar reasons, but this is much more rare).

EDIT: Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though, which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of everything.
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/degrassi/images/9/90/Thats...
I actually talked to a friend and showed him the app who was receiving speech therapy for his stammer. He told me that they are doing "similar" exercises in therapy sessions. So there may be a market, yes. I will research this subject more, thanks for the idea.
Indian politics - at least the Lok Sabha - follows a FPTP system which largely forces politicians to coalesce into a two-party system (in this case, a two-coalition system).

In most of Europe, PR systems tend to avoid permanent coalition.
"Perhaps I'm a jerk, but I don't feel bad when non-waiters get taken for a ride when hiring waiters for a restaurant."

This makes no sense. If you want to open a restaurant, you need to know the restaurant business well, not how to efficiently coordinate table serving.
Hi, sorry for the late reply!

First step is to figure out if you prefer a University or a "Hochshule" -- kind of a foreign concept.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochschule).

The Universities come with more prestige, are larger, offer a wider variety of programs, and are more theoretically based. Therefore if you like computer science theory, taking classes that are math-intensive and could include things like algorithm optimization or building compilers, a University is the clear choice. I have heard only awesome things about TU Munich and TU Darmstadt, although any of the big TU's are probably great.

The other option, a Hochschule, is more practice based. Although there will be a mixture of theory and practice at both types, the distinction lies in the emphasis. So if you want to spend more time going straight to writing code, a Hochschule might be the better choice. The other advantages of a Hochschule are that they can be focused on a particular topic (if you are looking for something specific) and they definitely will have smaller classes. This means the professors know you, and you go directly to them for help for which they are often freely available (contrast with a Uni -- usually either go to a TA or have to schedule an appointment with the prof a week ahead through their secretary etc.)

I went to a Hochschule and was beyond pleased. There were only 20 people in my whole program so the individual help you can get from Professors was amazing. I actually studied Geoinformatics not Computer Science directly (and therefore searched for that specialty), but I think any of the larger cities will have good Comp Sci M.Sc. possibilities at their Hochschules.

In any case you can always visit ahead of time if you can to talk to the professors and sit in on classes. If that's not possible they are also very responsive to calls and emails... they often have preferred quotas for foreign students and love to recruit them.

Hope that helps!
There are degrees of independence. Yours is a fine one to aspire to. Having a positive net worth is a nice feeling.
Sure. If you buy at a low price you show that _you_ don't care.
Ah, very true. Why they make it harder than necessary, I don't know.
Really? I picked up xmlns when trying to figure out Microsoft's .NET1.1 XML serializer. In addition to your object's schema, it imports a few extra namespaces for the schema definition language (xsd) and schema instance (xsi) features... in particular you need a schema instance attribute "xsi:type" to resolve type names for polymorphic things.

Used like that, it feels just like importing a library in a programming language - I have a reference up top on the root element saying "this schema has this namespace and this prefix" and then I have attributes and tags with that prefix peppered through my document in addition to my own object schema tags and attributes. I can see how a lot of xmlns features could be really opaque (I don't understand any of them) but in this use case it was pretty straightforward.
> You mean, names of agent provocateurs infiltrating peaceful protest group

Yes. And when they leave, abandoning the infant child that they had with a member of the protest group. Yes, that happened.
Should have take a play from Snoop and gone with MongoLion.
> That is .. government-job level human potential

Plenty of smart talented people work in government, insulting everyone who works in the civil service like that is not only offensive, it is stupid.