skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Educational Technology For Special Needs
The iPad has become one of the most sought after of all teaching aids. The constant flow of new apps aimed at elementary education makes great resources for teachers of special needs students. Students love them because they’re fun. Teachers love them because they can supplement almost any lesson. They’re great for visual, auditory, and tactile learning. The iPads are part of a larger pool of assistive technology resources for teachers. The Individuals with Disabilities Act requires that students be issued whatever technology meets their learning needs. Teachers can use iPads and all their software along with talking dictionaries and calculators, over-sized keyboards, artifacts apps and more.
I'd much rather see the reply first - and if I need the context, I can then scroll down to see the quoted message. That way, I don't need to scroll through a lot of context I already know just to see someone's one-line response to it.
But scepticism about libertarian technofetishism has been a bit of a theme in his writing for... a while now. The Vile Offspring in Accelerando are a scarcely-veiled example.
Anyone else having issues with Thinkpad T60 German-Keyboard and the default comment/uncomment short-cut mapping on linux?
Anyhints reg. the root cause of the issues?
I was developing software back then when extreme programming came about. It wasn't controversial at all. In fact, everyone I knew thought it was a much better way of programming than the current waterfall method. The only problem was inertia from management, which is always the case.
Looks interesting, but front page doesn't do a great idea with selling me on why I should spend a couple hours of my day experimenting. What will this do for me?
Just out of curiosity, what sort of serious tasks does one use 192GB of RAM for? (I'm not implying that there aren't any; just want some examples.)
20% swings over the course of a day is not at all average, and is in fact seen as quite dramatical.
Linux backdoor squirts code into SSH to keep its badness buried
Big data may be able to predict a Harvard “yes”
For PHP - Silex is really awesome.

You get the minimal app controller/router similar to Express. And you can pick and choose Symfony2 (and other) components to add. It makes putting together an API for your front-end a snap.

For those interested in this approach, I've put together a boilerplate called PHANG that combines Silex and AngularJS: https://github.com/ErikAugust/phang
The chink in the armor of all these strategies is upstream bandwidth. I have lots of data to back up. If I had to upload it all, it would seriously soak up my upstream bandwidth. If I had symmetrical, 1Gbit Google fiber I wouldn't have to worry, but I don't.
Meh, and you'd think that a singer as popular as Justin Bieber actually produced good music.

Bitcooin like any tool from the invention of fire

Well, yeah... Mr. Stross doesn't trust people to make their own decisions about using something like bitcoin, but he seems to advocate trusting those same people to vote for government overlords who will create rules that all of us should live by.
They bypass the meters taking all sorts of Jerry rigged risks when doing so.
I'm not disagreeing, but is there empirical evidence backing that? My only sources are heavily biased, but they point out that the periods of mild, predictable deflation (like Bitcoin would cause) such as The Great Deflation[1] actually experienced decent growth in real incomes and such.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
They show it off with 4K monitors, just not their own. For a machine that's specifically slated to use them (6 thunderbolt ports, two GPUs) it's extremely strange behaviour.
If you are a regular vim user the keybindings in Sublime vintage mode aren't anywhere near adequate. It's more like a cute quirk than a real feature.
Why implement a card skimmer? It 'd be far more profitable to write a program which dumps the whole cash in the ATM upon insertion of a special card... saves the cloning costs.
You say that but if it means you double your per server costs to handle the overhead. Hard to justify. Logging should be efficient. It must be to scale from Large to small.
"The web is incredible. I love the web. In so many ways it has improved the lives of millions by transforming society, education, culture, community, and commerce. "

We need to extinguish this kind of enthusiasm. Sure, computers are great, and they have changed the world, but not always for the better. And all this unending praise we give technology can keep us from thinking about technology critically.

I love the web. And I hate the web. I hate surveillance. I hate data mining. I hate advertising. I hate linkbait headlines. I hate youtube comments. Hate hate hate.
So the article claims that more assassination, drugs and child pornography is being sold now than before?

Is there any facts supporting such claim? Sold assassination, drugs and child pornography should exist as crime statistics, proving or disproving the claim.
And it sounds like this particular process is less reliant on dangerous chemical catalysts and produces less byproducts, so it's a plus in that regard.
Fortunately for you, the RFC RFC neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific formatting - so you can keep your variable-width fonts if you must:

http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt
Moore's "law" isn't holding now, much less in 15 years.
University of Illinois Study: The Ballmer Peak is Real
I see, so they are experimenting with the user experience, probably by examining assumptions and see how much can be cut away and still be functional.
Retail Apps: TOP UX Examples
Plants die when placed next to wireless routers
Tell that to property owners in Japan :-)
Bitcoin - Societal Evolution Accelerator
The author's complains are a sober reminder that society is not yet ready, and has not yet evolved all the infrastructure it will need to cope with rising global Bitcoin adoption.[1] Regardless, if the number of people using Bitcoin continues to grow, our institutions and infrastructure will have to evolve to address the problems mentioned by the author.

