skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At this time last year, AMD was preparing for a lay off in November (2012) in which they let a bunch of their open source GPU devs go. [1][2] [3] My projection is that this is an attempt to draw in the unpaid open source community. Both a smart and a dick move: they could have released this info while maintaining the paid positions, IMO.
[1] "Did AMD shoot itself in the foot by laying off open-source talent? "
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/110712-amd-open-source...

[2] AMD shutters German Linux lab, gives devs the axe http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_os...

[3] AMD dismisses numerous open source developers http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/AMD-dismisses-numerou...
Business Card Ray Tracer: Go vs C++
I wonder if they're just sniffing UAs, blocking Chrome. fwiw Firefox seems to work fine.
Your attempt to invoke strong emotions may be a useful rhetoric instrument, but it is absolutely not adding anything to those doing the jobs at MT.

How in the world can you even waste your time on criticising use of a high-tech product that is available only to those with a computer and access to internet? Surely there are those who are exploited much much more than users of MT? Especially, if your own link shows that 82% of survey responders answered that the income was not essential.

This is game theory all over again. If "ethical" people wont use MT, only the bad guys will reap the benefits of the increased efficiency. Shaming people doesn't help much if the "right" option is detrimental to their incentives.

Moreover, your US-centrism is showing in full force. Don't you think that paying an Indian or Romanian 25 cents/hour is disgusting? Ok, you hired some of your friends for $12-15/h for mechanical job. So ethical. Why didn't you do that in an English-speaking part of the world where citizens live for less then $1 per day. Wouldnt it be more ethical?

If you are concerned about education of poor children: spread knowledge about moocs, help with youth coding camps, tutor people or do free seminars.

And if you are really-really concerned about the Mechanical Turk then by all means go ahead and teach people who are on MT how to earn more, that would be so much better than complaining on HN about the ethics of MT.
Reference counting, even ignoring the additional expense C++ places on std::shared_ptr by requiring it be thread safe, is far too slow for allocation heavy languages. Only "we don't give a damn" implementations (like CPython) use it, because it is simply not competitive.
But he script supposedly detects elements in page, css etc so this would not solve the issue of views, but I have no idea what the payment model is - is it just views or clickthroughs?
The Galaxy Note 3 comes with a "tiny screen" mode that enables one hand usage
I don't think you can find a lot of companies based on your criteria (no startups, no large companies).
I know a couple of companies in Berlin and Munich using Python, but they are under categories of startups/social :)
Shumway compiles ActionScript bytecode to JavaScript source. It cannot target ASM.JS because not all ActionScript code is typed. The goal of Shumway is to identify what is missing from the web platform and fix it, so we're working on improving graphics performance.
Vessel’s A/B Testing Platform For Mobile Launches Out Of Closed Beta
You might find this service I built useful: It queries the Bing API for different combos of the name/domain (John.Smith@nytimes.com, JSmith@nytimes.com, etc) and returns their counts, and then deeplinks into a Google verbatim search of that email address.

http://emailguesser.com

Source is on Github: https://github.com/yahelc/emailguesser.com
I really like it but two remarks:
-they changed the graphics (it's no longer "pixelated")
-I think the physics are slightly different but maybe I don't really remember
Here's a summary of his capture, noting his activities on Stack Overflow and drug forums, summarized from the warrant: https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a
"The more we can help them out by writing our story for them, the better of (sic) we’ll both be."

I get that, but it sort of depresses me still.
I said this in the last DPR story (the interview): my bet is that he will go down for tax evasion. It's hard to prove murder, conspiracy, drug trafficking, etc., but it's easy to prove that this guy made a bunch of money and didn't pay taxes on it. He'll get federal prison time for it.
Auto + Mobile: Why Self Driving Cars Need an App Ecosystem
How did you guys send emails? SaaS? Your own thing, if so then how did you make sure you didn't end up in 'spam box'?
I smell a rat over the hitman claims. If there is no evidence for a body, or other evidence such as the funds transfer, why include it in the indictment?
So do Mozilla and Google (by default) when running on Windows. Project Angle (https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/) is a Google library that enables this in both browsers.
>>>> So by going the path he went, he paid off friendlychemist and scared him at the same time.

And anybody else who thought they would try and blackmail money out him. It seems completely plausible scenario and kills two birds with one stone. No pun intended.
Wow maybe that's why I have some of these problems. Do you have any links to this evidence about solving problems causes lack of empathy
You can type 'Bambi' on the front page for an even more retro version.
Meanwhile that's how data gets processed:
http://company.yandex.com/press_center/blog/entry.xml?pid=6

"One of the four big experiments at the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is now testing Yandex’s machine learning technology, MatrixNet, on their data on B-meson decay."
> You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty".

That's not it.

