skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's great that people are trying to innovate in this area. That said, I write a web app because I want the accessibility that anyone with a browser already downloaded can come use it easily. It seems to me like this would require downloading a thick client different browser to use web apps written for it.

If it could be rewritten to be started from a JS include on a web page, that would be ideal. Second best would be if it ran from Flash, a plugin that is still widespread. Next best is if it were a plugin itself, but very few users are willing to install a plugin, so that is already unusable for me. Next best is a downloadable separate app, but that's even worse in terms of the number of users who will go through the trouble to use it, so again is not something I would use at this point.

Good luck! I, for one, like the scene style demo vid! Although it didn't tell me if the engine would be open source or not, which is also a big thing with me. Coding for a closed source engine and being beholden to someone else to figure out and fix bugs in it when my webapp is having trouble is very painful.
I loved the Sega Saturn, for what it's worth. Army Men on the Saturn is the first time I played a multiplayer shooter on a console. It was great.
Why I Won't Try to Publish As I Move Toward Tenure
Ask HN: Moving to Toronto - I'd like to make contacts
I will be moving to Toronto at the beginning of 2014, mainly for personal reasons. Currently I live in NYC and I am a quantitative developer working in algorithmic trading. Since I will be leaving my job, I am considering alternatives jobs (non-trading or finance related) and also making some lifestyle changes.

- What is the startup scene like in Toronto?

- What is access to investor capital like?

- As a techie, how do you like living in Toronto?

If you are a startup hiring in Toronto, I'd love to chat, to see what types of people you are looking for and/or what sorts of problems you are solving.
Will Ferrell Is Not On Twitter, Idiots
That's the most beautiful chart I've ever seen.

I found:

The A^(1)_M automata related to crystals of symmetric tensors
G. Hatayama, K. Hikami, R. Inoue, A. Kuniba, T. Takagi, T. Tokihiro
J.Math.Phys. 42 (2001) 274 [Open paper's DOI page in a new tab]
arXiv: math/9912209 [math.QA,nlin.SI] [Open paper's PDF from the arXiv] [Open paper's arXiv page in a new tab]
inSPIRE: [Open paper's Inspire page in a new tab]

after just clicking around wondering if it was functional as a browser too :)
Programming made for humans
Depends on the cities. NY-SF by train will remain nonsense forever, but the eastern seaboard and a bunch of other clusters (LA-SF, Great Lakes stuff, I think the obama admin had a map of zones they wanted to put HSR proposals for a few years back) could be serviced by high-speed train, even more so with maglev (which extends the competitive range of train against plane)

My personal rule of thumb[0] is modern HSTs (280~320km/h top speed) are superior to plane up to ~1000km, and can remain competitive to 1500km.

(although, though that's much more of a personal advantage, having really shitty ears and great difficulty with pressure equalization the odd train tunnel — even at high speed — is much less painful than going from 0 to 30k ft and back)

[0] modulo specific settings, including the current security theater shit which I don't have to experience on train and considering that most of my experience is on european lines where city center to city center is what you want and airports are commonly 30~40mn away from city center
But wait, this happened before Deng came to power. Deng oversaw dismantling of he cultural revolution, per above Wikipedia link.
They're getting there. The leading edge of enterprise is already using scala or F#, which have a lot of the power of Haskell (in fact I'd argue scala's is more powerful in some ways, e.g. typeclasses cease to be a special case).

In terms of using Haskell in the enterprise, it isn't standardized enough (most libraries rely on GHC extensions), the library ecosystem isn't mature enough, cabal is still a mess (it's too easy to get your dependency tree into a broken state), there's not enough commercial support, there's not enough deployment/monitoring infrastructure around. Fundamentally, it was produced by academics who didn't care about selling it to the enterprise, and the effort to address these concerns hasn't entirely happened yet. It's getting there, and I think we'll see more of it as time goes on.
> If the public education sucks

What if group education is the problem? Parents being allowed to teach their children is a human right, and it's only very strange countries that block it. It smacks of government indoctrination.

> And .. the majority of reasons for homeschooling are plain invalid in my world (often based on religious ideas, claiming that the curriculum is containing 'forbidden'/'evil'/'wrong' stuff).

I guess the government indoctrination is working on you. (Did they run some propaganda ads to make you believe such a strange thing?)

No, the reason most parents homeschool is that they can do a much better job, because you don't have to spend half of the day on useless structure and discipline. By doing that you free up so much time that kids can learn twice as much as non homeschooled kids. Or they can learn other subjects not normally taught, or they can explore their interests.

It's not for all parents of course, it requires a good commitment. But homeschooled kids end up with much better educations that regular schooled ones. There have been many studies in the US on this subject and the results are very clear: Homeschooling works much better.

> 'Free society' doesn't imply the right to do everything. For some, myself included, the requirement to send your kids to a 'real' school is a necessary thing and not Restricting The Freedom.

