skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading that it doesn't look to me like they're sneaking into otherwise pure installers or doing it without project's knowledge. "When SourceForge introduced this, it bribed encouraged the top projects to participate by giving them a cut of the take. So these co-operating projects are also knowingly selling their users down the river."

For as long as I can remember Sourceforge's usability has sucked. That's reason enough to avoid it (but omg! free file hosting!) but the installer thing maybe isn't quite as deceptive and malwareish as your first message let on. It's just another facet of their lameness.

Kudos to Gimp for dumping them. Why does anyone stay with them at this point?
Yeah but this game has like 10 times as many openings so it will take much longer to learn them.

The reason why memorization is a problem in chess isn't because there aren't enough openings/endgames to remember, it's because most players need to memorize certain patterns to reach a certain level of effectiveness, because they would rarely be able to solve those problems over the board.

So the solution to the chess memorization problem isn't necessarily more openings and more complexity, which ironically could just INCREASE opening importance. Rather I think the idea is to increase the importance and depth of long term strategic factors like pawns, the sort of understanding of which grows over time and doesn't lend itself to rote memorization.
This is a very good point. Generally, there's some element of nature and some element of nurture in a person's development. I mean you take two identical twins who are separated from birth and find that they're very similar in some respects and completely different in others.

The point is that there's a difference between temperament personality. Some people are just wired to act a certain way and yet are raised to be a totally different way.
Unfortunately the API wont be released for third party development until next year, likely well into the beta period. But stay tuned! Right now we're working with various vendors that are trying to get their devices supported ahead of time.
I make sure Uncle Soprano gets his cut.
This scientist seems to be using this Just So Story for self-promotion, and he has done so for years.[1][2]

He has also attempted to profit personally.[3]

He seems to have the expertise to know that this story is flimsy, and not well-founded in science. Using an unvalidated method in this way could be considered unethical itself. [4]

Dr. Fallon's record of behavior might suggest a pattern of anti-social behavior. His job as a tenured UC professor is, in part, to educate the public. Instead he seems to give us sci-fi.

Of course, I'm just being totally silly, and so is he (not sure about all the writers he has duped over the years.)

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1278889...

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-...

[4] http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ethics-of-public...
I haven't read it, so I can't vouch for it, but Snakes in Suits [1] is a frequently recommended book on this subject.

[1] http://amzn.com/0061147893
When I see explicit mention of API, it implies there's no running memcache daemon.

I dug MySQL 5.7 manual several times, but I couldn't find any proof that this is just an memcache API atop MySQL.

But I found some proof that says there's a real memcache daemon atop MySQL.

> Running memcached in the same process space as the MySQL server avoids the network overhead of passing requests back and forth.

MySQL 5.7 manual clarifies that they're running memcache daemon inside the database engine in-process mode. So actually real memcache is serving the data atop the engine.

So, if dataset is read-only and small enough, it's likely to happen that whole the data is being served by memcache. In that case, it cannot be slower than memcache.

That's why I couldn't be impressed. The only thing MySQL doing is automatic handling of memcache daemon. That should be convenient, but not impressive.

Maybe I am wrong. If you think I am wrong, please show me some reference that explicitly mentions this is just API, and there's no running memcache instance.

Also, regardless of whatever is really happening under hood, this benchmark is still meaningless. Because database exists to store data and all the hard stuffs are only happening when storing data. Writing transactions usually degrade performance a lot. That's why writing transactions must be included in benchmark to show the real world performance.
You can use bitcoin as a payment network so that you have zero bitcoin price exposure. Truly none.

For example, with BitPay your POS terminal tells a price denominated in USD to BitPay, (BitPay quotes a bitcoin-denominated price to the customer with a unique address and the customer pays), and then BitPay tells the merchant the payment came through. BitPay credits the merchant account the USD-denominated value. At the end of the day, BitPay settles up the account (eg. ACH payment to merchant bank account).

