skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar?

Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber. That was primarily due to my mindset. I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. But unfortunately the experience killed my interest in wanting to strive to attend a good (or any) university, which I now deeply regret. Not due to loss of credentials, but rather due to missing out on the social experience of uni.

If it were explained to me that the reason I was in school was because an industrialized society needs a place to put children for 8 hours each day so their parents can work, it would've made so much more sense than trying to believe the lie that we were there to learn. It felt so obvious that we weren't there to learn anything substantial. By learning to program video games I'd gotten a taste of the amount of effort real learning took, and memorizing historical dates or doing trivial math problems definitely wasn't any effort. So maybe one solution to "How do we cultivate the desire to learn?" is to relax on the idea that school is even supposed to be a place for kids to learn.
What makes me feel worse is that I just upgraded to iPhone 5s and will stay with AT&T for another two years. I might can cancel the service but I know I don't have too many options to choose. The telecom companies are not like some e-commerce companies who can claim they're customer centric and do that.
This is actually pretty fun. More like a game than a dictionary, though.
Partially, that's because Android applications are cheating - Android runtime is always loaded in memory. Using native UI has its downside - XUL Fennec UI was portable, native one is not.

Sailfish browser isn't XUL UI either though, it's Qt (QML) based but relies on IPC to separate UI from the heavy components: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Embedding/IPCLiteAPI
That also provides fast startup.
I can't sleep over the awesomeness of your emulator. I love you and happy birthday <3
He's like the drunk neighbor who tries to break into your home, thinking he's locked himself out of his.

Dude probably thinks he's scoring comment karma at Reddit with that gem.
The question is: The program that recovers from the illegal prime number the original source code, is that program legal and freely distributable?
Well you can easily schedule it to do that... set it up to defrag and shutdown after you're done using it for the night.
When you're trying to protect science by finding nefarious motives among those who criticize it and start not with if the criticism is fair and to the point but if it can be used by your ideological enemies - you're doing it wrong. I.e. if you're in the political meeting, you're doing it exactly right, if facts are on your side, pound the facts, if not, pound the table. But if you're concerned about science as a way to expand our objective knowledge and not as a way to provide a dressing for your political ideas, whatever they could be - it is wrong.
I'm finding it really interesting that no one has mentioned that it looks like MS bought a company or their product for this solution:

http://itap-mobile.com/itap-rdp

"Important Update

Effective October 8th 2013, iTAP mobile RDP apps for iOS, Mac OS X and Android platforms are discontinued.

We will continue to support the customers who have installed this app up to this date but the app will no longer be available at the application stores and no further updates will be released.

We recommend you evaluate the new Microsoft Remote Desktop app available in app stores later this month.

Thank you for using iTAP mobile RDP.

Regards,
iTap mobile team"

Anyone that used the iTap version may find some very similar interface design and an amazingly identical feature set (iTap was the only iOS and Android RDP client with RemoteFX support for instance - something this new MS client heavily touts).

I haven't seen official statement to this effect, it's just the timing, design, and feature set (like MS suddenly having an iOS, Android, and new OS X client) seem way too coincidental.

Edit: The new OS X app doesn't appear to share the code base of the old one, as the new one exports/imports actual PC .rdp configuration files whereas the original MS RDP client for OS X also makes ".rdp" files - but they're not in a format compatible with Windows Remote Desktop client or vice versa.

Edit:
Microsoft confirms it bought the new code base from iTap:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2053689/microsoft-taps-itap-...
A Man Ghost Seen On Security Camera
This Is A Real Footage Of Security Cam Of A Man Ghost.This Is Just Unbelievable.
I thought that article was a great read, combining historical perspective with technical detail that wasn't glossed over.
Um, you mean in the sarcastic sense?
I disagree.

The flawed systems are SMS and predecessor systems like alphanumeric pagers, where your messages are archived indefinitely in a database by the carrier. Remember the Wikileaks release of all of the pager traffic in lower Manhattan on 9/11?

In my mind, the NSA/PRISM stuff is a meta-problem that is just something that is hanging out in the background. I work in enterprise IT, I'm not a dissident, drug dealer or whistleblower, so I'm more worried about incompetent carriers and other hostile parties than the NSA.

So iMessage gives me encrypted message content that may be readable retrospectively by the NSA, and is almost certainly "tappable" by normal law enforcement.