Of course it is restricting. You have just been brainwashed. A society can make up any rules it likes, and I guess you'll go along with it.

But you have to have a good reason for the rules. And there is no good reason at all for the ban on homeschooling.
> You picked up Android programming in your spare time, after having been a programmer for decades.

True, but the thesis being tested is whether I am re-educable. Android programming is certainly not 6502 processor assembly-language programming.

> I said that many people are, especially older ones.

Fair enough, I may have overreacted to what seemed to be an overbroad generalization.
I also loved the Sega Saturn. Sega Rally on the Saturn is a deliciously well-tuned game.
One potential solution might be to coat the reflective glass windows with a transparent layer that diffuses rather than reflects the light. Sounds like that would be the simplest and least costly approach.
What stops me from taking a picture of the screen with another device?
Software brings eye contact to Skype, with a little help from Kinect
Hi, author of the cheatsheet here.

I'm thinking of changing the snippet under "The Basics" to be what's suggested in issue #3 (https://github.com/audreyr/favicon-cheat-sheet/issues/3). Any feedback before I make the change?
Well again the code is nearly completely opaque to me (goes to show you that there is such a thing as too much abstraction) but again based off of the name "semi_implicit_integrate" it would be crazy for this to be anything but a Semi-Implicit Euler integrator. That falls into the class of symplectic integrators, so it should handle SE(3) fine.

There is also a explicit method in there, which probably won't handle it very well.

On the other hand, I hesitate to argue with the author about their own code... or are you just the OP?
If every penny spent on enforcing drug laws and incarcerating drug sellers and buyers were spent on education, treatment, and poverty programs, drug use would fall in the United States by orders of magnitude.

I have no doubt that's true. But even if the war on drugs was stopped, the money wouldn't go to helping the poor. The U.S. only has right wing parties, so the money would just end up paying off debt or lowering taxes.

One of the more pernicious effects of making the sale and purchase of drugs illegal is that people who sell and purchase drugs are sent to prison.
...
The prisons turn users into addicts and addicts into career criminals.

(hard) Drugs are illegal where I live too (The Netherlands). But we don't have such harsh laws at all. Possession of drugs means a fine and perhaps a few days in a cell sobering up.

It is not the war on drugs that is destroying the U.S's lower class, it's the ridiculous prison sentences. No country in Europe has as many drug related problems as the U.S., and in no country in Europe drugs are legal (except maybe portugal?)

You are absolutely right in everything you say. But legalizing crack cocaine does not sound like an optimal solution to me, sure perhaps you'll succeed in overthrowing the drug cartels. But then you have the issue of regulating or even organizing the legal (private) distribution of drugs. I don't see that ending well at all.

The prisons and the U.S.'s messed up legal system are the problem they are what should be fixed.
Or you know - a better solution - allow recompiled programs to be run on the desktop and allow sideloading of metro applications. The surfaces will disappear in a matter of days.
Probably because telcoms are already considered the worst offenders, and assumed to be evil? No change to the status quo = no uproar.
He spoke English to a non-Welsh speaking colleague.

The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers.

They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language.

A tribunal found that it was about his use of language.

> If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

I'd be interested to know what would have happened if it had been a language other than Welsh.

If there were a bunch of people who spoke Russian fluently, and he spoke Russian to them and English to the English speakers.
Bugs may not have wheels, but some of them form poop into a ball to roll it around. And they can navigate by the stars.

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-dung-beetles-stars.html
How handsomely? Will anyone step up and say? If this is happening, what is the going rate? If you were offered, but did not accept, what value would have changed your mind? (Everyone has a price) Are there really people out there that turned down half a million, a million, five million dollars? Are there smaller companies who would turn down 250K or 100k?
I think this would be much more interesting if you could provide it as a product (i.e. LDAP in a box) rather than purely as a service.
Why An Exokernel - XOmB: an exokernel written in D
If you think someone could get in thru the ssh port (exploiting an undisclosed vulnerability or with brute force password cracking) moving it elsewhere is not a long term solution. fail2ban is good to avoid brute force attacks, but portknocking with i.e. fwknop will be safer in more situations. If a service is not meant for the public then they shouldn't be able to even notice that is there.
Carrying on from that thought, the various mathematician-employing agencies have now had over 60 years to study the problem of "how much can we use this critical information-revealing tool without exposing its existence?" If they can identify an upper bound on "sparingly", that's immensely valuable.
If you're worried about that, it probably shouldn't be publicly accessible in the first place.

Yes, moving ports helps, but it's not a real defense. It just lowers bandwidth costs and prevents some not-so-harmful attacks (from people who don't know whether what they've compromised has any value.)

