skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a slight tangent, this story sent me off researching the alleged German time-manipulation project ( Die Glocke ) which led to a report about Mr Hitler's last surviving bodyguard, who died last week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23989454
Via private company operating for profit?
I live in Toronto, where the public library system has the highest circulation-per-capita in the North America, and even here we pay about $5.50 (in taxes) for each book borrowed from the library. Yes, it is free at the point of use, but libraries are not cheap to operate.
The problem is, privatizing a state function -- collecting property taxes -- into a profitable enterprise. Ok, the guy owed $134, explain how under any reasonable financial theory, how this should be worth $5000 or $197,000. Why not a lien against his military pension? Why not negotiate a payment plan? Even the IRS has the courtesy to do that.

Let's take the best possible return, say 20% annual return, and let's say he owed this for 10 years, then at best, he'd owe $848. I don't see how a firm purchasing a $134 debt from the state can justify such a huge penalty/return.
Let's just target seniors and be done with it. Take everything they got because they're old and we're worthless scum. Tell it like it is.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The guy didn't know that such things such as open source, git, Ruby, Python, Perl,... even existed. I find it impossible to browse the web and not to run into them, but it seems to be quite possible.
"Nobody is willing to accept responsibility for the problems and everybody believes they will somehow be resolved without their personal intervention."

When I look at my surroundings, majority of the people are struggling to make ends meet. Food, healthcare, jobs - this is what bothers them. Expecting them to take actions with not-so-visible outcome and be concerned about something which will happen sometime in future with unforeseen circumstances is a bit un-realistic.

This holds true for a huuge part of world's population so I guess 'adapting' is the only way now.
Actually, the pen-name is probably a reference to Joseph Schumpeter[1], who was an influential Austrian economist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter
The article talks about the real problem: fundamentally you're right, these people should have paid their bills, the problem is they're not given an opportunity to properly make up for their mistakes and the "punishment" does not fit the "crime". After the bill isn't paid the lien is sold to investors who increase the owed amount by an order of magnitude (so that the person really can't pay it now) and drag them through court, to the point where they have no choice but to lose their home. The system sort of worked (as the article noted) when foreclosures were done through the tax office, however now the investors can do it (which is where the fees come from). The core idea is sort-of okay, the problem is how corrupt it has become and how much abuse there is. Vulnerable people (as the article notes) are not given a chance to fix the problem, they're buried in further debt that they have no way to escape from.
Meta note: this is what journalism can look like today. Made for the web first, not for the paper. Visualizations that are actually insightful - and most importantly a well researched story.
Only proofs in 'constructive' logic.
There's a lot of proofs that aren't executable.
Most importantly proofs by contradiction.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic

In practical terms, however, this isn't a huge hurdle and comes with the nice advantage that you always have a program.

BTW. I'm kinda sure you know this already, but I think it is important to mention.

Thanks for the Haskell proof-book link. I'll check it out sometime.
Doesn't it stand to reason that if it were ever possible to travel back in time and kill Hitler that this would've already happened?
I'm ecstatic to be regarded the wrongest ever by someone still interested in lambasting "shit" sound equipment rather than just listening to music.
JPEG actually support self-repair: when you save out a JPEG, you can insert "restart markers" every so often, which basically repeat the original headers and allows a decoder to recover from any corruption.

If you put enough restart markers in an image, you can swap or replace the compressed blocks between any given sets of restart markers in the same image without glitching it.
As they mention, there have been simple reforms in other jurisdictions to prevent this sort of predatory behavior (not selling liens at all, especially if the owners are seniors or disabled, and putting limits on legal fees).

It sounds like it's basically an oversight, but nobody in government has bothered to fix it because the people affected are predominantly poor and black.
> You might be interested in L4; there's a variant that has been formally verified (but I think it's closed source?).

You are probably thinking of seL4[1] unless there's another I don't know about. I believe you are correct that it's closed-source. That always bugged me though, since it seems to defeat the whole purpose of verifying such a critical part of a system's TCB. In my mind, the whole point is that I as a user don't need to just take anyone's word for it.

Unless I'm mistaken (and I'd love to find out that I am!), what we have with seL4 is a commercial vendor handing out an opaque binary blob and saying "we proved it's correct!" but providing no way for the user to verify that they really did prove anything. Frankly, these days I just don't trust any organization's assertions on such things no matter how thoroughly they claim they have proved it _to themselves_. It's certainly better than "we hit it with a hammer and it didn't break, most of the time!", but it still leaves open the possibility that the person asserting it's proved is lying, or that they did prove it's correct _except for the backdoor the NSA secretly coerced them into adding to the version they released_.