1. Imagine that we have a system we're happy with for quantifying people's beauty.

2. Imagine that we discover that, in a sample population of 100,000 or so, higher beauty predicts lower willingness to wait in line, lower frisbee golf scores, and redder tablecloths in the home.

The idea here is that from (2) we conclude that (3) there is a single variable, "beauty", responsible for your rating in (1), but also responsible for your frisbee golf scores and the color of your home tablecloths. Now, in addition to using the system in (1), we could in theory rate people's beauty by visiting their home and checking the tablecloths, or by checking a frisbee golf score sheet (lest this sound ridiculous, I'll observe that a real test of intelligence in children consists of the instructions "draw a man", "draw a woman", and "draw yourself": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-A-Person_Test).

In the literature, "intelligence" or g refers to this hidden variable that explains performance across all the various IQ-driven tasks. To discredit the idea, you'd want to find a test which correlated positively with one well-accepted IQ test, and negatively (or zero) with another. Another commenter pointed out that, since we don't have a specific physical metric for intelligence, we can't rate people as having a certain number of "intelliunits". That's correct, and it means that an intelligence-discrediting test could have pretty much any content at all; all that's required is that it be positively related to one existing IQ test and negatively related to another. This turns out to be extremely difficult.

This somewhat murky nature of intelligence as defined means that you're rated in terms of a comparison to the population (we can't say "you have 70 intelliunits", but we do know how to determine that you're smarter than Bob, Carol, and Tom, but dumber than Jennifer). An IQ of 115 means, approximately, that you're smarter than 5/6 of the reference population, which is conceptually all European whites.
It is a good idea for a service, if possible please consider something like https://www.mobileworks.com/ as vincvinc mentioned below that tries to be socially responsible for crowd sourcing instead of mturk.
> 1. The agent randomly (?) stumbling on a LinkedIn profile which matched the timeline/description of the Silkroad project, which prompted to seek another unidentified agent which had all kinds of juicy deets on the suspect.

Sounds like parallel construction to give them a legal way to introduce evidence.
Meanwhile, down the street from my work it's pretty easy for people to buy/sell in person across the street from the State Capitol in Denver, CO. In a park in broad daylight.

Way to go, feds. Go justify that budget with scare tactics while we have open-air drug markets all over the US that you can't even shut down.
TL:DR - A very polite "No!."
Qualcomm Marketing Executive Calls Apple's 64-Bit A7 Chip a 'Marketing Gimmick'
Ask HN: Blog/publication databases?
Inspired a little by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482993:

Are there any current sources, datasets, or companies that catalog active blogs/publications? (ie. I search for 'beer' and get a list of blogs, magazines, etc. dedicated to beer?)
Not necessarily true. See "Down for the Count?" ISMM 2012: http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rc-ismm-2...
I think Linux would be the perfect place to test these assumptions, or concepts. There have been some distros that implement new looks (ElementaryOS). It would be an interesting idea to implement these concepts on-top of Linux.
It looks like a semi-structured database with certain common inbuilt types. A bit like a lot of 4GL products that were around in the 90s.
The body of research can be found by searching "human biodiversity".
Or how about an angular service that parses a raml file and returns a resource that implements up all models and methods ?

No need to stub it, just generate it on the fly.

Server side too. At least for quickly iterating and hand implement only the methods that require special handling.
Scientists Used Facebook For The Largest Ever Study Of Language And Personality
Ask HN: Does anyone in the startup world use UML?
By going through the RAML post I realized it's been a while since I last saw someone talking about UML.

Does anyone nowadays still using it except in the enterprisey world? It doesn't matter if is strict or loose UML, since UML by definition is full of it's own perks and people usually use their "own kind of UML".
It would be nice to see a proper corporate backed "tech lobby" with some teeth emerge from this, but I'm probably hoping for too much.
More like a very polite "Fuck, no!".
Indeed, a gigantic lack of perspective seems to be an occupational hazard.
NSA had test project to collect data on Americans’ cellphone locations
I don't think it will be enough for most.

I have turned the non-obtrusive adblock option of, I don't want to see any ads ever.

There is a reason I don't want that - because ads are content that suck. Ads that don't suck are content - such as the funny videos I am watching.

I don't give a hoot if the site I am visiting goes down because it can't afford its bandwidth bills - there are plenty other sites.
"Well, $161m is more than 23% of $327m to start with."

Read the linked document instead of just relying on Greenspun's numbers. The $327m number he cites appears to be incorrect.
These are the things I've been able to do in the past year or so that I thought were pretty interesting and enjoyable:

* Code to render PDF's into images using asynchronous streams to make it extremely fast.

* The same thing for videos, to recompress them for delivery to iPads.

* Code to use AWS to create a service that can be fairly easily scaled up and down dynamically in response to demand.

