skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you serious ? Rarely have I heard "R" and "fast" mentioned in the same sentence (the current one being one such exception:). In fact, only in the world of R would anyone call Python super fast. That line made me chuckle. R's strength lies elsewhere, no other programming language has such an exhaustive/encyclopedic ecosystem of third party statistical libraries. And of course there is ggplot.

Regarding speed comparisons I would also like to add that such comparisons end up being a pissing matches where both camps end up comparing external functions implemented in C. So at some point it stops being comparison of the core language implementation.

I do some decent amount of statistical and machine learning related coding and I dont like R. Its not the speed that I mind, or the lack of. I find programming in R very error prone. It could well be a personal failing, but I cannot keep track of its weird inconsistencies and special edge cases. The other gripe I have about it is that there are very few books that tries to teach it systematically, more often than not these books are styled as a grab bag of tricks and incantations.

The speed problem of R is in the process of being addressed by quite a few alternative rewrites. Radford Neal is writing one, Luke Tierney is writing one, then there is Riposte.

A side comment I would like to make is that it always warms my heart to know that people who have made their distinguished mark in stats theory (Neal and Tierny certainly have) also have a lot of interest in programming. In fact I have observed that if they are really really good, there seems to be a correlation. Though this is clearly anecdotal.
I bring this up because there is also the "all talk no code variety" and I have no problems with that if that "talk" was good. My problem is with the schmoozing variety, sometimes inhabiting positions of influence and prominence, that has no idea what they are talking about, their knowledge seemingly gleaned form reading overstated popular articles about algorithms and techniques, the cosmopolitans of research if you will. My advice to aspiring grad students, learn to recognize them and stay away if you do not want to be them. A good signal is to check how many recent first author or single author paper does the researcher have and whether he or she writes nontrivial code. This is usually indicative of how much commitment and excitement the person has for his/her craft.
Mac OS X Terminal/iTerm/console tips and tricks, 2013 edition
On Lisp is great for learning about macros, and what is possible.

That being said, what is idiomatic in CL is not necessarily idiomatic clojure. For example, pg tends to like anaphoric macros, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro), while Clojure tends to eschew them.
+1 on the noise canceling headphones. They're best at canceling ambient noises. Human voices around you do tend to somewhat leak in. Thats suppressed too if you put some music on. The other advantage is that you tend to hear music on much lowers volumes since a lot of the background noise is cut out.
Remember to use SelectorGadget (http://selectorgadget.com) to help generate your CSS selectors.
Project Loon: Google's Balloon-based Internet solution
You're not wrong, but:

1. If you're using salt, it implies you chose to roll your own key function using hashes. That's a bad idea, because:

2. GPUs can produce so many combinations per second that the difference between salted and unsalted is basically indistinguishable for smart attackers.
As well as Perth, Western Australia: http://www.wafreenet.org/
I use Win 8 (because suddenly noone wanted to sell Linux machines anymore... And I don't figured yet how to install a Linux using USB here, I just cannot disable the godamn secure boot) with Classic Shell Start Menu.

The Start Menu from Classic Shell is awesome, and I only look at Metro interface when really forced into...

Too bad the "desktop" app of Win 8 is still hell buggy (ie: sometimes it even crash and don't relaunch, leaving you with no desktop, just desktop mode windows, but no icons, no taskbar, no clock...)
Youbot: remixing your old Tweets with a Markov chain generator
> Most decent and important sites would throttle the number login attempts one can try before at least throwing up a captcha or outright blocking.

The types of attacks discussed in the article are not feasible when the only way to try a guess is to send an HTTP request. Look at how many guesses per second those GPUs are doing. You won't get anywhere near that sending HTTP requests.

Passwords are far, far more likely to be cracked if the database of hashed passwords is compromised. That's what you should really be worried about, and it's the main reason to use strong passwords.

Also be sure not to reuse passwords, even strong ones. A strong password can still be compromised, because there are many types of attacks that have nothing to do with cracking hashes.
In writing will provide a paper trail that may later prove very handy.

E.g. "oh yeah, that guy: I fired him for poor performance." How would you prove otherwise without a paper trail?
I was amused to learn the Germans had built a similar line on THEIR side of the river, called the Siegfried line.
It varies greatly by book.

A sewn cloth binding, archival-grade acid-free paper, and good inks will last centuries.

Pulp paperbacks may fall apart after a single reading, though I've got a few I've had for 20+ years and multiple readings, though a few of those have a fair bit of packaging tape on them.