I wish I had the time to tackle something similar for the open-source world, but with 2 small kids around I barely have time for the small open-source projects I do manage. It's very cool too see this article's work being released in source form, and I really hope some open-source devs pick it up and run with it. I for one hope to be able to contribute in what time I do have.

[1] http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/research/sel4/
Terms and conditions may apply
This has nothing to do with anything in the article. Besides what you are saying is ridiculous anyways. A society where people are forbidden from getting loans or investing? You can't even charge interest on risk?
Another smart twit. So he thinks.
I like the Twitter and Facebook check but it really needs to take your input and turn that into suggestions not just combinations.
This is why I think licenses such as AGPL and GPLv3 are hurting open-source (and Free Software). The intentions behind them are good, but in practice they are used in parallel with commercial licenses that have nothing to do with open-source.
Good intro the Game of Life CAs and such...
What if by killing Hitler all future timelines ended a lot worse than this one? If it were ever possible to travel back in time, then we are living on the most optimal timeline according to some metric.
PRE-formatted code fragments show up in monospaced font in my browser, which makes it stand out sufficiently against the body text, which is a proportional font.
In many places, a minor cannot enter into a binding contract nor own/control property of significant value. So that would leave me wary of entering into an agreement with a minor where I was to give them a lot of money and they might be able to arbirtrarily cancel our agreement, or their parent/guardian could seize control of assets unexpectedly.
This so much. If time travel would ever become reality, wouldn't we already know?
Why would an Ayn Rand acolyte support the state taking the property of private individuals?
Maybe it happened, sort of. I mean our timeline being the result of killing Megahitler and replacing him with the Hitler we know and find him totally evil only because we can't compare him to Megahitler.
Reading something like that makes me very angry. What would be the highest punishment against people who do something like that? Personally, I would not have any problem to dish out the highest one.
Our library sold off its local history books, its local author collections etc. It keeps only popular stuff that gets checked out a lot.

They have a point, have the stuff that people want; its just that I don't read that stuff so there's nothing in it for me. Kind of like a grocery store that sells only nachos and coke.
Well, it's generally been the case that the government could seize property due to failure to pay property taxes. The problem is that the government here is, bizarrely, selling the liens to "investors" rather than just collecting the taxes owed.
Tell me again how government does such a wonderful job protecting the weakest & most vulnerable.
#clojure on irc.freenode.net
I got excited about this thinking I could use it to quickly prototype controlling a toaster oven over USB, but I'd have to add another software USB implementation like the bootloader's.
Was literacy a human right before humans invented the first written languages? What about the first few thousand years afterwards, where it was a technique used only by specialists and the materials to write were very expensive?
If you have never taken 24 hours to debug a segfault, you haven't done enough C/C++ programming.

E.g. a rare race condition causes some memory to be freed while there's still a live pointer to it, but THAT doesn't cause a segfault immediately because the memory is immediately reused for some other data structure (in a different thread), so when the dangling pointer is accessed it points to allocated memory that's being used for some other purpose. Some field in the data structure the dangling pointer references is mutated, and then finally in another thread that same memory is accessed via a different pointer (the one that was recently allocated) and part of it is treated as a pointer, and dereferencing THAT causes a segfault.

(Oh and by the way, in real life things can get much more complicated than this before the program blows up with a segfault. In fact, you're lucky if there's a segfault, instead of finding out months down the road that your data has been subtly wrong the whole time.)

Ultimately the solution to this is some iterative combination of swapping in a guarded malloc, then trying things in Valgrind, then trying various Valgrind options, then setting some hardware watchpoints in gdb, then finding that the race condition disappears in the debugger, then adding log statements all over the place, then statically analyzing the code for hours while pulling your hair out, then finally by accident noticing that padding the first data structure with an extra field makes the problem go away, then setting the right hardware watchpoint that actually helps, etc, etc, then piecing together a real story for what's happening, and ultimately making a 2-line fix.

If you think you're somehow "above" this kind of horrible drudgery, and that your immense programming skill will let you avoid it forever, then you are just not very experienced (or you're not working on hard problems).
When a company starts supporting something in public, it usually ends up amounting to a kind of commitment - such that reneging on the commitment has costs, in reputation if nothing else.