* Creating a highly tuned Node.js server capable of serving thousands of requests per second. Even basic CRUD operations can be pretty interesting to code when you are fine tuning server system level settings, optimizing database queries, using caching, etc to make sure that response times are all around 10-15ms even at hundreds to thousands of requests per second.
Want something a lot weirder? Watch the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen (the X-Files spinoff), which aired six months before the attacks:

> Foreshadowing a number of conspiracy theories which would arise in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the plot of the March 4, 2001 episode depicts a secret faction within the US government plotting to hijack a Boeing 727 and fly it into the World Trade Center by remote control. The stated motive was to increase the military defense budget by blaming the attack on foreign interests.
At the kind of scale I would use it at I would just hire personal assistants.

That said, I've actually used mechanical turk to earn money in some of my low points (was living in my car working on a startup, out of cash, crazy/long story). I didn't make US minimum wage, but if I were living in Bangladesh, for example, it would have been OK money.
Very good write-up indeed, managing to skip the actually superfluous technical details and focusing on the relatively simple claims. All In all, this seems to support two great truisms:

1. Committing crime is very easy. Not getting caught is hard

2. When it comes to gathering evidence, you're only as good as your biggest screw-up

I believe this is just an arrest warrant, rather than the full set of evidence they will be using to using to prosecute. Whilst the links between the elements may seem tenuous, that's exactly how forensic investigations work, and I often use similar techniques as part of investigations
Umm... talk about missing the point. The C++ version fits onto a business card. it's 35 lines by 37 characters wide. (1295 bytes)

The Go version is 229 lines (6.5x as long) and 4255 bytes long (3.2x as long). Fit that on a business card...

Your title should be "Go program optimized for speed faster than C++ program optimized for code size" and you should stop trying provoke people with false comparisons.
Most arrogant quote I've ever heard coming from a developer. I hope this sounded different in context because that is one of the most horrible and elitist things I've ever heard pertaining to our industry.
Federal court reviews legality of NYPD Muslim surveillance program
Obamacare Fines to be Seized From Bank Accounts?
What part depresses you? That we need to do the write up for reporters?

(fixed the typo...thanks!)
Former Microsoft Privacy Chief Says He No Longer Trusts The Company
FBI Says It's Busted The Web's Biggest Anonymous Drug Black Market
This, in the wake of the Breaking Bad finale.
You make a good case there - the fact that Canadian investigations drew a blank definitely seemed strange!
Really sad to see him pass. Some of his books were absolutely superb: Rid Storm Rising, Hunt for the Red October, Patriot Games, Without remorse. RIP :(
It is troubling to see that all the arguments presented by the US government in this motion are based on the preservation of government power and the ability of its agencies to conduct surveillance, rather than the constitution and laws passed by congress.

Any and all concessions granted to plaintiffs in this motion are exercises of the discretionary power of the federal agencies, rather than acceptance of the limits which the agencies are legally obliged to comply with.
We make a similar thing: http://www.teampostgresql.com

AJAX/JavaScript powered rich web GUI for PostgreSQL. Looks like this took some inspiration from us too (which is great). TeamPostgreSQL is a side-project but pretty mature, having been around since 2010.
"I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice."

I would appreciate a pointer to the track record. Genuinely interested not provoking here. Ubuntu Server LTS has always had a 5 year support period, so 10.04 supported until April 2015 and 12.04 until April 2017. Seems widely used.
Why the series A crunch might be good
There are two problems with your claims:

I, as a user, wouldn't be happy having to blacklist all sites.

I won't pay a monthly fee for most sites, because I read a little on a lot of sites - I don't mind paying a 1 penny per article fee if it is convinient.
I have to be the only person on the planet that actually likes pgadmin.
Alone, no. Read the 10 pages of corroborating evidence following these initial steps and there's definitely enough for a warrant.
Spectre, a game about battling hovertanks, was ripped off by Hover, a game with no weapons and no damage? What?
> What is an hba file? How am I supposed to know what it does?

From the section in the docs titled "the pg_hba.conf file", which explain it quite clearly? [1]

> PostgreSQL has a "createuser" command. Great, but how am I supposed to know this is a PSQL command?

Its not a psql command, its a client application. Which you are expected to know by reading either the documentation section on client applications [2] or the documentation on the administrative function for which that particular application is used [3].

Of course, you don't need the program for the function, you can just use SQL. Which, presumably, you are going to be reading the documentation on for any RDBMS, since even the ones that support the standard the best (e.g., between PostgreSQL and MySQL, PostgreSQL by far) still have some implementation specifics you need to be aware of.

> MySQL is more intuitive. Authentication? User/password.

PostgreSQL supports that, and configures it by default in the project-supplied installers (IIRC, for local connections only by default.) You only need to configure authentication if you are using different options, or want to support remote logins.