At the very least, use public-key authentication instead of password authentication for SSH.
Three Ways to Impress Your Boss
What secrets about the football? It's a Haliburton aluminum suitcase with a radio, a book describing the options, and a Marine handcuffed to the end of it. This is all from Wikipedia.
Wait, why? Try to read it aloud and it will make sense. I've seen lot's of hard and confusing syntax but this is not one of them. And I'm not a Ruby developer.
Most of the computers of the present are.
A related tool I’m working on is a visual debugger for topology construction. You can see an example here showing California state and county boundaries:

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/topology/debugger.html

You can zoom & pan in the debugger as well as use the arrow keys to step forward and backward through each step of the construction process, while in the JavaScript console the global `current` gives details on the current step. My plan is to make this a drag-and-drop interface for constructing TopoJSON with the ability to see exactly what’s happening along the way. Of course, it might also be nice to edit and fix the topology in-place, but for now that’s probably better left to desktop GIS!
Healthy Soil Microbes, Healthy People
From that description you should be able to build one yourself..
Sink your teeth into BLOOD SWEETS - the new EP from White Elephant Emporium
'Blood Sweets' is the debut EP by White Elephant Emporium and will be available as an exclusive download from whiteelephantband.bandcamp.com on September 9th 2013.
all users are caucasian middle-aged people with anglo names? that's not so random.
Is story-telling an invention? Because arguably other animals have languages and tools, but humans use story-telling to explain complicated things. Whether it's travel directions, technical instructions, or a spiritual message, it all gets across by some form of story-telling. And that's what makes it stick.
That Time I Made A Website
I'm not convinced by either side. But I find the article reasoning totally hilarious: be careful with that supply flooding that has never happened, even with monetary incentives, but that could happen any moment!

To be honest, I think (and that's a very personal belief based on personal anecdote) that more people can learn programming than it's thought. But it needs much hand-holding, determination and means than it's reasonably expected.

So (again: a gut feeling, so take it FWIW) the barriers might not be in people's brains, but do exist anyway. And the article does nothing to disprove the common wisdom (IIRC backed by some empirical evidence) that only so little people can learn programming.
To be fair (and as an immigrant I was also appalled by PG's logic), he qualifies his statement by saying that he considers it a problem when the accent makes it difficult to understand the person. I think that's a reasonable bias, but a bias nonetheless.
According to that Wiki entry, Nintendo had almost nothing to do with this game.
End of the company-issued computer
It's indeed a large amount of traffic. But it's not scary. None of it will get through if your SSH software is up to date, you have it configured properly, and user accounts are managed sanely. The attacks to be scared of are those that are actually targeted at you. And they will find the port SSH is running on either way.
> because they want to prevent their children mixing with a diverse population.

No, they just send their children to private school.

> Neo nazis, radical extreme Muslims, Christians and Jews, Hippies - they all say very similar things for home schooling.

No they don't. You have just been brainwashed by your government. You and darklajid both have very bizarre views about homeschooling - whoever is in charge of propaganda is clearly doing a good job, but he is not doing a truthful job. (Also go read my reply to him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316449 )

It is stunning to find a modern country abusing human rights this way, and using a propaganda campaign to make their own citizens actually believe they are doing the right thing!

I did not realize it was this easy to manipulate people with outright lies.
This also happened with the Aria in Las Vegas, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39403349/ns/travel-news/t/death-ra...
Other way round, multiplication is in P, so integer factorization is in NP. And a breakthrough in P?=NP could have implications for factorization.
Here's an idea for an app:

1. Upload a large, centered image, and have it spit out all of these different sized, optimized favicon images for me.

The initial image should be large enough to accommodate all lower sizes.

Any takers? :)
Readability link for those put off by pale grey text on a white background: http://www.readability.com/articles/zkhxahj4
Interestingly, my native language is Czech, and it makes it rather easy to learn English and Spanish, because the only sound that's missing is English 'th' in three or think, which people here pronounce like 't' or 'f' and "I fink" sounds pretty horrible :)

You forgot people mixing up v/w, and being funny with r. ;-)
To put this into perspective, the distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 506KM.

It's roughly comparable to:

* Ottawa->Toronto (449KM)

* LA->San Francisco (622KM)

* Washington DC->NYC (363KM)
Opinion Stage - Social Polling & Voting done right.
You'd have to be really careful about that. arXiv.org isn't peer reviewed, so there's a lot of crackpot science on there. For some of the best examples, search for P!=NP proofs.

(It also depends on discipline. A lot of respectable math and physics preprints first appear on arXiv.org and can be exceptionally solid.)
Miles Copeland, the CIA officer whose book Curtis relies heavily on in the article, was an interesting character. I've been meaning to look up that book for a while. Has anybody here read it?