Among other things, society will need more secure (truly malware-resistant) personal computing systems, more secure (from snooping) communications systems, substantially better authentication mechanisms, more secure energy generation and transmission equipment and facilities, more secure financial institutions, and more technologically-savvy regulatory and policing institutions.

Those are all really good things.

--

[1] Compare, for example, how society works with paper cash and gold bars versus Bitcoin:

* Paper cash or gold in substantial amounts is always stored in private or bank safes, or in high-security underground vaults that most people have only seen in movies. In contrast, Bitcoin private keys are often stored in general-purpose personal computers running a wide variety of applications, managed by people who don't know how to secure a computer.

* Transporting any substantial amount of paper cash or gold is often done via armored trucks operated by highly-trained security personnel. In contrast, Bitcoin private keys are transported via all sorts of highly insecure methods by people who don't know better.

* No sane person holding a substantial amount of cash or gold at home would ever let complete strangers come and go into their house as they please, while giving them keys to all doors, cabinets, drawers, and safes. In contrast, people regularly give complete access to their computers to complete strangers by willingly or unwillingly installing software created by such strangers.

* Our regulatory and policing institutions know how to identify, prosecute, and even prevent illegal gold and cash transactions, successfully keeping them to a tiny percentage of overall economic activity in most advanced economies. In contrast, those same institutions do not yet know how to cope with the use of Bitcoin for illegal activities.

--

Edits: moved comparison of Bitcoin to gold and cash to footnote; also, made minor changes to several sentences so they more accurately reflect what I intended to write in the first place.
That's because the arguments are ridiculous.

>At today’s value of roughly $1,000 per bitcoin, the electricity consumed by the bitcoin mining ecosystem has an estimated carbon footprint – or total greenhouse gas emissions – of 8.25 megatonnes (8,250,000 tonnes) of CO2 per year, according to research by Bitcarbon.org. That’s 0.03 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas output, or equivalent to that of the nation of Cyprus. If bitcoin’s value reaches $100,000, that impact will reach 3 percent of the world’s total, or that of Germany. At $1 million – which seems farcical but which may not be out of the realm of possibility given the artificially limited bitcoin supply – this impact rises to 8.25 gigatonnes, or 30 percent of today’s global output, and equivalent to that of China and Japan combined.

Can someone explain to me the validity of simply multiplying the value of Bitcoin against its current percentage of world's total greenhouse gas output? How is the carbon footprint of Bitcoin attached to the price of Bitcoin? I don't expect that the recent halving in price caused everyone to pack up their mining rigs and returned carbon emissions to 0.015% of global emissions.

Not to mention this author somehow manages to keep a straight face when arguing that Bitcoin could possibly account for more emissions than China and Japan.
Isn't Glacier overpriced, compared to other personal backup solutions?

Say, I have a mere 2TiB of historical data (various junk I made or collected over last ten years or so). Storing on them with Amazon is $20/mo, and if I want to look on that photos from 2008 I have to wait for several hours just to find that I misremembered where they were stored and pulled out wrong files. And unless it happened that I uploaded a good amount of data on that exact day, I'll have to pay for downloads.

Other offers for unlimited storage are Cyphertite at $10/mo, Crashplan at $6/mo, Carbonite at $100/yr, AltDrive at $4.5/mo and so on. While they're probably not-so-unlimited (they don't say that, but I guess one won't have much luck storing a petabyte), less respectable than Amazon, and most services lack an API and require to use not-so-trusty proprietary software that has to be sandboxed properly, Glacier doesn't look like a good deal to me unless we're talking about backing up some either quite big data (like tens of terabytes) or relatively small amounts of data (less than 500GiB).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to any of companies mentioned above. Just happens that I'm currently fleeing from Bitcasa (they suck hard) and looking at various options to not maintain a self-hosted NAS.
So a deflationary currency would lead to everyone simply grinding to a halt like those people on the planet in Serenity?
I must agree, it is very badly visible, unless I am missing some setting that would make it a solid block of bright color under current character...
I posted on this story and the issues it raises here: http://humanwithuterus.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/gendered-bre...

Would love your thoughts!
Agreed, very nice.
I've heard the speed issue mentioned as well, although slow compared to what, I wonder? I don't see offhand any fundamental reason why it would be dramatically slower than, say, a standard FLIP-based fluid sim. It amounts to advecting Lagrangian particles combined with solving the elastoplasticity equations on a Cartesian grid, with a snow-specific constitutive model.
Your questions are a little too vague; what sort of affiliate program are you looking for? What sort of software are you selling, to whom, in what context, for what purpose? Without those details, any solution anybody presents you is going to be very general and probably not very helpful.
I'm still against it. Burning caloric mass for energy when so much energy is around us is just plain ignorant. We need to move to solar and wind power.
I'm sure they will be soon.
You really seem to fail to grasp the difference between a currency (store of value) and a speculative investment (in hopes to beat inflation or exponential returns).