Never does the merchant hold bitcoins.
He likes to win arguments.

so maybe roughly 100% of humans?
I can't. But then again Hacker News is full of examples and hacks that I'm incapable of pulling off. So that doesn't really mean anything.
A funny story about the perils of diagnosing yourself with a machine (somewhat related):
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/episte...

Raymond Smullyan is a fun guy; really good logic/puzzle books.
TLDR version of this critique might be: "Violence can be emotional, too, and Pinker is myopic for focusing, with reductionist logic, on physical harm and death in his definition and analysis."

I, personally, find Pinker's analysis incredibly thorough and compelling, and focus on death and it's systematic avoidance over time an extremely meaningful measure. This critique seemed to imply that if ones definition of violence is merely physical, then better to throw out the whole thing. I almost get the impression that Ben Laws never fully read the book, as many of his points are dealt with directly.

I do, of course, think there's room to think about the impact of emotional harm from and within societies, but that subject matter doesn't moot the impact of more animalistic harm.

Further, I have difficulty being swayed by appeals to logic that logic is, itself, unappealing.
Oh no, I agree completely. Here's the question that's on my mind though: does the fact that someone's brain works the same way as a serial killer mean that they'll act the same way themselves? Or are there millions of Ted Bundys out there who never actually killed anyone and even lead productive lives?
You might also enjoy http://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher

He comments on professional matches, but the part of his feed that I enjoy are the 1/3/5 minute time control games he plays. He is very good at articulating his thoughts during the game, and I find that much more engaging that listening to analysis of alternate lines that's more common in commentated chess matches.
Interesting, but this story feels very incomplete without some interviews with his family and his grad students. (Not that they would feel free to talk openly.)
Plain old corundum - you can get pieces of it the size of your fist if you see what is left after welding railroad tracks with termite.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...

> Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself: weeks before the suicides, in December 1996, DiAngelo agreed with Applewhite to leave the group so he could ensure future dissemination of Heaven's Gate videos and literature.

This isn't surprising. The most dangerous viruses and parasites aren't the ones that kill their hosts immediately - they have to ensure their own survival first. If you view suicide cults as a meme (in Dawkin's terminology, not the Reddit usage of the word), then this makes sense.
Mirror??
Quite possible, and it also reduces the odd intersection of massive money with coalition politics. People wanting issue X will be promoting issue X, not issues Y and Z which happen to be pushed by the same party.
I can't see how one can put much blame on Facebook if people are using it for legal purposes. I think there is no enforcement because there is no money to be made in it. Unlike drug crimes where the government can confiscate property.

Should the government enforce mandatory checks in such cases? Involve child services if guardianship is transferred in the area?
>They use other people's creative work to promote their business, for commercial gain

This is what irritates me so much about the majority of buzzfeed's articles
Booking a flight with bitcoin.. Doesn't that seem even more suspect than booking a flight with cash?
Today's goals:

* Spend 100 million for supercomputers to compute this address's wallet in one day.

* Acquire said wallet.

* Reimburse my 100 million debt.

* Enjoy my 50 millions.

Anybody got supercomputers?
Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Want His Successor to Kill the Xbox, Bing
Year-on-year percentages of growth, but nowhere actual market share. Spam.
you know what's interesting is that i've been seeing a lot of psychopath books out there recently.

Like a publishing trend, where people are riding on the success of some other book.

kind of like that 10,000 hours thing came out and many books about it all came out at once.

it makes me wonder if that's all that it is, a trend in publishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
>please prove me wrong.

The onus is not on anyone else to prove a 1-word assertion wrong, it's on you to prove it right. More generally, every assertion is wrong by default, the asserter has to prove it true.
He likes to win arguments / so maybe roughly 100% of humans?

Not at all. Some humans "argue" or "debate" to understand the truth of an issue, rather than to "win." In "losing," I actually learn more. I see that as the difference between mathematicians (truth-seeking) and lawyers (win-seeking.)
Interesting, thanks posting.