(He was also the father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, not that that matters.)
The Phillips deal was essentially a way to annoy Sony, with whom they had a contract that went sour. They weren't involved in any of the CDI games, and they were all horrible.
Trader Joes is Down
I disagree. Mobile gaming is a vast wasteland with a shitty business model. Either you sell a game for peanuts or you go to a freemium model and not-so-transparently squeeze your customers for every penny they are willing to pay. There's no benefit to Nintendo. Alos, touch controls are very limiting for a lot of genres.

Maybe when Apple and Google get serious about mobile gaming, it'll make sense to release AAA, not until then.

However, I do like the idea of targeting mobile platforms as companion devices to Nintendo games or consoles. For example, It would cool if you could use an iPad or iPhone, in lieu of the Wii GamePad. SmartGlass-type stuff is cool and detracts nothing from the platform. Slick mobile app access to your account is awesome. Nintendo should have a presence, but releasing standalone games today is not necessary (didn't save Sonic).
Yeah right , so your app doesnt have business objects ? validation ? complex business rules that need to be enforced server side ? server-side queued processes and middlewares ? what kind of app are you talking about ?
You are talking about Surface RT. Side loading will allow the present troves of ransomware and nasty toolbars to run amok on the Start Screen. And just allowing sideloading will not generate considerable interest among masses, to be frank.
I definitely agree with your sentiments. What is also missing from this article is that from a demographics perspective, it is much easier to work in an auto-factory than to do software development. As a result, the pool of people that can work in a factory is much, much greater than the pool that can work as software developers.

This opinion of my mine does not have anything to do with how hard the work of a software developer is but more to do with simple human traits. At a bare minimum to work effectively as a software developer you need to be a good learner, ability to try new things, be able to step out of your boundaries and push yourself, discipline to sit in front of a computer for long stretches of time, and comfortable with change. These traits are in some ways the opposite of an ideal factory worker.
Breaking RSA keys up to 1024 bits is one less-outlandish-than-some possibility.

NSA published a note advocating use of ECC in 2009: http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/elliptic_curve.shtml

NSA's statement wasn't "we've got an RSA-breaking machine" or anything like that; the highlights are 0) folks are using RSA-1024, which public sources only ascribe 80 bits' worth of security to, smaller than the usual margin; 1) RSA gets slow with long keys: according to public sources, 256-bit security requires RSA-3072, which is 64x slower than the equivalent ECC-512; 2) RSA-breaking implementations keep getting gradually better over time, whereas ECC's effort-to-break has basically stood still.

Their own ("Suite B") guidelines for use of public algorithms to protect classified data tell the US government to use ECC, not RSA. (AES-256 is fine, though.) They licensed patents for particular implementation techniques:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography

Bruce Schneier, reacting to Bamford's statement about a cryptographic breakthrough, said: "Another option is that the NSA has built dedicated hardware capable of factoring 1024-bit numbers. There's quite a lot of RSA-1024 out there, so that would be a fruitful project. So, maybe."

(There's a lot of RSA-1024 out there partly because old 1024-bit SSL certs die hard, and people are lazy about switching to bigger keys if, for example, it would make establishing SSL sessions more expensive.)

Finally, perhaps not related to public-key crypto but really interesting, the XKeyScore deck had the bullet point "Show me all the VPN startups in country X, and give me the data so I can decrypt and discover the users" as one of the things you can tell the system to do. That could just refer to one of those protocols that everyone knows is broken but is still in use (MS-CHAP/PPTP) or to either a protocol/implementation break or something else affecting VPNs we currently think are secure.

Maybe the best argument against a crypto breakthrough is that it's clearly extremely hard (none of the brilliant mathematicians working in the open are close) whereas attacks on implementations and protocols are relatively easy. If you have a big bag of 0-days, have stolen some certificates (as Stuxnet seemed to indicate), and are inside a bunch of service providers, it seems almost redundant to put a lot of effort into factoring big numbers, unless some big technical improvement basically falls in your lap.
There is LMDB (http://symas.com/mdb/) storage solution for read heavy workloads. Alternative to LevelDB or CDB.
Depends. Earned monopolies are not so bad, and Microsoft earned their early Windows 3.x one. At least compared to early OS/2 (crippled by IBM policy limiting it to 286 mode) and everything else I tried at the time.

And not following this field (RSI means I had to give up on games decades ago) I don't know what the author means by "uncompetitive", but if that's in concert with the overpriced, as in less features for more money, it's all of a piece, even if not as dire as the Windows Office examples.
> everyone "needs" police protection (and it surely can't be provided via free market)

Police protection certainly can be provided privately via the free market - and it often is even today, in the sense that there are more private security guards than public police officers in the US - but we usually call people who advocate entirely private generation and enforcement of law anarcho-capitalist rather than libertarian.

Economist David Friedman is one of the best thinkers on this subject; he bases his views on history and the economics of law - this chapter of his book Machinery of Freedom is a good starting point on the theoretical case:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...

(I also recommend the book _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State_ by Bruce L. Benson: http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/... )