skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Procrastination happens when you reject a large long-term reward (the joy of finishing a project or solving a problem, or becoming successful in business) in favour of a smaller short-term one (partying, playing video games).

The latter activities are often more enjoyable while high so by introducing the option of smoking weed into the mix you are effectively increasing the appeal that the short-term rewards have, making it less likely overall that you will choose the long-term ones.

I suppose you can always use it as a reward ("if I work hard Monday -> Thursday evenings then I'll get high and chill out on Friday"). I'm sure that a lot of people who are successful do something like that (replace weed with any other vice or enjoyable activity).
Dutch Intelligence Agency Hacks Internet Fora
Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
Browser session tab security isolation
It looks like Java/C++, with an interesting syntax. Concurrency model and time and duration as builtin types makes it interesting.
It doesn't really read like Torvalds at all to me. More like Standard Cynical Programmer.
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> if it were written in pure CSS

> also a challenge

Is CSS turing-complete? If not, game over.
Well for one, it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem that dating sites face when starting out. And I guess even with traction, you want people to feel like they are in "a crowded room", even if a bunch of the profiles don't respond back or flake.
...wow. That's pretty creepy.

I'm Dutch myself and I knew that the AIVD tapped a lot, but mining data from forums?!
I have always wondered: don't adopted children provide another natural experiment, on a much larger scale than the (presumably quite rare) cases of identical twins reared apart?

You don't even have to hope there was another child of the same parents who wasn't sent for adoption (although that would certainly help) - simply control for socioeconomic status and everything, and see what the "intervention" of moving a child to an upper middle class family changes. Or not?
Thank god, a way for me to read Hacker News more often throughout the day. ;)
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Good ebook for learning data structures & algorithm
Hi there,

I am c/c++ programmer.
I have 3 years of programming in C.
I wish to contribute to open source but I am demotivated by my lack of algorithm knowledge.

Please name few good books that will give me a fair introduction to Algorithms like search algos, etc etc.

I don't mind if I have to learn some Math for it.

Thanks in advance
Ankit.
True, in English it would be 'forums'. In fact it would be 'internet forums' in two words, but this is clearly written as it is in Dutch, where it would be «internetfora».

Although, only the title of this thread is 'internetfora', while the article has separated it into two words.
There are simple and compelling reasons penned by the creator[0]. I ain't an expert in security, although the key idea of a local backend with P2P activities makes intuitive sense to secure data from eavesdropping.

Ideas from a related project[1] like de-centralization, self-management of small servers (as opposed to server farms) distributed around the globe could be leveraged in cryptosphere? Diagram explaining interactions in Elijah[2]

[0] http://tonyarcieri.com/the-cloud-isnt-dead-it-just-needs-to-...

[1] http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/

[2] https://github.com/cmusatyalab/elijah-cloudlet/blob/master/d...
To make a comment not regarding moral and civilizational impact, I'm wondering what kind of value targeting forums can have.

Does this really worth the cost, compared to something like making friending bots on social networks and weight analyzing content for keywords ?

I suppose their definition of forum should be considered, here. Do we speak of the canonical form of a forum, like a punBB powered website, or is any website aiming to allow people to chat a forum ?
> It's just a ton of system administration work.

Let's say I'd like to have a context menu where I can choose "Run in sandbox", then I would either choose a preexisting sandbox configuration or define a custom one. IMO, there's a plenty of research do be done on how users can seamlessly define allowed data-flows (what the sandboxed application can read and write), and how to implement the allowed data flows.

There's a fine line between "implementation issues" vs "research topic". Research can touch other fields than technical, e.g., HCI.

As an example, GPG is a powerful system, but all available UIs and "integrations" with existing mail clients are clunky at best. We don't know how to create a good crypto UI for GPG. There's a research topic.

Therefore, even the technically best sandbox won't be used if it entails a "ton of sysadm work". (For example, I have Linux installed in virtualbox VM, but I don't use it often because the integration with the hos OS -- e.g., clipboard sharing -- is clunky.)
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And yet strangely, I'm not surprised. There seems to be a race by intelligence agencies to collect as much data as possible in recent years (well, the past decade). And while in the West, the Americans is leading the pack, the others aren't shining away without a fight.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it has become more a sport than a national security measure by these agencies. They have gone cocky, so to speak, thinking that because they are government agencies they are above the law that regular hackers supposedly are not.
As an academic I feel no schadenfreude at all. I feel somewhat sad.

This model will work eventually. It's mostly a matter of how the courses are structured and taught. I don't think it'll replace traditional universities but it should challenge the price structures and general lazy-bureaucracy attitude of many of them.