Let's make your chain of thought a bit more entertaining, How much of your traditional currency savings (in percentage) are you confident to convert to BTC?
C# and Java developers are cheap. So fuck security we'll throw more dev sat it.

Signed
NCR, Diebold, et al.
LOL no Mexicos Hubbert peak was about a decade ago. Cantarell is bouncing along empty, Chicontepec is useless, economically unviable for geological reasons. And they don't have much else worth mentioning. (edited to add, duh I'm obviously talking about geological petroleum reserves not some kind of racial/cultural commentary)

Its kind of like guano "production" from a century ago... Once its removed and shipped out, its gone, and all the money in the world isn't going to make shippable product appear out of thin air.

You're talking about two different scales. MX will never pump more oil than they did at peak a long time ago. That doesn't mean fat stacks of cash can't be made on the downslope or political intrigue can't be useful. For example, petroleum revenue declines are already causing a financial / political crisis in MX so transferring the blame from PEMEX to "vague groups of rich foreigners" is a wise political move as its always better for a local to blame the foreigners than the other locals. So the Cantarell tank is almost empty, almost entirely pumped out; better to blame Exxon than the CEO of PEMEX, at least if you're the leader of MX, at least on paper (the actual guys running MX are the drug gang leaders, which is a whole nother topic... take away petroleum revenues and legalize weed in the USA at the same time and MX would make Somalia look rich which is a crisis not just for MX but their neighbor to the north, which as a real political issue is why the USA will never legalize weed until long after the oil downslope is all resolved in MX... intentionally collapsing a neighboring country with a completely permeable land border is almost as dumb as the idea of the war on some drugs)
I read the post and wondered if it was prepared, and he waited until the next "crash" to post it. After all, that's the best time to post anti-bitcoin posts.
Personally I think http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mavh9/trustless_bi... is pretty cool. I am not aware of other systems which can do that.
I really rather agree.

I also don't really object to currency manipulation by central banks because they are a stabilising influence and (in theory) are there to stop the money supply from becoming a negative economic factor in times of recession etc.

I quite like the article, and I've made many of those arguments myself. I don't know that bitcoin will fail. It may be that there are enough people to keep it going indefinitely, people who buy in to the politics, who don't care about the politics, or don't know about the details. But I'd not be sad to see it go.

Crypto-currency is really cool. Next time I'd quite like one that isn't inherently deflationary and doesn't require burning millions of dollars worth of electricity to keep the system safe from attack. There has to be a more elegant way. But then I don't give a crap about decentralisation so there are multiple good schemes IMHO.
I'm the other co-founder of Treehouse. It's something that Ryan enacted back in the Carsonified days, but it's worked amazingly well and is just something we've always done.

Company folklore has it that Gill, Ryan's wife, basically commented that it seemed like the company was running them rather than them running the company back then, so their solution was to switch to working 4 days per week.
Relevant blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/11/26/the-monument-t...
I guess the industries that benefit from "the more RAM the better, with no limit" would be 3d rendering, video editing, simulations, and large-format photography. I am doing the latter, joining together thousands or tens of thousands of images into a single seamless photo. for example:

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-gigapixel-roppongi-hills-mori...

http://360gigapixels.com/london-320-gigapixel-panorama/

http://www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html

I am aware that in many applications, the GPU has taken over for some of the "heavy lifting", but that is not true in all cases. Given there are basically no real power or thermal considerations limiting the RAM for a computer like this, I would really like to know if this 64GB limit is real, or if it is due to what RAM modules are available on the market now. Is it a limit in the OS? Will the Mac Pro be able to have 256GB RAM in the future, or not?
Looks promising, but the search functionality does not work, one of the locations is "Shhhh...", and is very slow loading the browse capability.
I know Crashplan will let you mail them a hard drive for the initial seed. I think other services have this too. The solution posted isn't really much less than Crashplan from what I can see.
Or he could have just not emailed a bomb threat.
I think so. I only switched to ST3 because ST2 was being a giant pain in the ass with it frequently deciding to add my current theme to the 'ignored' packages, frequently not showing the sidebar when launched with a directory as an argument, and similar quirky bugs. ST3 has been solid as a rock in comparison and is a lot faster/immediate as well.
Lab Mice Are Being Kept Too Cold, Apparently
Why aren't my balls shrinking/disappearing?
Occasionally crashes for me (32-bit Arch). I just updated to the new build to see if it's better.
> Bitcoin in traceable. Much more traceable than something like cash or gold.