The reality is, that's about as good as you are going to get outside of a defined community of interest. My employer has highly secure voice and text solutions available for key personnel, for instance. Perfectly secure communications won't be available to the masses, because the operators of those systems face liability.
Obligatory link: What Colour are your bits? http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

The fact that this Wikipedia article exists at all embarrasses me.
Neat site, but not sure how well the content scales. Pithy rhymes and alliteration get stale pretty quickly. Obviously, the beauty of Urban Dictionary is the ability to lookup words that are actually in use. So it has practical utility outside of its obvious entertainment value. Not sure this works the same way.
Keep in mind this is not a virus in a traditional sense. The user has to explicitly run the executable to run this malware.
It seems that America has a higher rate of maverick learners than other countries.

It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.
Also, downvoting is only available for a certain comment age. Once the comment is X hours old, you lose the ability to downvote, but can still upvote.
Not to mention hypnagogic / sleep paralysis - mind awake, body asleep.
I'm not sure enabling hipsters to sound like they're scripted by the writers of Juno is a good thing.
Where Do Wikipedia Donations Go? Outgoing Chief Warns of Corruption
> a pill to help the flushing process

I'm afraid this will require nanobots.
Over here in Indonesia, most of the more prestigious schools follow the Singapore model. Kids do end up studying a lot, but on the whole it doesn't seem more than I did as a kid (in rural America). They tend to be pretty well-rounded, teach three languages (English, Bahasa, and Mandarin), and follow roughly the math courses I remember as a child though perhaps a year advanced by 4th grade.

In the US, schools seem to be succumming to two very serious trends. The first, and most basic, is in the school attempting to replace rather than support the family as the basic unit of education. You can't do this though. Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home.

This leads directly to the second problem which is the worship of innovation. I get told by friends in the US about how math classes are teaching Fibonacci parlor tricks for multiplication (like lattice multiplication, which I know enough math to understand but only because I know a lot more math than the average parent). This joins the high tech toys in the idea that gadgets and trinkets can teach our youth but parents cannot. The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.

In the end, I don't see how American higher education can survive another generation without some major adjustments to our public school system (and probably society as a whole, to be honest).
Something like CrashPlan provides good protection against this sort of thing for home users. It includes versioned, off-site backups -- either on their servers for around $6 a month, or on a "friend's computer" for free. Either way, the backups are saved via crashplan, not with direct drive access, so it should be safe against this kind of thing.

No affiliation, just a user.
Largely because it is the only option ;-)
There's a lot of money in the low-end of the market, especially in the near future. Over the next decade or so the developing world is going to add on trillions of dollars in GDP. That's going to bring a lot of people to the table who will be able to afford a low-end smartphone or tablet, and for many of those people it will be their first computing device. Due to sheer volume alone there is a ton of money in that market. And that's in addition to the low-end of the market in existing developed countries, which is already huge.

However, the 5c isn't in that market. It's a $550 phone. It's only seemingly "cheap" because the usurious financing that most cell companies use enables them to offer a low down payment amount.

Look at it in two ways. When you lock yourself into a 2 year contract you're going to be paying about $1k for whatever device you upgrade to. The difference between $100 and $200 up front is trivial in comparison to this. So paying $1100 for a $550 phone versus $1200 for a $650 phone is, well, stupid. Even more so when you consider the performance and quality differences between the 5c and 5s.

That's at the high-end, for people who can afford expensive plans and expensive phones. At the low-end the 5c isn't competitive either. If you comparison shop un-subsidized phones on prepaid services you see that you can get LTE android devices in the $200 to $300 range, a Galaxy S3 is only $350. With an S3 and a $35/mo plan (virgin mobile) someone will be saving a minimum of $500 and closer to $1000, for comparable service, over 2 years compared to buying a subsidized 5c from verizon or AT&T. Even more if they opt for a truly low-cost phone (which can be as cheap as $150 unsubsidized for LTE capable devices, and essentially free if you don't care about LTE).

So it doesn't compete on the low-end because it's too expensive and it doesn't compete on the high-end (where its price puts it) because it's missing stuff.

No wonder no one is buying it.
>> (Part of me still wishes Haskell was an option for web scripting but I can dream)

You're not the only one: http://www.di.unipi.it/didadoc/lfc/OtherPapers/Iteroperabili...