Roughly how many $ of bitcoin sales do you do?

A lot of Bitcoin-related services seem kind of sketchy - they get hacked or disappear with a bunch of other people's bitcoins. What sort of steps have you taken to protect yourselves / minimize your exposure to the risk your payment processor will get hacked?
I admit that was an unfair swipe at formalism, but I do think that formalism is far more effective in the light of a clear, intuitive exposition that conveys the concept straight into the mind. Formalism is good for battening things down tightly, after the fact.
This is impressive work by the Joyent team!

I've seen two sources of memory leaks in Erlang based systems: 1) unbounded process message queues, and 2) passing binaries across process (pid) boundaries.

Many beginning erlangers run into these, and they're relatively easy to identify and correct. With a little practice, these become easy patterns to recognize and avoid.

As far as httpc, I'm unaware of that bug -- but I can say that I recently worked on a commercial product that leveraged httpc as a core component of the service, and it worked fine.
Seriously - there's always some attack vector. I got notified a few months ago that an old static blog on one of my personal sites that I had totally forgotten about was hacked (bad permissions + some feedback form).

Most web hosts have some form of caching available to customers so the concurrency argument doesn't hold up well either.
> Would you prefer people just didn't bother to discuss this topic,

I would prefer that people stop saying that it's a modern development, or that there was no sign of it until Snowden leaked, or that it's some weird new thing. GCHQ at least has been open about their behaviour for years and years. ECHELON was discussed in EU parliament.

> do you have something to say about where the limits on this behaviour should be?

My view is tricky for me to explain, but I'll try.

1) GCHQ need to be allowed to do stuff. The limits should be clear, and defined by law.

2) GCHQ is a secret organisation, thus their oversight must be by people who keep secrets, but who are accountable to the public. GCHQ oversight failed, hard. I'm not sure what should happen. I hope that, in secret, someone is getting a kicking.

3) I don't care what GCHQ does to people who are not subjects of the UK (or whatever the hell England plus others is called now)

4) For UK subjects I would prefer that GCHQ does not collect meta data. I could be persuaded that they can collect targeted meta data, if they have suitable oversight. EG: They know that Bob is a terrorist-sympathiser. (Beyond just looking at a few YouTube videos - this would be things like sending money, fly-posting, fund raising, associating with other terrorists, etc.) GCHQ would apply for, and get, a warrant, and be allowed to collect meta data for that person. Warrants would require oversight, not just by the courts but by the oversight body.

5) For UK subjects I strongly prefer that GCHQ does not collect content data unless they get a warrant.

6) GCHQ claim to obey the law. I want oversight to be stronger, and I want some of the GCHQ choices to be challenged. I don't want weird interpretations of words to guide their behaviours. (EG: Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations" - well, a blow job is sexual to most people.)

Having said all that, I am a lot less bothered by GCHQ data slurping than I am by other potential privacy invasions.

GCHQ has a many petabyte dump of data but there's no impact on me unless they grep my name. (I'm aware that this is like me saying I'm not so bothered by police stop and search powers; me being white and rarely leaving the house means that I'm never stopped and searched.) Plenty of other organisations have my data, and we have many examples of them breaching confidentiality through corruption, incompetence, maliciousness, and so on. I said a bit more about that in this post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6767612
Doesn't this "pattern of anti-social behavior" just prove his claims?
That really shines a light into the mind of Applewhite, while he may have indeed been a lunatic, he knew his ideas were bullshit.
From the Boston Dynamics YouTube channel:

BigDog Weaponized - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptyV1cpE14o

BigDog throwing cinderblocks - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jvLalY6ubc

It's only a matter of time before it gets a machine-gun or grenade launcher attached.
"Psychopath" absolutely has a clinical meaning. While not formally defined in the DSM, it can be diagnosed via the "PCL-R" test [1] administered by a psychiatrist or other qualified clinician. The test has a 40 year history of use in penology.