In other words, the cost of this patch is not just this immediate code, but ongoing maintenance and support of further features. Almost certainly the guy who pushed the patch doesn't have permission to enter Intel into this kind of commitment.
most people on my course are like that. at the start about 90% didnt know what a programming language is and about 50% didnt know what WYSIWYG stands for...
I compared my Amazon wish list (about a thousand books) to what was available in my local library. Just based on the few hundred at my library, I can potentially save a few thousand dollars. I have already saved a hundred or so just in the last few months after doing so. That makes it well worth my tax dollars going to my library system. The library has both physical books but ebooks, audio books, streaming video and of course the community services/classes.
They've been across about 4 different disks. I copy using SCP, so it's unlikely that the corruption happened over the network, most likely it was between the CPU and disk as it was being read/written.
This one is also pretty clever (based on catching the write() syscall with strace) :
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/can-you-get-cp-to-give-a-prog...
House of Fog shed light on this problem. it is tragedy.
Spoonrocket is pretty unique. You'd have to go to the 3rd world like India to get similar levels of service.

Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.
Concrete Mathematics should not be too hard to understand for someone who understands basic algebra. Most of the topics it covers use nothing more than arithmetic and simple logic.

That said it is not a good general mathematics book (it is designed as a Computer Science book).

A book that will help you - How to think like a Mathematician: http://www.amazon.ca/How-Think-Like-Mathematician-Undergradu...
Do rights change, or does the expression of a right change? I believe everyone has a right to an education. Obviously that education will have changed from 4000BCE to 2013. What about the right to create and choose family? How does that intertwine with society's thoughts about homosexuality?

I guess a good answer to that question would be a PhD dissertation, not a HN comment. I wish I knew the answer, or that it was easy for me to express.
I was referring to the generally sociopathic attitude they tend to adopt toward The Poor.

BTW, this is a privatized operation wherein predatory debt collectors buy the liens, foreclose the property, and then flip it at a huge profit. Just another example of government acting as stenographer for the financial industry.
I'm not sure cost/book loaned is the best measure of a library's performance.

In my local area (a suburb of Washington D.C.), I have 2 brand new libraries about 5-10 minutes from my house, with another one planned within walking distance. At both the extant libraries, book loaning is just part of the services offered by the library.

For example, on any given day you can go in after school and the libraries will be packed to the gills with students using them as after school study centers -- with private group study rooms and the like. Private tutors often meet with their students in the library as well instead of people's houses as it lets them have a centralized place where they can see 3 or 4 students in a row with high efficiency.

They also offer a pretty full schedule of community events, for example one of my county libraries has regular meet-ups for parents of autistic kids. The kids get together and play videogames and the parents meet with a special educator.

I've also attended talks by authors of niche books that would never get a chance in a major book chain. One of the best I recall was a talk by a retired player about his days as a professional baseball player in the Negro Leagues.

Libraries are more than just a cheap alternative to a book store, they're major community centers dedicated to learning in general.

I'd happily pay $10 a book loaned to keep them around.
> Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive?

Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary.

In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but eventually someone is going to come up with a decision of how things are going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually, things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself."

And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :)

> Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.

Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months. At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people and do something useful.
I can't really see Ayn Rand supporting the seizure of property over unpaid taxes. I'm not an Ayn Rand fan, but it's pretty easy to figure out what she does or doesn't believe in from her writings. And taxes are definitely in the "I don't care for that" category.
"One of the bylaws of the International Association of Time Travelers states that you can't kill Hitler. The problem is, everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. This leaves more experienced time travelers the onerous task of undoing the historical edits of n00bs."

http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory
By this logic... Facebook is actually a Twitter-clone? My head spins.
It does not necessarily, though it is possible.

1. If it is possible to go back in time to kill Hitler, it is possible to go back in time to defend Hitler. There may be a stalemate.

2. We may be living in a timeline that is the result of killing another evil person. Hitler may be an acceptable result of that.