If you look at programming in particular I feel very good about all these online courses. It's easier than ever to teach yourself programming which is a net+ for society. I don't understand how more accessible education for everyone is ever a bad thing.

I don't think it's just education that's broken though. HR is also broken because they mostly look for the signature on the dotted line (oh look someone else has done the vetting for us) and tend to value certification over actual skill. Long term, I hope it'll be enough to list coursera etc. courses, books you read and a github link on your resume. IT should strive to be a leader in this shift because it's generally an industry where self-learners can do extremly well and have traditionally shown it's possible.
And to run this program in a single line of bash on Unix systems (does create a ./a.out file):

echo 'int main(){int _[2048],O=(int)&O,__=~__+__;while((__=-~__)^2048)__[_]=(O=(O*0x41C64E6D+12345)&0x7fffffff)&1024?1<<5:0;while(usleep('"'"'d'"'"'<<'"'"'\n'"'"'),__+=~__){while((__=-~__)^8192){if(_[((__>>2)+2048+"\x01?@A"[__%4])%04000]&1<<5)*(_+(__>>2))=-~_[__>>2];if(_[((__>>2)+04000-"\x01?@A"[__%4])%2048]&1<<5)*(_+(__>>2))=-~_[__>>2];if(__%4==3)_[__>>2]|=_[__>>2]^'"'"'\"'"'"'&&_[__>>2]^'"'"'#'"'"'?((_[__>>2]^3)?0:1<<4):1<<4;};while((__=-~__)^10240)if(putchar((_[__%2048]=_[__%2048]<<1&1<<5)?'"'"'X'"'"':'"'"' '"'"'),!(63^__%0100))putchar(10);}};' | gcc -xc - && ./a.out

.
Yes I managed to get this already, thanks though!

It was probably Google's cache that was giving trouble, the Github one worked fine.
This is the most important sentence I think:

According to the document the Dutch “are looking at marrying the forum data with other social network info, and trying to figure out good ways to mine the data that they have.”

The posts for one individual on one forum are maybe not that interesting. But by connecting this data to the data of his/her other internet activities, you get the total information awareness idea. E.g. Facebook, Gmail, other forums accounts, Whatsapp messages, websites visited etc.
a nice look using cartoon at http://vish-speak.blogspot.in/2013/11/bitcoin-phenomenon.htm...
You don't necessarily have to get off blogger. You can change the template to be more sane. Currently you are using the "dynamic view" template with "magazine" as the default view. If you select "classic" (the first choice in all the dynamic view templates) your blog will stop popping up light boxes by default.

Any template outside of the "dynamic view" category will be even better. Where better means to me "does not need JavaScript to display properly".
Take the company off hold and keep pushing along. Focus on what's next. They might come back to you. Seriously. Don't count it, but it does happen in M&A. Next time you can ask for more $$.
I just read that as 'regularly hacks Interflora' and was momentarily amazed at how seriously they take their tulips.
It's the crawler for Naver, a south Korean search engine.
Best way to learn Scala/Akka?
Hey !

I am C-Family Developer, with good experience in JS/HTML5.

I have been trying to learn Scala lately for new project, exploring the functional capabilities and actor model.
Akka is the main reason to use Scala in this project. I read that Actors are an incredibly powerful abstraction for building highly-concurrent, highly performant predictive systems.

The most books I found cover definitions, the why ? and not the how. As a developer with an experience in OOP programming, I don't need to learn things from scratch but I'd like to learn practical things.
Can you suggest good ways to learn Scala Akka, Open source projects to try, Best practices to use in such advanced programming level ?
Can you name any good books, blogs, talks to learn from it in order to widen my eyes on Scala's capabilities.

Thanks in advance.
No you don't get it. It isn't sentient code. This isn't smart code. It's just plain old code that does plain old pattern matching like we've been doing for decades.

It isn't anything that hasn't been done before. It is just more of the same from WA - Hype and bullshit.

How exactly the work that WA is doing going to nail down the future of computing? This is crazy. I'm sick of the hype around WA. It's essentially just a search engine + mathematica at this point.
This is like antibiotics. The natural selection process will push people to use more secure communication methods etc. The conclusion, for me, is that repression is not the way to go and makes the problem only harder to monitor and control.
The strategy I would follow to address this problem is to identify the mechanism by which these type of behaviors reproduce themselves and contamine new people. This is where to target. And again, not in the Rambo way, in a chess way where everything is kept under control and will lead to the final check mate.
I do not see this as a problem with Thrun, but as a problem with the current educational system. If MOOC's carried a fraction of the "academic credibility" that college degrees did, Udacity would be a home run already. This will require a cultural shift, and companies like Udacity are sowing the seeds.