More recently, a lot of interesting research is being done now on the physical basis of psychopathy, using various non-invasive means [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...
i see that as more discussing and communicating than arguing.
Pinker wrote an interesting and thought provoking book. Certainly he is trying to make a point, and is a bit selective in the data and how he presents it. But this critique is not so much about the substance of the book, or any data that contradicts Pinker's thesis. It is more a blur of relativism and fancy language. I think it is interesting that physical violence has on many measures and timescales been declining, which the critic doesn't seem to refute. Instead he makes a very odd attack on Pinker for not writing a different history of different meanings of violence. I mean you could make this same critique about anything anyone has ever written, but that would be mere sophistry.

I seriously question if this isn't a parody of modern academic criticism.
There was a recent IAmA, on Reddit, by a vacuum repair technician that echoed your sentiments. He also had suggestions for quality models.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1pe2bd/iama_vacuum_rep...
Makes me wonder if scientists and supporters of vivo animal testing are unwitting psychopaths, not just simply having low moral intuition.
Imposing morality on others is a survival strategy, but obeying morality yourself only becomes one once everyone else is imposing it on you.
Oopsie, yeah. In fact, I just noticed one of them is even 1996! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHl80Wmpj40
New blood, old world
the bitcoin drama on HN is becoming too much. so here is my humble proposal:

-- All those HNers who have purchased bitcoin and are interested in the hype to drive up price, please u are destroying HN for the rest of us

-- All those who are submitting these links for various reasons like vested interest, karma, etc please stop. you are destroying HN for the rest of us

--All those who share disdain I have for these articles, if the above two proposals fail and the article makes it to the frontpage, please don't join the comments to debate them on why bitcoin is this or that; it simply encourages others to submit more useless, meaningless, and dramatized bitcoin links.Leave them alone to enjoy the fun.

If these 3 point proposal works and we let all the irrelevant bitcoin articles slide, HN will be a bit better.

Thanks
Yes, I am completely fascinated by this too. Kinda makes one paranoid, though!

One article I read was cleverly headlined something like, "You are what your grandpa eats."
Not sure why this indicates he believed his ideas were bullshit... in my opinion, leaving material behind to spread his ideas after his own death suggests a truly held belief, not a purposeful scam.
I'm not sure, but you should join my company. We're hiring!
no, it provides anecdotal evidence
Yeah me too. I have the feel that developers find themselves attacking the problem of compression, entropy and abstraction of meaning more and more often these days. Which I see as a good future, while I hope that some convergence of the evolutionary better DBs happens. Commercial DBs rot and die in popularity compared to opensource solutions, which marks the value of our time, that is cooperation and usefulness, over individual benefit.

Can't wait for 2014, and not just because 2013 was a bad year.
And the page still has hidden text at the bottom of the page.

Truth be told, this is one of my favorite examples of hidden text, because it shows that people don't always use spam techniques for making money.

I haven't had much luck contacting the maintainer of that page to ask them to remove the hidden text.
What about integers being keys.

That works fine.

How does a 3 level deep map work with clauses

The most straightforward manner is like you would do this in a relational database (if the goal is to keep O(1) times). E.g. two-level:

foo(a,x).
foo(b,y).

bar(x,a-x-one).
bar(x,a-x-two).
bar(y,b-y-one).

Again, you can add predicates to make this less unwieldy.

If the JSON conforms to a schema, there is also the possibility of mapping particular keys to arguments. Since you know the set of possible keys in such a case, you could map keys to fixed term arguments. E.g. a structure such as:

{ "foo": "apple", "bar": "pear" }

Could be mapped to:

json(apple,pear)

You would have the same You could do this for deeper maps as well. It gives you the same benefits as hash maps, O(1) indexing. In fact, the Hdrug[1] system uses such a representation for partially typed feature structures, which can have an arbitrary depth. It provides a DSL for easily specifying types (the 'schema') and unifying structures and substructures. There is also a short description in the introductory chapters of my thesis, though it is definitely not my work ;).

