skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting choice from an evolutionary standpoint: At the time homo sapiens evolved, we presumably had saber-tooth tigers, tyrannosaurus rexes, abonimable snowmen (or whatever :) prowling the bushes around the place we slept.

If you were all alone, wouldn't it be a better survival trait to be groggy 24h/day than to be fully alert 16h/day and dead to the world the remaining 8h?

I've heard that there are species of fish (and possibly birds) that are awake around the clock; they deal by sleeping one brain hemisphere at a time, which leaves enough active brain to avoid obstacles and predators.

If humans never took that evolutionary road, does it mean that we are genetically disposed to social groups, i.e. "someone else is watching your back while you sleep"?
... until their users started being conscious that long too.
Debian != Ubuntu
Is there any commercially viable messaging protocol that is 100% defensible against any and all attacks?
Surprise, surprise the government is still using waterfall.
NBA 2K13 Gameplay with Funny Commentary
They have a "Science and Technology" section in every single issue. Frankly, it contains some of the best, most scrupulously accurate science writing for a general audience that I've seen anywhere.

Also, just two weeks ago, they published a "leader" (primary article expressing the editorial position of the paper) that was very critical of climate change deniers.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21587224-all-means-que...
Skydive on Google Maps
Seems very like http://bellard.org/jslinux/ from a while back.
It rejected my 360Kb images :-(
Why should airports have security? Just because other countries have security, doesn't mean the airport needs security. I don't know of any other transportation that requires airport like security, why are airports so special? I've seen bomb sniffing dogs at train stations, and cops patrolling, but no patdowns, or forced searches.
Sure, I'll ask my 70+ year old relatives that have been using PC with Windows since they first got their computer to download an Ubuntu ISO, burn that and re-install their system.

Joking aside. I'd love for everyone to just jump on a virus free OS, but as soon as that OS is mainstream there will be viruses.

The problem isn't the OS, the problem is that people trust everything that is for instance sent to them via e-mail. Users need to be educated on security, no matter the OS.
Has anyone tried this one? http://www.javascriptspellcheck.com/
Why Clinkle (already) needs a redesign
With a title "To an alarming degree..." it immediately feels like a persuasive paper. Who thinks it's alarming? From the sound of it, everyone should (or does) think this is alarming.

But it may be a stretch to say this is someone trying to discredit global warming.

Science isn't broken. People claim what they see, sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are right. But eventually we find out the truth.
Corona Editor + Sublime Text
Nate Silver comes out very clearly in support of climate change theory in his The Signal and The Noise, and elucidates why, although he goes carefully through the problems and limitations with many climate models.

Criticising models is not the same as claiming that anthropogenic global warming is false. Indeed, Nate Silver makes the point that climatologists are their own greatest critics -- they collectively know the limits of their models better than almost everyone else.

So I'm not really sure why he's in your comment. If you've read what he writes, then you'll need to be building counterarguments to much of what he wrote on the topic; "models have problems" is just part of it.
You mean like The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer which is expected to lose something like $150 million? Big names certainly help. (And IMO Kevin Spacey is what elevates HoC from something fairly pedestrian to something worth going out of one's way to watch.) But this is a biz that's hard to predict winners in and I'm skeptical that viewing data makes a big difference.
Microsoft has always had "half-baked frameworks and class libraries".

I actually like MFC, but it never really got past the "good for a first cut" phase, IMO. Fortunately, I've never had to deal with .NET, and besides a little MFC, most of my work is on Linux these days.
The problem is there are too many entry points into an airport. If you wanted to get a device into an airport and on a plane, you can. It might not be quite as simple as walking it through the security gates, but it can be done. The body scanners will only deter the "monday morning" terrorist. But anyone putting any amount of thought and planning into it won't be deterred.
but those royalty free images look so convincing...
Maybe not insanity, but I would find it a little noisy reading that code, like having to code at a desk near the receptionist.

I wouldn't mind if the comment said "using qucksort because n is expected to be large". But only if the choice of quicksort over some other algorithm was deemed significant.
Airports (not airlines) provided security against known threats. The 9/11 hijackers circumvented that bringing in box cutters, not the expected guns and bombs, and by using the planes themselves as weapons, instead of just hijacking the plane and using the hostages as leverage.

TSA is in precisely the same reactive mode: make people take their shoes off after some nut tries to blow up his shoes, etc.

Bruce Schneier: "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers."
This is a superb work! Beyond my imagination.
They may very well not be able to read your messages after the initial key exchange.
This wouldn't really prevent them from profiting - an unsuspecting user could still pay the ransom, and then never receive a decryption key, so would be both out of the money and lose their data.
This seems a bit disingenuous to me. If I understand it correctly, they are saying that the messages are encrypted using an RSA key unique to the sender, and that this is not secure because Apple could, if they wanted to or were ordered to, replace the certificates with ones that were not secret:

> Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties.