As Warren Buffet has said, the courses he took at Wharton barely differed in quality from the ones he took at Nebraska. Our culture is so obsessed with shallow accolades that it is slow to recognize a humongous opportunity right underneath its very nose.

There is absolutely no reason that MOOC's cannot teach many college-level courses as good as or better than their real life counterparts. Unfortunately, the motivation of students largely stems from the aforementioned shallow accolades.

As a filtering mechanism for professional skills, I think the current academic system has some flaws which MOOC addresses nicely, perhaps not as a complete replacement, but a powerful complement. But the reality is, academia should be used to filter academics, and in many industries, a degree represents nothing more than 4 years that could have been spent learning the actual profession and adding value to the economy.
That attracts people to the site (fake profiles have nicer pictures), so they pay to be part of it. Not a lot of people see it is a fake profile at first.

I have tried to use dating websites. Even on non-free ones, you can still register for free and see profiles. Whenever the picture is really nice, I use a small Firefox plugin called "who stoled my pictures" and find the picture is from someone else (models for instance).

I don't know if those sites create the fake profile themselves, but they certainly do little to detect them. Usage of something similar to the "who stoled my picture" plugin would be quite effective (even used manually by their staff who goes through new profile to approve pictures anyway).
It's all about connecting the dots. They want to gather as much information as possible and try to get a better picture of what each individual thinks, does and his/her social ties. The forums are just a piece of the puzzle.
Just use cygwin!
Still not a suitable solution IMHO. Now you have to deal with multiple ports, startup scripts etc etc

Every other database on the planet has database names pretty much.

I LOVE Redis but this is just a bonkers limitation IMHO...
Could you instead provide some links on relevant things YOU have written and gave away for free ?
All dating sites do this. If you know of a single dating site that did not "seed" with model photos when it was started, I would be interested to know about it.

badoo is another scam site with 80% fake model photos - it's obvious

the online dating scene is big money and very poor ethics

I'd like to see google dating - with a "don't be evil" motto
What are the benefits of IRCCloud compared to a bouncer?

I'm using my bouncer on for about 10 years now and never missed one line of chat in about 5 IRC Networks (Quakenet/ Freenode/ ETG/ Gamesurge/ OFTC).
Make 'em pay. Become so successful that the VC who screwed the deal looks like an idiot.
"The greatest challenge of education is to nurture the desire for learning in students"

I could not agree more. I think the idea of a curriculum is quite broken, especially in high school and below. I'd much rather have a huge list of stuff that will be tested upon university entry and let students learn whatever they want during high school (well ideally I'd want universities to do 1 on 1s with every entrant) and spend 100% of the time on creating an environment in which learning and exploring what interest you is encouraged.

I think the fundamental problem is that most people (including myself) have some assumptions on what a good education is supposed to entail and have a really hard time not trying to "force" kids to learn certain things. I blame Plato :P
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It definitely is a dragnet kinda approach; let's just collect all the data, chuck it into a big database and see if we find any connections with insert random justification here.
This is sad, and this is being flagged too, so fast, seriously people? This is a genuine security issue which needs to be alerted to everyone out there. And Homakov has also gone so as far as to make some pull requests and he has been asked to stop (WTF?!). Really I see this more of like arrogance from the project maintainers' end.

I'm thankful that I don't depend/use on any of these features for my project though.

Thanks Homakov!!
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How do we quantify who is "leading the pack"? This would assume we have representative coverage of different countries' activities and that is certainly not true.
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There are multiple fora (like phpBB) discussing the Jihad, or joining the rebels in Syria. I suspect these fora would be of interest to the AIVD.
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Going off the rails
Already fixed in CyanogenMod: http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/54850/
In APL, it is one line of code http://catpad.net/michael/apl/. Whether it is obfuscated or not is a matter of interpretation.
An interesting selection of anti-establishment crypto primitives and protocols... although, if I'm not mistaken, DJB has been involved with every single one.

If anyone saw Dan Kaminsky talk at LISA 2013[0], you can really see what he means about NIST being replaced by "some guy".

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/rethinking-dogma
Well, in your particular case, I guess just having a lot of shit on github would be sufficient :)
Keep paying them to do that. Taxes are a good thing, after all: governments also build roads and help the poor - which no one else can do.
If you all remember the fuss about the "terughackwet", a law that would allow the police to hack people, this is what I meant when I said that the AIVD (general intelligence agency) and MIVD (military intelligence agency) have had this power since the beginning of time. This merely proves that they're actively using their capabilities and that the police doesn't really need it; they can just ask another agency.

I would assume the same for forcing passwords out of people, something which is still supposed to be illegal in the Netherlands but isn't. The AIVD and MIVD have the right to do this.