Several of my college textbooks fell apart distressingly fast, and I've got a number of softcover books whose pages are getting unglued (varying vintages). Different cover materials can also have different longevities: a few composite / plastic covered books have had the covers crack off or break.
No. Clojure's first public release was before Arc's first public release. Rich was also working on Clojure for two years before release.
Have a look at http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/tags/on-lisp to see Stuart Halloway going through On Lisp in Clojure.
I clicked that link, and the webpage started with a woman voice speaking too much like a whiny entitled gal wanting something when you arrive home, and I don't figured how to shut it down, and closed the tab :/

Why people leave these whatever with automatic sound that cannot be shut off?
>I just cannot disable the godamn secure boot

To enter the firmware setup, use the charms bar to go to Settings, then click Change PC Settings, go to General, then scroll down and find Advanced Startup.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/ibm_opens_up_power_c... "The consortium has the potential to establish Power architecture as a viable option for applications running within Google's datacenters."

Also, I suspect that work about wimpy cores was done for a reason.
On the other hand searching for some text in a hundred physical books is very inconvenient.

Search _is_ one application where electronic copies definitely can surpass physical books.

Though if I know the author and work, I can often flip to a page pretty quickly. Especially if there's an index, but even without, I have a pretty good sense of where in a book a passage occurred, even position on the page.
This was my first thought as well. I'm in the Bay. I'd do it.
The word takes its root from comedic wit, such as puns and comedies of error. For example, in the musical, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" there is a character who has searched for his missing children for decades. A captain of the army comes to his town to wed a virgin concubine, only to find out that she is actually his sister and they are children of the old man. Furthermore, they were only reunited with their father because another character, seeking to disrupt their marriage for the benefit of his master, pretended to be a fortune teller that would help the old man find his kids and then actually did, inadvertently, through his devious acts. That's ironic. While also unexpected and coincidental, the irony stems from the circumstantial nature of the event.

Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. Holding your wedding in April in Arizona with the theme "April Showers", knowing that it very rarely rains in Arizona in April and thus making light of the point, and then having it rain in the middle of your ceremony...that would be ironic.

From Wikipedia's article on the word, the best description I found was "a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things". It is the comedic relief that comes from recognizing the curveballs you are thrown just when you have it all figured out. Often, it's the situations that help the underdog.

Generally speaking, because they are circumstantial, most ironies must be deliberate or else unique to that situation. A "No Smoking" sign on top of a poster of a smoking Sherlock Holmes (seen in the Wikipedia article) is not in of itself ironic. However, someone deliberately placing a no smoking sign atop that poster would be. This photo is ironic because it is unique to the situation: http://bit.ly/6SqBsD

While we're on the conversation, can we please stop using the word "literally" to mean something happened, as in "I literally ate the whole sandwich." That implies that you did not do something figuratively, but there is no figure of speech having to do with eating a sandwich. It is an explanatory word, not an emphasis. "He literally went around the world in 80 days" is an accurate way to describe your friend's 80 day trip across 4 continents. "Did you hear? NASA is building a spaceship that can literally travel faster than the speed of light." Accurate. "I literally worked for 12 hours straight on this"...please revise and resubmit!
I will save you the rest of your life's labour.

http://www.amazon.com/Howard-Leight-MAX-1-plugs-Uncorded/dp/...

You're welcome.
The title originally said FB were making ARM SoC...
I hate articles like this.

"According to sources close to the situation..."

"_dozens of people_ inside and outside the company..."

"_many_ close to the situation"

"sources said..."

"_the persistent rumor_ that Gates had dropped the bomb..."

"Other sources cautioned that it was not..."

"....said one source with knowledge of the situation"

Garbage like this shouldn't be on any forum, forget HN.
That top left compose button should definitely be white.
Facebook's only been talking about ARM servers since 2010, but I guess that's just the misleading trade press for you.
>What is irony?

The debate that arises from a given definition thereof
Not enough to matter. Attackers haven't been dependent on rainbow tables for a while now. As discussed in the article, they're using GPUs to hash guesses individually for each account.

More to the point, using MD5 for password hashes isn't acceptable, at all. Not even with any extra layers of security. Not with salts, not with extra rounds of MD5, not when combined with SHA1, etc.. With reasonable options (like bcrypt) available in every major programming language, there's no reason to use something provably ineffective like MD5.
> Both Clojure and Common Lisp have type systems that can do most things ml and haskell can do.

