skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know who tptacek is, I've read some of his papers, I've applied to the crypto challenges, I've disagreed with him in the past about the importance of BSAFE to the industry. It still comes across as petty to launch into a meta discussion of who's right and who's wrong on HN when there's much more interesting topics to consider based on this article's revelations.
Note that an R line of code can potentially be equivalent to many lines of C code - more frequently than the opposite.
Nexus devices do not ship with unlocked bootloaders. Users have to manually "fastboot oem unlock" for that to happen.
> Wait, tptacek is calling Bruce Schneier an NSA apologist?

I think that was intended as sarcasm. He's defending his previous position by saying that he (previously) had the same opinion as Bruce Schneier, whom no one would accuse of being partial to the NSA.
I didn't mean to counter what you were saying - I was just mentioning that nation-state is not the appropriate term for these entities.
Bucky figured out most of the problems we would be facing about now, and many of the solutions. He pointed out that, if we used our technology to efficiently supply our needs, we would be able to work for about two years and then retire having paid for our the rest of our lives during those two years. This would be possible starting sometime in the '70s. The important thing to remember about Bucky is that he was an engineer. A real one, not a software "engineer" (like me), and he calculated what he talked about. He was not a philosopher.
patio11 has a great story about how he learned of it, via Patrick Collison:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/06/stripe-and-ab-testing-ma...
Digging through this is kind of fun.
Queue your way to scalability with Iron.IO
Willing, sure, but probably less able, at least outside of the close allies like the UK.
You've misinterpreted me. I am in no way suggesting that Apple employees are smashing a Google bus. I'm just trying to clear up two big assumptions people in this thread are making.

1. Humanities degrees aren't monetarily worthless. They're quite valuable (measured in dollars) to people who are passionate about the user experience, because they help those people land and hold onto design jobs. I mentioned Apple because it has historically been really supportive of the liberal arts, but it's certainly not the only one.

http://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Apple-Tech...

2. The claim that the vandals have humanities or art degrees was (as far as I can tell) invented by HN because they think these guys (https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2013/12/20/800_gbus.jpg) look like hipsters. There's no evidence to support it.
One thing that may be happening (or start happening) here with these bus protests is that unrelated leftist groups from the Bay Area will seek to piggyback on to this and cause havoc. This is a definite trend if you follow political action in Northern California.

By far one of the most notorious offenders are the "Black Bloc" anarchist groups. One of their codewords during protests is "direct action" which means "break stuff, smash windows." I can't say anything about their political views, but it's a fact that they attract a greater and potentially more violent police presence.
Sales copy doesn't have to be lengthy. It won't cover every benefit and won't cover every objection. Consider that the initial sales copy on Khan Academy is six words: three for the benefit "Start learning now", and three to address what is apparently a main objection: "Completely free, forever."

As another example of addressing an objection in a complicated product, there's 23andMe. They take a different approach and address what might be the main objection, privacy violations, all the way at the bottom of https://www.23andme.com/howitworks/ It'd be interesting to see the change in signups if they'd made a reference to the privacy protections at the top of their homepage.
en(?!c)|rr|il|eat|^(do|p|b|c(?!a))

Glob 386 although not the cutest way to do it.
4 Reasons You Should Let Your Team Set its Salaries
That's not a fair example at all since hearing doesn't have an obvious relevance to coding, it's a mostly mental/visual activity (+ the physical activity of typing the code).

Schizoprenia on the other hand impacts the exact same faculty that is the most important one for programming, the brain. I don't think it's ignorant to be fascinated over how his illness so severly impacts his though processes while writing (and living), but apparently not while coding.
That page has a good sense of humor!

"Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program."

Plus a few more gems in there.
Causality, as such, is not directly observable.

The whole thing science does is produce and refine methods of inferring things that are not observed from things that are.

This is awful, awful science. Science works best when the entire process (from cause to outcome) can be subject to empiricism.