(n.b, this is from 1999)
I would think that .Net portable apps are likely also per user executables.. not to mention that there are usually at least one scripting environment even on windows cscript/jscript/vbscript/powershell for example, not to mention Java, Python, Ruby and/or node may be installed.
Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1
In that sense, dynamic languages often have a jump on their functional counterparts. Relying on the type annotations for all documentation is probably the other side of the coin. I understand that generic combinators sometimes need sufficiently general argument names, but even then, there's often some semantic meaning that can be attached with a self-documenting variable name. Enough with the 1- and 2-letter variable names!
Wow what a scheme. I mean it's almost the perfect situation for whoever wrote the system. It creates an extortion mechanism with a sense of urgency. Normally, users just carry malware around on their machine for weeks or months. The most frustrating part of this whole thing is that if you don't get the private key back and you're not backing up; you're toast.
Brains Sweep Themselves Clean Of Toxins During Sleep
The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.

I thought the whole world is about assembly-line learning rather than self initiated learning.
Do you have any documentation to support the stuff about UInt32? The old Firefox JIT had some limitations like this but I'm not aware of anything like that in the current one (which has been shipping for multiple versions). Is it a v8 limitation similar to the 31-bit 'small integer' limitation?
Interesting that you would prefer OpenGL and not native widgets/controls. Can you elaborate on why?
----------------------------------------

TL;DR:

The genius of this story is that Phil Carmody found a way to just ADD BITS to the end of a zipped, illegal program to make it a large publishable prime number.
Even more brilliant is that if you convert the prime number back to binary (trivial) and unzip it, you get the illegal program. That is amazing.

----------------------------------------

For the curious:

Let "k" be your illegal program zipped in binary, interpreted as a number.

Carmody created a buffer of zeroed-out bytes to the right of "k" to allow for a
free space to search for prime numbers without tampering with the illegal bits
on the left that he still wanted intact. The unzip program will ignore
everything after it anyway (either because of null terminating zeros or because
the file size listed in the header would ignore it).

(illegal bytes) (zero buffer)
| |
v v
|---------------------------||--------------------------------|
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk0000000000000000000000000000000000

He created this "zero buffer" of size "n" bytes by multiplying k by 256^n. You
already know that multiplying a base-10 number by 10^n adds "n" zeros to the
right. Multiplying a base-2 (binary) number by 2^n similarly adds "n" zeros to
the right. This is what "bit-shifting" is. So, multiplying a binary number
by 2^(8n) will add increments of 8 zeros (a zero byte) to the right of the
number. And if you know your rules, 2^(8n) = (2^8)^n = 256^n.

Then, he modified the bits in this zero buffer to make the whole thing a
prime number.

(illegal bytes) (left-over zero buffer) (prime-making bytes)
| | |
v v v
|---------------------------||---------------------------||---|
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk00000000000000000000000000000bbbbb

He didn't do this directly of course. We know from a popular theorem that
there are an infinite number of values of "n" that make (k * n + b) a prime
number, as long as "k" and "b" don't share any factors. He presumed with
high probability that (k * 256^n + b) would hit on that infinite space of
primes, and he was right. He found values of "n" and "b" to match his
illegal "k" value to create a prime.

To relate the equation to the visualization above: "k" is the illegal bytes
in the beginning. "n" is the size of the zero buffer. "b" is the prime-making
bytes.
> It's possible that the situation for executing giant orders in one fell swoop hasn't gotten any better under HFT, but it hardly seems to have made it worse. Plenty of stocks went "no bid" during the 1929 crash.

1929 is an obsolete example. Heck, the SEC didn't even exist in 1929. A more relevant example is 1987 -- how many stocks went "no bid" on Black Monday?

Here's how HFTs operate today. Bid furiously while the going is good. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a trade, you can always hit up the actual market-makers for a penny loss. And if the markets collapse, you pull out. What could be better? Supply liquidity when it's not needed, and stay out precisely when liquidity is most needed.

Meanwhile, the registered market-makers are pulling back, or pulling out. And why not? They used to count on having the good times to balance out the bad. But now, the HFTs are siphoning off their profits during good times. Thus, the cross-subsidy has gone away. In periods of market stress, the HFTs go hide under a rock and don't participate in absorbing losses.

The effect is: There are now fewer market-makers in periods of market stress. That's how HFTs have made things worse.
Greatly oversimplifying the situation with that terrible metaphor.
Firefox-dev is definitely moderated. I've experienced it recently.
One thing that threw me off initially is the fact that typescript will complain about errors, but still do the translation of TS -> JS. For example:

var s = 'hello';
s.toExponential();

Typescript tells you about the obvious error that there's no property 'toExponential' on strings, but it also merrily produces yourfilename.js.