What is misleading here is that (if I understand it correctly) the cryptography is solid, it is the implementation being owned by Apple that raises the doubt. But this is NOT a statement about the cryptography used on the iMessages, it is a statement about the fact that Apple effectively has "root access" to their phones.

Imagine that you had a PERFECT and UNBREAKABLE code system. Perhaps it interfaces with angles who alter the laws of the universe to prevent anyone but the intended recipient from reading the messages. Such a system would still have the same vulnerability. All Apple needs to do is to alter the phone so that when you click on the icon to launch this perfectly secure messaging app it instead launches one that has the same UI but which actually sends a duplicate to the NSA (or whoever it is you don't want listening in).

ANY system where code can be deployed at will and the owner of the device is not in full control of the device will have this same level of vulnerability. Saying that a system is insecure because you could change the system doesn't tell you anything interesting about the system.
This one paragraph summarizes everything that I love and respect about Bill Watterson:

> had signed most of my rights away in order to get syndicated, so I had no control over what happened to my own work, and I had no legal position to argue anything. I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way. I made a lot of impassioned arguments for why a work of art should reflect the ideas and beliefs of its creator, but the simple fact was that my contract made that issue irrelevant. It was a grim, sad time. Desperation makes a person do crazy things.

I also highly recommend reading his 1990 commencement speech at Kenyon College (his alma mater): http://www.angelfire.com/wa/HOBBES/info/speech1.html

I first read that years ago, and one line has always stuck with me: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
> climate scientists have been too quick to claim the credibility of Science when their work does not measure up to that standard

What the fuck are you talking about?

Observations and models are repeated and challenged far more in climate science than most other fields. It is a good example of science working exactly as it should. I'm not sure where you think climate science has gone astray but considering how expensive and difficult controlled experiments in climate science are, I think climate science does an amazingly good job.

To clarify: yes, there are lots of bad papers in climate science (see Sturgeon's Law) but science does not require every paper to be accurate (in fact, you need a few extremist ideas to try to shake things up). Science requires rigorous retesting of theories to narrow the target and climate science is one field where that's happening all the time. Climate science's continuous observations does a pretty good job at sidelining inaccurate papers within a couple years (a quick turnaround all things considered).

Climate science's problem is non scientists misrepresenting, misinterpreting and misunderstanding. The science itself is exactly what you'd want for every scientific field.
No, nothing is defensible against all attacks. OTR, Silent Phone/Text, (I'm forgetting some here), GPG/PGP, they're all good enough if you verify the fingerprints.
If you think MSI is bad, and I'll have to take your word for it, what MS had prior to it was probably worse. Writing installers for Windows using MS tools has always been a nightmare.
I'm not sure if I'm alone here but I just lack social skills. It's like everyone but me has this secret book of how to interact with people. I'm not autistic or anything but I had little social life when growing up. I was actually rather popular at the Internet but that didn't translate well to real life. I'm now trying to catch up in my early twenties. I meet interesting people every day but connecting with them non-superficially is the hardest part. I am too shy to talk about anything and I have low self-esteem. I literally start to mumble when telling a story if I don't know the person well. So far rationalizing about it hasn't helped.

It's a wonder I managed to get a few friends.
Cookies are bad for you: Improving web application security (2011)
I think it's on the same page as the .deb and .rpm files.
Well, being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question. Apple had claimed that they were incapable of intercepting the messages, not that they had policies against it. And Apple is known to be subject to secret US government demands that come with a gag order.
Jeesh Mr. Pedantic,

Pesty herbs, eg weeds, can you not parse in context or isn't that the point.

Round-up is supposed to be one of most begin herbicides, yeah but throw enough of a supposed good thing around and you get problems.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Resistance

Edit: The better way to deal with weed, insects and what-do is Integrated Pest Management, IPM, where one adopts an integrated, sustainable approach to the plant and animal, uh, pests that hinder food production.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_pest_management
MongoDB monitoring and backup service
> I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.

The biggest payout of all.
Events WILL occur, with or without security. And they will also occur at malls, schools, places of work, and sports stadiums. but the solution isn't to treat every customer as a criminal. Especially when it doesn't solve any problems.
Wouldn't it have to be in its RNA?

/ducks
They didn't use dodgy language: "conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data." [1].