I think we've reached an impasse here, because clearly we differ on whether or not unobservable events can be reasoned about with any level of confidence. You seem to state that inference and models that produce predictions will lead to a "arbitrarily close to 100%" level of confidence, and that's where I completely, utterly disagree... especially when we're trying to talk "billions of years ago".

Even in the recent case of a broken window, only your neighbor who saw the event could have a decent level of confidence in what caused it. Millions of tests, models, and inferences would only produce an educated guess as to what happened, all of which would be obliterated by a neighbor simply explaining what they saw.

As I said before, I am strictly empirical when it comes to science and am willing to call my personal claims about unseen events as "faith" when I am trying to establish truth about them.
I actually prefer your second form: return as soon as you know you are done in the function/method -- if nothing more can be done, then don't pretend to do any more.

In the case of cleanup that must be done in the end, perhaps 2 functions would be better: a top level func to acquire and dispose of resources, calling an inner func to do as much work as it can with the resources. (assuming something like C that doesn't have a "finally" clause like Java)

I've never understood how finding the end of a long / nested mess of if/else blocks, rather than leaving the function, is somehow better. Which one feels more like a GOTO in terms of least astonishment?
Exactly!

Also, I think that the magazine will still be out of focus since the camera was focused primarily on the father.
I'm reminded of the case of Dani Bunten, born Dan, who was a video game pioneer and probably would be posting here on HN today if she hadn't died of cancer. Will Wright dedicated the Sims to Dani, Salon notes in her obituary:
http://www.salon.com/2003/03/18/bunten/

Dani wrote after undergoing sex reassignment surgery: "Don't do it! That's my advice. This is the most awful, most expensive, most painful, most disruptive thing you could ever do. Don't do it unless there is no other alternative. You may think your life is tough but unless it's a choice between suicide and a sex-change it will only get worse. And the costs keep coming. You lose control over most aspects of your life, become a second class citizen and all so you can wear women's clothes and feel cuter than you do now. Don't do it is all I've got to say... That's advice I wish someone had given me."

Her full essay is on a memorial site, though Google says it's malware-infected, so take precautions:
http://www.anticlockwise.com/dani/personal/changes/dont.htm

I wonder if the outcome (and her recommendations) would have been different if she were going through this today.

A final Dani quote: "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'"
A Very Startup Christmas
No, some people do not experience fear at all. It is not hidden anywhere. As scary as this may seem... lol
As mentioned in my closing statement.
> No, it's completely non-standard to place quotes around just one word from an original source.

It is non-standard in your particular dialect of English. It is common and accepted in others.

See the discussion on the use of quotes in this HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6446077
Google Festivus Easter Egg
The black art of hand tuned, run-time emitted, MSIL.

I have done some already; I intend to master it in 2014.
Client side encryption\decryption(can be done in javascript) with Gmail storing and passing nothing but encrypted data they themselves have no means of reading.

Of course, that would mean Google has no means of directing ads based on content so they would have no incentive to run Gmail in the first place...
This article demonstrates everything that is wrong with science journalism
Official press release on the Silk Road arrests
more like forged letter.
I'm surprised they let him go too. I guess we'll see if he dies of some form of aggressive cancer a year from now.
And? The OP was talking about it as fact despite not having seen the banners. The bias is still there.

As for laser printers, exactly how much of the printer industry is Google involved in? These people are targetting Google. Google doesn't make or promote printers. Yourself and the OP are creating a strawman just so you can burn them.

So, like I said, your bias is showing. There is no irony here, and certainly none 'at an all time high'.
Successful data teams hustle
YouTab - automatically get chords and sync them to youtube and soundcloud
Lockr aims to make coaching tasks easier, more efficient
This is, of course, the only safe (for the speaker) way to admit to normals what s/he is. Otherwise it is torches and pitchforks with you people. (Normal humans are far more frightening than any psychopath. ;-)
No, let's not go down the path of saying things are OK because they're better than the worst option out there.
As someone from former USSR, here's my take: the reason Khodorkovsky went to jail is because he violated the law of thieves, he stood up to Putin's bullying. If there was an across-the-board principled anti-corruption effort it would be a different matter, but there wasn't. I am tired of hearing Western's justify Putin's thuggery.