In my experience so long as you don't have any syntax errors, tsc will give you back javascript. This is partly because the translation from typescript to javascript is incredibly straightforwards and ignores the types completely. Writing a nonvalidating, dumb but super fast ts -> js transpiler is about an afternoon's worth of work, especially if you bootstrapped from the typescript parser and tests.
Fascinating. An average 60 year old man sleeps for 20 years (considering a normal 8 hr a day sleep) that is 1/3 of his life. A polar bear and some other hibernating animals sleep for half of their lives. Amazingly polar bear is cognizant enough to feed her baby while she is sleeping.

Sleep also lowers the heart beat. It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of hear beats. An elephant lives longer than a mouse because it's heart beats slower. Could that mean that people who live longer generally sleep more.

Whales are known to live for a long time. Wonder how much they sleep.
In a case like this, the more important licensing question is that of the x86 instruction set; I do not know what the strict licensing situation would be with that—it's quite possible (probable, actually) that this is technically illegal.

For the software part, why would you advocate GPLv3+ over permissive licenses like MIT/BSD/Apache?
Corporations often shape the news as well. When I was in college, studying public relations, several of my professors estimated (based on industry experience working with major networks like CNN) that 40% of news stories originate from PR offices. In other words, PR people provide the newscasters with detailed pitches or even entire segments.

I don't think this is always a bad thing, but it's something to be aware of as a consumer of media.
I didn't like redshift as much when I tried it a year-ish ago. The version I tried made me enter all the GPS coordinates manually and I never felt like it achieved the same effect as well.
These sites don't participate in the DNS. They (theoretically, at least) keep their IP addresses secret by sending and receiving traffic only through the Tor onion routing network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_...
Prime numbers can provide the ultimate form of compression. If only there was a way to find a corresponding prime number per code base.
> Those people have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders, not to your moral compass. This is something resolved on a societal level, not on the corporate level.

This is the kind of ethical cop-out non-philosophy that's tearing then American environment apart.

A corporation can be a good global citizen, or a rapacious parasite. They are not obliged to rape the fuck out of everything in sight to turn a short-term profit for shareholders. Let alone lobby/bribe the government to open new loopholes so they can pillage harder and faster. Doing so is bad for the long-term prosperity of their country, and the shareholders.

No really - don't be evil.
Sorry, I didn't devote the time to read your article carefully and by the time I reached the end I had forgotten the beginning. On second reading I find this part a little odd: "...we would need to make a very solid case indeed - a case I cannot make nor will make here. Let’s assume that the case has been made and examine an easier question, how feasible such strategies are at accomplishing the goal at all." It's almost like you're sabotaging your own argument by saying that it probably doesn't matter but here are thousands of words on the topic anyway. (I realize this has already been discussed in the other subthread.)
Great claims require greater proof. Is it possible to get some more 1st-hand details and interviews to support these claims?
Eben Moglen talked about the different legal regimes that were applied to different classes of information (which programmers might view as different numbers) in "Anarchism Triumphant", at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.pdf

I think it's an interesting read in conjunction with "What Colour Are Your Bits" (suggested above).
I feel like I'm in the minority here (backed up by a similar discussion on reddit today), but I really enjoyed high school. I liked the classes, I felt like I knew what I was doing with life when I graduated and went on to college, and then there's the whole social thing that people seem hit/miss on. I made a ton of lifelong friends in high school, played on sports teams all 4 years, and evolved from a shy little kid to a reasonably social adult by the end as I gradually learned to come out of my shell.

Maybe it's just the people who comment on these types of articles are the kinds of people who also didn't like school, but I personally wouldn't change my high school or college experiences for the world.
Add to that a 250GB SSD and drop the ram to 8GB (for fair comparison) and the price is $1,430. Similar MacBook Air is $1,550. So, for extra $120 you get better screen, much nicer touchpad, light up keyboard, an OPTION to run OSX, and way nicer design.

The X1 Carbon is kind of nice. But same thing applies. Low res screen is a letdown, and by the time you load it up to be comparable to say, rMBP, it's about the same price.
Tighter spreads were made possible by electronic exchanges, penny pricing, and direct access brokerages.

You didn't need HFT for that. You could've gotten the same thing with LFT. If all you want is a penny spread, then nanoseconds don't matter.
It was actually Jean Christian who refused to go to Iraq