1. https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/
The US is economically first world but cognitively third world
:)
i dont see how something like this could conceivably work for 2 parties that do not yet know each other. the problem of establishing identity/trust between strangers can't be solved in any 100% manner over any medium that can be tampered with.

if both of you rely on some intermediate authority for authentication (as HTTPS works), it's by definition not 100% because the intermediary can, in theory, be compromised.

if the two parties know each other and can authenticate via some basic questions, that may work. or you can just exchange symmetric AES keys in person or public certs through another channel.
BART Workers Plan To Strike Friday
I totally disagree. When I talk about "Creationism" I'm talking about a creation event that occurred (say 6000 years ago).

The implementation details aren't necessarily important.

The first 16 billion years could have been emulated and then placed on the live hardware to run after that.

The initial faith has a lot to do with our final outcomes.

Scientists are rather forced to believe in evolution (or some other form of something from nothing). How else could this wonder have happened?

Creationists start with the belief of something from God. This generally tends them to steer in a direction away from thinking evolution is true. Not necessarily though.

Either way, the point is, the creationists don't necessarily worry about implementation and so the young earth ideology shouldn't be tagged with them. That's my take anyways.
This is how I end up doing a lot of programming. I'll start learning a new library, concept, or approach and I'll be reading and reading, then eventually I say "man, I could read all day, but I just want to bounce my brain off some code"

Course; probably a little more expensive to do that with woodworking :)
The equivalent of source code in civil engineering (and engineering of physical things in general) is the drawings/plans, not the actual bridge. In practice it turns out that drawings for physical objects are often even worse at comments than software, in part because leaving comments on CAD models is so much less convenient than in code.
I find it hard to believe that CMMS actually performed system integration, such as it was. I find it easy to believe that CMMS hired a contractor to perform system integration. And just as the individual contractor employees saw issues, there were probably government employees within CMMS who also saw issues. . .and just enough senior executives - government and contractor - to ignore the "naysayers". . .and insist on having their fingers deeply in the pie of such a high-visibility project.

And, of course system integration was not the only project management/technical issue with this project.
Both B5 and DS9 were well worth watching. And both had pretty ehh pilots. (And I'm got going to even touch accusations that the similarities weren't coincidental :-))

I pretty much agree with your take on DS9 even though I ultimately think it became one of the better Trek series.

B5 continued to have some pretty clunky acting in some cases and low-rent special effects but, given your tastes expressed in other posts, you'd probably enjoy it. My only caveat would be that it's somewhat one of those "mystery" shows (run off to the discussions about what this revelation meant) and I'm not sure how well that translates to after-the-fact binge viewing.
The Omidyar way
Thanks. I give that a shot.
I'd give a science fiction show about a generational ship a chance no matter how cheaply it was produced, for example

Something like The Starlost?
Ask HN: Can anyone tell me why my comments are not displayed?
I created this account today. My comments are not visible to public. A red asterisk is displayed next to my every comment.
Am I the only one who still watches This Old House and New Yankee Workshop?
Sure anyone could be hit by a car tomorrow. But why do we even bother to have education and laws? Why police officers and firefighters? Why EMT and doctors? Why don't we just let everyone die if there is nothing more that we could do?

If there is only a 40% of a chance that a driver given a ticket will drive safer, then there is a 40% more likely for any individual to survive while crossing the street so we continue to issue traffic ticket.

If kids are 40% more likely to avoid smoking by educating them, we will do it.

If there is a 40% chance you will be saved from a gun shot tomorrow because of more effective, stricter gun control, you probably would support it.

If there is a 10% chance a solider will live after a brain injury, the EMT and doctors will attempt to save his life.

If we all say "well let's fuck it because we will all die", why do we even bother to save life? Why EMT? Just fuck the injuries and let them die. That's your logic. That's the logic we get: survival of fitness.

So, let's accept out ultimate risk that we will all die and let's move on and forget about safety. Just because we can't have a 100% success rate.

While the TSA cargo and individual inspection is not very effective, it makes an attack with bomb a few percents harder. It might open up other avenues (e.g. massive shooting at the waiting line) but we can't lose a few percents because tomorrow when shit happens, and when your loved one is dead, you'd be joining the army and shoot those mother fucker out. And then you will come out and say "I wish I had those stupid TSA did their job".
I'm guessing that it has to do with the focus behaviour of the mouse. If that's the case then it would be the 'focus_follows_mouse' variable. It is set thusly:

http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_focus_follows_mouse

Then again I may be sadly, sadly mistaken.
So ask the stores / developers / employers along the route to buy-in on the road. Ask them to help pay for construction and give them a cut of the tolls proportionate to their investment. This lowers external capital requirements to create new roads. Tolls could be used primarily for maintenance and upgrades, but may have some profit associated to pay back the initial investment. If the associated nearby economic interests are invested in the road, incentives seem pretty well aligned to me. Thoughts?
I used Sabayon for about 2-3 years on my laptop with no complaints. I mean, it broke a few times, but that was my own fault, and I was always able to 'unbreak' it using recovery images and usually due to proprietary modules (grrr ATI).