I personally come from Belarus, where a president that was democratically elected on anti-corruption charges assumed the role of a dictator. This was well expected by most of the intelligentsia: on the day of the run off election where Lukashenko's win (against another shitbird, of course, who ended up siding with Lukashenko afterwards) was confirmed my brother called us and told us to lookup 'Sulla' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla) in a history book. The practice of using "crusade against corruption" to assume dictatorial role is as old as democracy itself.

That said Putin is far more pernicious than Lukashenko: with Lukashenko there is no longer any more of a pretense of democracy than there was under, e.g., Saddam in Iraq (there are elections with mythical sounding figures and no campaigns). Putin is far more cunning: he's able to maintain the facade of democracy while having unchecked and unelected power. With recent revelations about "enhanced interrogations", NSA and FISA kangaroo courts, US -- while light years far from turning into a Russia or Belarus -- is starting to show some of these very same dangerous signs of police state(1) tactics via plausible deniability.

I'll leave this quote out there on the topic of rule by robber barrons (which the oligarchs were plain and simple) vs. rule by thugs on a moral crusade:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

- C.S. Lewis

(1) Here I am using the historical definition of police state: while today it's equated with totalitarianism (and neither Russia nor Belarus -- much less United States even under the worse scenario -- are totalitarian states, as anyone living in those countries who has also lived under Soviet rule can attest), the original meaning contrasted a 'polizeistaat' (rule by decree without any constitutional limitations) with a 'rechtstaat' (rights state -- constitutionally limited rule of law).

As a side note, it is unfortunate that the privatization process was botched enormously in USSR and its successor states. I always thought that the right approach to privatization should have been to follow the old Leninist slogan _literally_: factories to workers, farms to peasants, i.e., give the employees non-trivial amounts of shares/options in their workplace. Instead it became "factories and farms to corrupt middle managers and old Soviet elite".
Trusting trust :) This is one of, but not the main reasons why we build our own (Bloomberg B-Unit, PDF is the only good pic I see: http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/files/2013/11/b-unit_3...)
After 17 years, CSS gets variables
Ask HN: How do you forecast webapp hosting / maintenance costs?
For the purpose of constructing a financial model, I've been asked a few times (over the course of years) to provide an estimate for the variable costs involved in hosting, or more generally, keeping a web application online.

I'm curious to hear various approaches people have used, from wild-ass guess approaches with a few basic assumptions, to more rigorous approaches involving benchmarking.

Note that the technology would not be built yet, so true load testing isn't a viable option.
Every decision the SC makes they explain their reasoning in detail (which is published and made available online). Video of proceedings in front of the SC are also available broadcast on CPAC, and available online.

If you don't think a group of judges with years of experience knows the charter, the law, and applicable jurisprudence better than the average citizen then you're deluded and need to seek help.
Could someone explain what this phone is? The link is worthless and their site isn't very good at explaining it.
How is their coverage in SF?
I think Pavel is providing the financial backing for Telegram, rather than being an employee -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov
The Ban Calendar

July 20, 2012 - First step to ban plugins.
NPAPI plug-ins in Windows 8 Metro mode

October 31, 2012 - 2nd step to ban plugins.
Smarter NPAPI installs from the Chrome Web Store

November 15, 2012 - Banned packaged Apps v.1
Restricting extension APIs in legacy packaged apps

December 21, 2012 - First step to ban external extensions.
No more silent extension installs

September 23, 2013 - Banned plugins.
Saying Goodbye to Our Old Friend NPAPI

November 07, 2013 - Banned external extensions.
Protecting Windows users from malicious extensions