3. We may be at the forefront of time, i.e., there may be no future ahead of us to have already invented the time machine. Similarly, time travel may branch time so create a Hitler-less timeline for copies of ourselves (i.e. no causality.)
the article's title makes it hard for me as a non-us citizen to understand what foreclosure means in this context.

what i got from the article is this: due to the financial situation of the owner, a small unpaid tax turns due to unfair practizes into a larger debt of like $5000, which then allowed a judge to enforce the sale of the house so that unpaid taxes could be paid off.

now if the house was sold for the mentioned 197'000, does that mean that the owner at least got the proceeds minus the debt? the title suggests that this would not be the case...
> Boeing) has been doing this for a long time

Sure, and Microsoft has been using formal methods for eliminating all manner of security holes since at least the XP SP2 days. I didn't say that formal methods were always a bad trade off. I said that they are very expensive and implied that they are a bad default tradeoff for general purpose tools to make.
It has always seemed to me that property taxes are a completely incorrect idea; far more onerous than, for instance, the estate tax. Have there been any serious efforts to get rid of them?
> "Hey guys, I know a little HTML and I was wondering if I could build a MMORPG..."

Yes... But here's one place to start (somewhat analagous to "read Accelerated C++ and the OpenGL red book"): http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Flow-Cytometry-Howard-Shapir...
iOS 7 seems like exactly the kind of inattention to detail people have dreaded since Jobs left. Hard to imagine he would have rubber stamped something so ugly and inconsistent.
U.S. government spied on Brazil's Petrobras oil firm
HxD lets you fill bytes with random data, making it an easy way to fuzz files.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but if a real estate agent claimed 'Shelter is a basic human right' in their marketing - would that constitute a conflict of interest? What about Evian adding 'water is a basic human right' to their labels?
reference: http://www.luafaq.org/gotchas.html#T9
As an English atheist, possibly surprisingly, I think Islam is right regarding interest. Unfortunately wrapping it up in mumbo jumbo doesn't give it any credibility. Also it isn't really related to the article.
1) when you see "ninja" and "significant knowledge" in the same job ad, everything is insignificant

2) most job ads don't know what they are after, but they know they are after a "ninja"

3) no, not all job ads are like this - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:86X5cn0...

4) I would not require anyone to know HTTP by heart, but to have understood deeply whatever I-D (s)he has read (and remembers) on HTTP
> The only way out of this climate problem is going to be a technological solution.

The Ozone problem was successfully solved with the Montreal Protocol without adding more tec into the mix for which no one understands the impact completely nor the harm done to the environment.

If you insist on a technical solution invent or use one to reduce your personal CO2 emissions to 1 metric ton per year. Some exist already, e.g. bikes.
Evidence suggests Chuck Norris didn't manage to kill Hitler.
>I don't understand what you mean by non-standard.

Symbols in advanced math tend to be very poorly defined and contextual. Imagine programming if every function had a two-letter name and the list of which packages to import was left out half the time.

This is covered in the article.

Proofs formatted for automatic solvers show that they can be standardized. Now think about the tiny percentage of proofs that are in this form.
Is there a reason you only pickup up one point?
How does that make a difference? If I give a financial advisor 10% of all profit I make, and make no profit, he gets nothing. So, he has an incentive to make me money.

Why would a deal on the investment make a difference there, and how would paying him by the hour solve this?
There are a verity of techniques[0] for breaking LFSRSs if you have the outputs.
CBC modes security requires that IV's actually be random or indistinguishable from random. LFSR output streams are not indistinguishable from random, so the system is on face not secure.

A slight digression: Asking how you'd actually figure that out, in the context of arguing for the security of the system, is the wrong question and a flawed approach to designing cryptographic standards. The same question could be asked about the last packet IV issue Rogaway raised. No one knew at the time how to exploit it then, but it was still a bad idea, as time has proved. I can't see the attack is not the right design philosophy for cryptographic system. To anyone reading this, please please don't use it. It usually leads to broken shit and, if some of the people proposing the standards are malicious, certainly will if they are cleverer than you ( and the NSA probably is).

Now, if you are just curious how to break it: All you have to do is get a few IVs. Suppose the system does encrypt then mac. Let's assume you can get the system to decrypt its own messages and give you the result (this is a weaker version of a chosen cipher text attack and authenticated AES CBC is still safe even with this issue provided IV's are random). Simply replay a given message a few times. The IV changes each time, and hence you get the result of m xor IV_1, m xor IV_2, m xor IV_3, etc. Minimally, this gives you the XOR's of the various IV's with each other which may be enough to calculate the LFSR state. If you happen to know m as well, then you have the IVs. Game over.

Lastly, assuming you don't get a chosen plaintext attack for a protocol with as broad uses as IPSEC seems like a bad idea. Minimally, you clearly get one if it's used to secure http with javascript in it via the same mechanisms as BEAST. You also get one in the case of ICMP echo. File sharing protocols would seem to also readily provide them.

[0]http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5293/cryptanalysis...