I don't know about that, Haskell has quite a few very non-trivial extensions in it's type system that I have yet to see replicated outside of research languages. ( Rank-N Types, GADTs, Kind polymorphism, etc).
Where and how did that happen? What was the name of the startup? Who organized the event?
I wonder how long the handshake takes. I imagine that the scan looks something like how CRTs work. But the triangulation back to the origin and whatnot seems like it'd take a certain amount of samples, or a pair of sufficiently-displaced sensors working in concert.
Potentially, they do not have multi-AZ ELBs and only thought to have their EC2 or similar instances in multi-AZ. Or they don't have proper tuning of their DNS to stop routing to failing ELBs. Or... Amazon is unaware or not making us aware of the side-effects that their subnet outages tend to have on the overall network in a region.
Leaf blowers used by homeowners or the people paid to take care of their gardens are one of the most "typically American" and absurd and annoying things. You almost never hear/see these things around Europe, except some similar contraptions use to take care of very large city parks, for which they probably make sense, and even then they are used at reasonable hours.

I mean, using a powered leaf blower to help clean up some fallen leaves off your front yard, sparing you 15 min of your life? Wtf...
Great 2 minutes of entertainment. Thanks
any specific reason why it should be that way ?
Indeed. For example, dual-paned windows are fantastic, but since air conditioning is relatively rare in dwellings in the Bay Area, you effectively can't use them for sound insulation for several months of the year.
Unreinforced brick will indeed fall down in even modest earthquakes. In new construction it is possible to sink rebar into the wall, at which point it is at least the equal of concrete (and certainly more attractive); however a lot of people don't want to bother with perceived time and expense and so we go back to concrete and stick framing.

Much construction in California is penny wise and pound foolish. It is routine to omit insulation from the walls in new construction, never mind that it will pay for itself in savings on heating and cooling bills. Wooden houses can be destroyed in an earthquake if the quake shakes them off their foundations; fixing this is simple and easy during construction but, again, wasn't done for a long time. I believe the only reason it is done now is code requirements—it would not overly surprise me to learn that the builders can't be bothered even in new construction.
In my first journalism class, one of the very first things drilled into our heads is to always be explicit in who or what your sources are. Even if they're confidential, how many there are and rough details about them should always be given.

Weasel words are the bane of decent journalism. It's a shame so many major news agencies don't seem to realize this, though.
> The original ASCII standard defined characters from 0 to 126.

0 to 127. 127 is a power of 2 minus 1, which should be a hint; in specific, it's two to the seventh minus one, since ASCII defines codepoints for all possible combinations of seven bits, which is 128 possible codepoints, so the enumeration ends at 127 if you count starting from zero, as computer programmers are wont to do.

> all possible 127 ASCII characters

128 characters, as mentioned above.

> the ASCII guys, who by the way, were American

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The ethnocentrism was unfortunate but it isn't like you weren't warned.

> The numbers are called “magic numbers” and they begin with U+.

He can call them "magic numbers" but everyone else calls them "codepoints".

> UTF-8 was an amazing concept: it single handedly and brilliantly handled backward ASCII compatibility making sure that Unicode is adopted by masses. Whoever came up with it must at least receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm sure Ken Thompson and Rob Pike will be happy to hear someone thinks that way.
Yep! Good find!
It's not really the flexibility. Masonry is strong in compression, but heavy, and relatively weak in tensions. It tends to crumble under its own weight.

But yes - brick is good in a hurricane, but a death trap in a quake..
Hmm? I can see it, and I don't have "showdead" on.
> if you can't use bcrypt or something like it, you should store passwords in plain text

No, he's saying that if you can't use an acceptable hashing function, you shouldn't store passwords at all.

But, why would you be unable to use at least one of the suggested hashing functions, anyway? It's hard for me to imagine a language or platform where none of those functions is available, excluding very simple, special-purpose systems like PLCs.
I made a translation visualisation example (using the given 8 queens example) at http://thinkinghard.com/correspondence/rhoscript/index.html.
this is the equivalent of waiting for the second and third albums of a one-hit wonder. and even that one hit is strikingly overrated and immature.
A factor of 1000 isn't that important.

Really. First, stare at this chart from the Ars Technica article:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/expone...

This graph shows, roughly, that a short password can be brute forced in seconds using modern hardware. If it is just one character longer, it suddenly takes a week to brute-force. This is the miracle of exponential functions.