This is something that is often forgotten in these discussions. Everything is public with bitcoins. The only open issue is binding the transactions to an ip and via that to a person. And considering how widely the internet is monitored these days that should not pose a problem.

After that analyzing connections between wallets is a similar problem as analyzing friendships in a massive social network. Transactions form a graph from wallet to wallet.

If massive drug rings would use Bitcoin instead of cash it would actually be easier to track them down than it is right now.

In addition bitcoin is trivially forkable. It has only as much value as people want to give it. It is in essence as imaginary as any fiat currency is.
Yep. We've been working the 4-day work week since well before we raised money.
It's limited by the system rather than OS. I'm typing on an HP Z420, and there's a 64GB limit too.

Nothing to do with Windows and Mac OS.
I agree, but I also think the poster to whom you are responding has a valid point as well. The internet gives us access to a lot of useful information. It also gives us access to orders of magnitude more useless information. And the President of the United States? Well, I just hope that 30 years ago his information was better than what I can find by Googling. (Though hind-sight makes most things clear)

I think the President comparison is useful, because we, if nothing else, have the ability to access so much information that would have made the President's jaw drop three decades ago. However, I agree with the minor nitpick that he had access to higher quality, classified information that the rest of us will never see.

Also, I find this comic to be 100% relevant:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=759#comic
As a web developer I have to say: a 2x increase in JS performance is insignificant.

If I would profile most web apps, JS execution wouldn't account for much of the processing time, the DOM interactions are order of magnitude slower.

Users would barely notice a 2x increase in JS speed.

Also the snapshotting could be done with JS too if Google would be really concerned about startup time.

I would say that at this given moment in time the performance argument is BS, the real reason is that most of Google are Java developers that probably don't like JavaScript and they want something that looks more like Java, because that's what they are used to.

JavaScript has it's issues, however I think that TypeScript the superior approach towards these kinds of problems.
I don't know what to say about someone wanting to not learn, other than the old metaphorical:

"when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

I suggest trying out some screwdrivers for a while.
while it may seem hard to trust our financial system, you CAN trust that when you put your money in a bank, it will be there when you go to get it out

Unless your money is in Cyprus.

In any case, in Bitcoins you may not be able to trust banks, but on the other hand, you don't need to (as much), since you can store huge sums anywhere, even your own head.

Hell, print out a private key and store the paper in a safe of a regular bank, if you want to.
The bomb-hoaxing Harvard student was using Tor, but they caught him anyway
I'm struggling to think of tasks that necessitate 192GB of RAM that are really best suited for a Desktop machine and not for a server cluster.
I've been using it for a few months now on OSX and I don't think I've had a single issue so far.
> I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix.

Not as much in near-Earth orbit where we enjoy much of the Earth's magnetic field's protection. Astronauts come back with an elevated risk of cancer but not tremendously so.

> That and the relative lack of local oxygen.

Grow some photosynthetic algae too, which'll convert sunlight to oxygen.
Do they make DDR3 ECC sticks bigger than 16GB?
design work by Gregory Koberger!
I want to see image-based development (think Smalltalk, for example) that scales to large teams. Datomic-style time shifting of your code, a DVCS built directly into the environment basically, that allows for rapid experimentation, but that will work cross-user and cross-team -- we may have it as one large project, but I want to work locally and somehow merge with master, despite eschewing pure text/files.

A pipe dream, yeah, but one I continue to tinker with :)
Where I live (Sweden) even transaction through western union require identification card, and the clerk is required by law to ask about the nature of the transaction. The transaction will be booked, logged, and "shared" with most countries including the US.
See also EasyGit - https://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/
>The more meta-programming that a language allows, the more its functions will tend to be composable

Where are you coming up with that notion? Clojure's composability comes from being functional, not from meta-programming.

>The more composable it is, the more its libraries can be tied together without the need for an over-arching framework

A framework is just a library that inverts control. Your code is the library and the framework is the application. Writing main() yourself is not a benefit, and having a framework do it for you isn't detrimental.
A pegged CPU or GPU is pretty noticeable. Illicit mining has to be the best use of the access (instead of say, stealing $0.01 from an ad network or whatever).
It may have made a new filesystem and written that to your NAND Flash or eMMC drive partition. So the filesystem itself won't contain any old data.

Depending on the type of filesystem used, it may have walked through all the blocks of the NAND Flash, erased them, and then marked them as 'ready for use'.

If you are very serious about this, your best bet is to (A) stop using the phone now, (B) dump the raw partition contents using the Android tools.

The situation might be better or worse if the phone uses eMMC, but the above holds. The chip itself does the Flash management (wear leveling, bad block detection, etc.). So it can hide more, but there may be leftover data from the old /data partition still in the unused blocks.