Note: I am not for or against adding maps to the language. There are probably applications where they are very handy in Prolog. For the things I worked on in Prolog I never really needed first-class maps.

[1] http://www.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/Hdrug/

[2] http://danieldk.eu/Research/Publications/phd-thesis.pdf (starting at the end of page 19)
> It's stories like this that make me wish we had the term "national security" as narrowly defined as the term "treason".

The U.S. Constitution has Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 that reads:

> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

People on the political left seem to favor a broad interpretation of the powers that "general welfare" gives to the federal government. Why isn't there a similar acceptance of the broad powers that "common defense" grants the federal government in the same clause?
Yeah, the original title was different. But it's because I'd never heard of static blogging and it didn't have any good themes.
You know, you're right. SSH has about the most sane crypto ui out of everything. That's a really sad state of affairs. I also agree with your point about self signed certificates...you it seems like sites should be able to identify you by that. It's probably easier to keep the certificate store on your machine safe than it is to actually follow the best practices that I've seen regarding password selection and usage.
When UTF-8 was first defined, they didn't know how big the Unicode range was going to be, so they defined it as a 1-6 byte encoding that could encode any 32-bit codepoint.

When Unicode was deemed to end at U+10FFFF (because that's the largest value that UTF-16 can encode), UTF-8 was revised to be a 1-4 byte encoding that ends in the same place.

Python clearly implements UTF-8 in a way that uses at most four bytes per codepoint (why support five and six byte sequences if they'll never be used?). I think what we're seeing in '\xfb\x9b\xbb\xaf' is four bytes out of a six byte sequence.
There was a reason why Huxley picked an insecure religious fundamentalist with a fondness for self-flagellation and fear of his own sexuality to contrast with the Brave New World. And it wasn't because he identified with him.

The satire is of the relentless drive towards excess, which Huxley saw epitomised in America's nascent consumerist culture and the drive to industrialization it was serving. The reason why it keeps coming back to the relentless sex and drugs isn't because Huxley then thought sex and drugs were bad, it's because he though any sane authoritarian regime would give the people the distractions they wanted most.
The reason static followers are so few is because it sucks, but so does Wordpres. Statiq is going to actually make static blogging accessible to people
Proposal: submit more of the sort of things you like to see on HN, and downvote or flag the things you think don't belong.
> "Steadfastness basically means that you cannot force a predicate down the wrong path by filling in output arguments wrongly."[1]

Interesting. Yeah is how I often mess up. The backtracking just ends up going the wrong way.

Are you familiar with Mercury, what do you think of it. They add besides type, also predicate determinism. Something like (copy paste from its example code):

>

:- mode append(in, in, out) is det.
:- mode append(out, out, in) is multi.

Here they determine various determinism modes of predicate append. Do you see that as a good improvement? Very useful? Or a nice to have option?
1984 wasn't really about predictions. Orwell was writing about Britain and Russia in 1948.
How to launder Bitcoins
I wonder if this is really the only way
It isn't going to be online much longer.

Domain Name: HEAVENSGATE.COM

Creation Date: 1997-12-18 05:00:00Z

Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2013-12-17 05:00:00Z
Doesn't depreciation apply equally to servers in dedicated datacenters? I think the bigger issue is the cost of going in and reparing/replacing parts when they break.
wtf, are you kidding?! There are ONLY commercial solutions from a handful commercial vendors. Yeah, truly trustful resource.. really, have you even looked at the results, I mean dude IBM,MS,ORACLE,NEC and then it starts to repeat...

So I understand that you request a cost per transaction column and it makes sense, but that link sucks.
US police force pay Bitcoin ransom in Cryptolocker malware scam