Now multiply the y axis by 1000. The long password now takes 1000 weeks. But the shorter one still only takes a few thousand seconds. If you are running your cracking program for a day, you'll get the same results you got before. The weak passwords are still weak enough to crack. The strong ones are still strong.

(Note, by the way, that it doesn't take 1000 times longer to guess 1000 salted passwords, because some of those passwords are super weak and will fall in seconds, after which one no longer needs to guess them. So, for example, once half the passwords have been broken, the new multiple is only 500. The Ars article explains this, but I didn't understand its wording at first.)

It is true that salt makes some difference. But it is not a meaningful difference. The difference between giving up 60% of your passwords and giving up 73% of your passwords is probably moot.

EDIT: And my example number of 73% is too low! That is bad news for MD5! Again, the article: they cracked 82% of a 16k-password file in one hour using only a single commodity GPU.
Houston is a nice place in the loop, especially midtown, which is very similar to Austin. It's not cheap in the loop, though. As you say, there's too much oil money for that to be the case. When people point out that Houston is cheap (and I'm guilty of this sometimes too), they are referring to the suburbs, like Sugar Land. Inner loop neighborhoods definitely aren't cheap.
I feel like we're at a point now where articles that just try to 'demystify' unicode are almost teaching the controversy if they don't come out and actually say how you should deal with encodings in new apps.

It's about time we actually start pressing for the idea that utf-16 was a terrible idea and that utf-8 should be the dominant wire format for unicode, with ucs4 if you really need to have a linear representation.

Utf-16 is confusing, complicated, and implementations are routinely broken because the corner cases are rarer. I really hope we're not still stuck with it in 50 years.
>ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The ethnocentrism was unfortunate but it isn't like you weren't warned.

Yea, I think it reflects how much technology development comes from America even back then as well as now.
You might not like how it was written, but Kara Swisher has credibility and I don't doubt it's true.
Mass-produced clothing is also a commodity.

You're just convinced it's not.
Isn't it actually ironic that a company would offer Thanksgiving lunch on a day when most people would not be in the mood to eat it (having eaten their fill the day before)?

3: a) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; an event or result marked by such incongruity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse
Honestly this has never really been a secret, but it is good to see this get some proper attention. With any luck Americans will be more wary of statements like Bush's infamous "'Why do they hate us?' ... They hate our freedom".
Irony is situational - it doesn't have to do with meaning unless the confusing of that meaning resulted in some coincidental action directly related to that meaning...

For example, the character "Annyong" in Arrested Development is always saying "Annyong" (meaning, "hello") when another character says hello to him. Everyone else thinks he is just repeating his name, but he seems oblivious to this confusion. The irony is that his real name is "Hel-loh", but he does not seem to get the connection either. The misunderstanding of his name and its meaning causes an ironic comedy of errors. Arrested Development is full of these, as are most situational comedies.
> However, R lends itself to ad-hoc analysis much better. Less cruft and weird transformation to set up for ad hoc analysis.

Classic domain-specific language: Good fit for the problem domain, even if it's weird in every other respect, as R is.
Is there any way to see the trace on a website ?
Is Third Point known to have been going long with their Yahoo! shares?
Ken Thompson: A Brief Introduction
Ask HN: Need your MVP built? Let's chat.
I'm an engineer at a company in Palo Alto and I am looking for work to keep me busy during my free time. If you need your MVP built (and are willing to pay, of course) then I'd like to talk to you and get a better idea of what your idea is, what your timeline and budget looks like, and things of that nature.

Feel free to email me at jms at brwr dot org.
don't go to hackathons if you just want to win
hahahahha!!
Anyone else think they're doing the same now with the "gas attack" in Syria? I don't really claim to understand how a dictator thinks under pressure of civil war, but the guy seemed relatively intelligent and educated. He'd probably know better than to do such an attack, when US and others were looking for any excuse to enter the war.

The situation really is terrible for everyone there, but I'm not sure an US intervention would make things better, and I especially don't trust US propaganda anymore. I'm way over the "spreading democracy" phase.
I think both On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp from PG are good books.

The only criticism I have is that PG does not write code in "Common Lisp style". It's often more of Scheme with Common Lisp.
FTA: "It is sometimes mentioned that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, wrote a compiler that only required four kilobytes of memory. However, Thompson wrote an entire operating system that could operate with the same amount of memory -- and not just an ordinary operating system"
Does this technology require clear skies/do clouds block the laser?