> Yes, pg_hba is more flexible, but if you have only one DB user...

You don't need a multiuser RDBMS at all?

> And there are convenient mysql* commands, you can tell they are mysql commands.

And how do you know that they exist or what they do without reading the docs?

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.h...

[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/reference-client.h...

[3] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/database-roles.htm...
From the URL of the screenshot linked to, it's a Wordpress installation.

A lazier sort of wag might point out that Wordpress runs on MySQL, but that would be a cheap shot unbecoming of our noble selves here at HN.

A more helpful sort might encourage the site owners to turn off the HTTP server, install WP Supercache or W3 Total Cache, then turn it back on.
A Nexus 4 cost $359 at launch here in Canada. An iPhone 5 cost around $700, almost twice the price offline. You can't really compare the 2 products directly.

It's like comparing a Ford with a Ferrari. You would be better comparing the iPhone with a Samsung Galaxy S4 since they are similar price points.
I assume the FBI subpoenaed all information related to the account from SO, which would likely include a full history of changes.
What have I missed? Do you have a link?
And now the tech companies can give up their vaunted crusade for user's rights. "Oops! We tried!"

Plausible deniability and so forth.
I certainly wouldn't endorse it, just pointing to it as an attempt to avoid the circularity of defining violence as "what the state does" and then defining "a state" as "the organization with a monopoly on violence".

I do think it nonetheless ends up pretty entangled in the ideas invented by the modern centralized state, especially the ideas of "property ownership" and "a contract", which are supposed to exist in a sort of ethereal global-variable state separate from any facts in the physical world or local interactions. The modern state enables that fiction by maintaining a central property register backed by a cadastral survey, and a set of courts that enforce the abstract idea of a contract. Minarchists are perhaps more open about this dependence than anarcho-capitalists are, by just directly asserting that the state should exist solely to operate and enforce a property register and contract law.
Nothing surprising here. They're fighting tooth and nail to keep their activities under a veil not of secrecy (that's impossible at this point) but of vagueness, which in the end achieves the same purpose: preventing people from caring.

The worst part is that the argument brought against transparency actually makes sense on the surface level, but as usual completely ignores the factor of bad actors within the system, which need to be kept in check as much as any hypothetical group of terrorists.
just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here is a warning to any non-westerner members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
Be careful what you wish for. A big slice of the tech industry builds surveillance technology and sells it to anyone globally. Would you trust such a lobby not to lobby for protectionism if US companies were losing business to overseas providers of verifiable secure services?
Real life is not so overly complicated as Breaking Bad plot.
I cannot imagine web frameworks working beyond request/response. About Play - I believe it's trying to go further than Django/Rails. It is powered by Netty, Akka, has async response support, plus Scala FP features. There's also promising ReactiveMongo driver. All these put it at least half way closer to shiny async future. I worked with Node.js too and for me it's more pleasure to write async code in Scala.
This makes me miss Groklaw.
"meteoric growth" sounds about right for most startups, since they fail.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html
That they are so busy that so often they rehash press releases, that's all. Anyway, it's neat what you did.
Former Climate employee here.

Swiss Re reinsures Climate Corp, not any individual policy. So Climate Corp sets the price for each policy and pays out each claim. Swiss Re pays out to Climate Corp if in aggregate all the claims are greater than the price charged.

Does that make sense?
Or, more to the point: "That's a stupid question!"
Yeah, I think Debian would of been a better choice. Personally I would say Gentoo, but that might be more work for them (although Chromebook switched from Ubuntu based to Gentoo based)
This debate is commonly referred to as the nature versus nurture debate:

https://www.google.com/search?q=intelligenc+nature+vs+nurtur...

It's a vigorous and deep debate. Happy reading!
Within 10 seconds of loading it up, I had already glitched into a wall and trapped myself in a box. Yep, that's nostalgia.
This brings me back, but I was really hoping it would be another game I played in the 90s that was very similar except it was a flight sim where you could get off the ground. I've done google searches over the year to find it but have never been able to.

I am pretty sure the game was called 'Chaos'. The aesthetic was very angular; I believe the main craft you steered was a yellow triangular shape. I loved it. Anyone know it?
So this week I've been reading Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II by Stephen Budiansky.

The US intelligence community has a long history of going right to the communication source and obtaining raw data from public companies. In the 1920's Herbert Yardley's "American Black Chamber" worked with Western Union and other cable companies who turned over interesting cablegrams and radiograms.

In 1940 [before the US entered the second world war], the military assigned Lt Earl F. Cook to read and copy cable messages that passed through RCA's office with the consent of RCA's president, David Sarnoff.

After the war, there was of course project Shamrock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK
Actually AdBlock Plus had the name first!
Works fine on Chrome for me.