I've got one question though: does anyone know what they mean with "They acquire mySQL databases via CNE access." What is CNE?
Building a model on some training data is easy. Debugging it is hard. Th machine learned model is essentially equivalent of code that gives probabilistic answers. But there are no breakpoints to put or watch to add. When model doesn't give the answer you expect, you need to do statistical debugging. Is the problem in training data, do you have correct sampling, are you missing a feature, is your feature selection optimal, does you featurizer have a bug somewhere? Possibilities are endless. Debugging ML model is black art. Most ML "users" would simply give up if model doesn't work on some cases or if they added a cool feature but results are not that good. In my experience less than 10% of people who claims ML expertise are actually good at doing statistical debugging and able to identify issue when model doesn't work as expected.
please continue to stay the course, moot. For better or worse, I love the site and its community. 4chan has been arguably more influential and relevant to the internet as a whole than many other similarly sized communities. It's managed to weather the influx of new users very well, which is something that has greatly degraded the quality other sites like reddit and tumblr.
> we've built a startup that's so disruptive, we nearly had an exit within 2 years - but now we're about to crash and burn.

But what about making money? Is it so disruptive you haven't been able to charge for it yet? That sounds like a consumer app. Are you another Instagram? Could you be Snapchat? (snicker)

In all reality, either you are so disruptive that you need help finding a way to make money, or you should be able to raise more money if it's something that's actually adding value. Something is fishy when your current investors are dropping you after this deal fell through, either the company is in more dire of a situation that you can see, or something else is up.

I don't know what actual advice to give other than take a close look at what you're doing to see if it's truly providing value not just "disruptive" and if there is an opportunity to start generating revenue to fund yourself. That's the most obvious solution to a startups cash flow problems. If you are solving someones pain point, I bet there's a few people out there willing to pay for it.
This one was mentioned by Homakov on Twitter I think. Though I would love to have it wrap the responder instead.
For something more Erlang:ish (but better), see the Flow Based Programming implementation by Vladimir Sibirov, GoFlow: https://github.com/trustmaster/goflow .

It lets you give your components names, and the inports of the components are somewhat analogous to Erlang inboxes as far as I can tell.

But then it improves on the Erlang actor/mailbox concept by keeping the "wiring" of the connections between boxes completely separated from their implementation, which lets you change the data flow much more easily (hook in a monitor, logging facility, and extra test mock or whatever ... it is crazily powerful when you start to think about it!).

GoFlow is of course not the only FBP implementation, but a Go implementation makes quite some sense I think.

If you wonder what the Erlang creator (Joe Armstrong) thinks about FBP, you can find his comments on it here: http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/10/transformative-progra... (He's considering implementing one in Erlang :) )
I think eval has some great use cases (maybe on a node.js server), just not what you are shipping off to the client.
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Awesome example. But that's a targeted intervention. Any treatment/course that's provided universally will tend to help most those best able to use it, i.e. the best prepared, most privileged, etc.

This is part of why equality of opportunity can't lead to opportunity of outcome: Differences in ability and character exist and the better the background environment the more they matter. It's like height. When there's substantial variation in nutrition a lot of variation in height can be explained by that but once more or less everyone has adequate nutrition there's still a hell of a lot of variation in height, and it's due to genes and randomness. Environmental influence has been reduced to close to zero by equalization.
There are some API's you can use to send such SMS, e.g. the Tropo API. You don't even need a phone for it, works online https://www.developergarden.com/apis/apis-sdks/telekom-tropo...
I'm not trying to blame anyone and I have nothing against inexperienced people. I'm quite happy with the people I've managed in the past, most of whom have been fairly inexperienced. They were generally better employees than I was a manager [1].

There is a difference between nurturing and handholding. Nurturing is opening the door for them, handholding is pushing them through it.

A concrete example. I had a young college kid put in charge of a bunch of mechanical turks, most of whom were considerably older and more experienced than her. Her first few days of the job were rough - the older girls thought they deserved the job and gave her pushback and I was also unintentionally undermining her. Nurturing her involved asking what she needed, redirecting all work queries to her, and building a report to let her change the business process (she switched from time tracking to goal tracking).

Nurturing was simply telling her underlings "ask little boss lady" when they came to me and then going back to coding. That's exactly what she asked me to do. Handholding would have involved "hey everyone, I need you all to be nice to little boss lady and if you aren't I'm going to yell at you."

(Incidentally, if anyone needs a great manager in Mumbai, let me know. I think she's on the market.)

[1] I failed to protect the people below me from the people above me and I can't blame that on anyone else.
Adding extra ram or a second monitor would be upgrading, you don't need to replace every component.