I finally stopped due to my laptop itself breaking; crunchbang is my new distro of choice for my desktop. Biggest upsides: fast(er) turnaround time on updating packages compared to Gentoo (not just build time, entropy >> portage as a package management system). Current packages packages with wide selection due to Gentoo as upstream. The one caveat is that mixing gentoo/sabayon with any amount of complexity is pretty involved.
Side note: I really wish Apple similarly supported remote desktop in "Back to My Mac" on the iPad. I think would spend a whole lot more time doing work on my iPad with keyboard rather than lugging my 2 year old MBP around.
But where does that fluid come from? I assume water (plus other nutrients) that was consumed earlier in the day.
Google also doesn't seem to have an option to turn off the notification that your phone has automatically backed up photos and video to your G+ account and are ready to be shared. I've trained gmail to consider it spam though.
Sleeping in one 8-hour block at night seems to be a recent invention.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/sleeping-like-a-hunter-...

"...the Ibans of Sarawak, 25 percent of whom are apparently active at any one point in the night."
Robots in space
Didn't Win the Green Card Lottery? Go Big on Gaming...
I have a hard time imagining anything worthwhile that could come from powerlessness and disengagement.
I love New Zealand's quarantine people. Every time I visit they clean my shoes for me!
You should, actually. Ubuntu has an it efface 90% close enough to windows these days, and back in 2010 I did exactly what you say - got my mother to start using Linux instead. It's filled her needs perfectly and my support calls have dwindled to near-nothing.
There have been countless research papers on this topic, so I doubt it -- http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=dynamic+memory+com.... Not to mention the fact that RAM compression was quite common back in the DOS/Win95 days: http://oreilly.com/centers/windows/feat/softram/dblscan.html
"Sometimes trades do have semi-secret techniques evolved from dealing with the same damned issues over and over and over again."

Where "the trades" means any and all activities, not just blue collar occupations. I'd estimate that atleast one quarter of the stories on HN are about "semi-secret tech secrets," eg "How I do X with vim/rails/AWS/ubuntu." That being said dealing with the expansion and contraction of wood is hardly a semi-secret of joinery. Expansion and contraction of wood is a fundamental concept in joinery and cabinetmaking. Any decent introduction to joinery/cabinetmaking book will discuss this basic property of wood as early as possible.

A good mental model for water and wood is inserting and removing a bunch of marbles into the business end of a broom. The broom will not get longer as marbles are inserted, but it will get wider/fatter as the marbles take up space in between the straws of the broom.

It is also worth pointing out that when you arrange the boards the end-grain should create a "wavy pattern" in order to mitigate cupping; one board will cup up and the next will cup down. My ascii art is failing me but here is a best effort:

Good: |\\\///| |///\\\| |\\\///|

Bad: |\\\///| |\\\///| |\\\///|
> The truth machine is broken. How do we fix it?

> And why is it that whenever I see a list of the "top 10 most important problems" to solve, this isn't on it?

The truth machine has always been substantially broken, what has distinguished the scientific process is that it works at all. Our historical view of science suffers from absolutely enormous selection bias, in general we are only ever interested in following the stories which trace the threads of truth as they track through an absolute maelstrom of error, caused by nepotism, cronyism, prejudice, or a thousand other uncorrected human faults. 'Publish or perish' is only a modern progression of faults which have always been there.

That's not to say that finding improvements to the scientific process is not a hugely important question, but we should spare ourselves the drama of thinking our age has broken the system in some uniquely terrible way.
The only reason 9/11 caused these is because we (nationally) overreacted.
Is HN's SSL cert invalid for anyone else?
Why to Try
> I've heard that there are species of fish (and possibly birds) that are awake around the clock; they deal by sleeping one brain hemisphere at a time, which leaves enough active brain to avoid obstacles and predators.

Whales are known to do this; I imagine it makes breathing much less difficult.
Well, I'd hope they'd use all available resources to make sure they were targeting the correct people.
Feds Sued for Hiding NSA Spying From Terror Defendants
Two things:

1. How can we help? How can I support you?
2. Please open source this.
I think the red asterisk just means that it is your comment.
My point is really to just define the block as containing quicksort when the function it's in does other things as well. Refactoring it into it's own function with a useful name would be just as (or probably more) useful. It's really that lack of either which I see as insufficient
Offtopic, but: in case you need to reply to someone here, you can edit the text of your post within two hours.