December 19, 2013 - First step to ban all extensions
Keeping Chrome Extensions Simple

Next? When Chrome extensions will be disabled at all?﻿
You lose. "Following orders" is not a defense. Established at Nuremberg trial of Nazis.
We have a little piggyback board with transformer, 10 MHz fox osc, and a dual op-amp to let us swing enough V to make the spec for twisted pair. Haven't started offering them publicly yet, but the code has been running two years. We gave an overview of the software defined NIC at SVFIG Forth Day 2012; video and powerpoint available thru SVFIG. The code is in the current arrayForth distribution. Still waiting for time to finish converting TCP to run on the 16-bit polyFORTH model but IP, ICMP, ARP, UDP all work. TCP only knows how to send a proper RESET.
> Yeah - all political protest that uses modern technology is automatically hypocritical.

No, only those protesting modern technology.

Protest Gitmo with modern technology all you want. Nothing wrong with that.
Browser Extension Password Managers Exposing Passwords Everywhere
Im very confused about what you are trying to prove with your server example. The hard part of your example has nothing to do with building a cheap server rack and everything to do with the fact that it is very difficult to build a website that attracts 50mm hits a month, a point you completely hand wave around
Thank you. He's a great man.
We are disagreeing.

Multiple inheritance does not admit an elegant (per Dijkstra: simple yet effective) mathematical description. Since it is a programming construct, however, there must be some description of it, which we also know must be ugly - we have ruled out it being elegant.

JOINs are not intrinsically complex in the way multiple inheritance is. And they need not have bad performance either: it is just that relational databases have not caught up yet with the advances in category and type theory, and suffer from that accordingly. Saying schema-backed databases are intrinsically bad because SQL databases suck is just like saying static typing is bad because it sucks in Java and C++.

And, yes, Universal Algebra is one big source of inspiration of mine, precisely because it leads to simple descriptions of large classes of structures.
Was this money tax free? How does that sort of thing work?

I hope bsafe licensees sue. Any one know of any serious efforts to replace some of the standard cipher suites in common code? AES -> Serpent, SHA -> Whirlpool etc...
SF has been predominantly for the young for a long time. Been here 20+ years and heard the same thing when I first arrived. You get to a certain age and move on (if you can).
I've sometimes wondered if the presence of psychopaths in powerful organizations leads to sociopathic behavior on the organizations part, even though most members are "normal." I'm thinking of situations like the outlandish behaviors of major investment banks defrauding their customers, knowingly selling them "toxic" mortgage back securities.

A small population of actors, inclined to gain power, and ruthless in conduct forces all members of the community to act in concert, lest they be cast out entirely.

This might also explain the disconnect of an organization like the NSA, made up of mostly decent, sincere people, engagin in profoundly anti-social, if not downright illegal, activities.
Yeah, I used two cards and one of them already got smurfed (I put on block on the other one as a prophylactic measure). At this point, if you used a card at any Target in the affected time period, just assume your card has been sold and is going to get used.

This is going to get macroeconomically expensive, I think.
For phone security, you actually don't want root enabled by default, especially if it is being sold to noobs. Even for pro users, it is best to be able to do most of what you need to do on the phone without requiring root privileges. Although ofcourse if it is really your phone, you should have the ability to root it, which you will still be able to do provided you have an unlocked bootloader, or even just if can run an root program from over usb. It is much more important to have an unlocked bootloader than just having root access pre-installed.
The op was successful because the analysis was accurate unlike yours.

As I stated below, the article more or less claims the author has magical supper powers. He overcomes the great internal struggle (with some help from the great expert) and ultimately chooses to use his powers for the good of the world.

The comment isn't transformative when the article is taken at face value- self aggrandizing.
Visual Binary Code Cube: Code-News for Hackers
I let streamingcrack.com expire a while back after sitting on it a couple years, and it's still free. YMMV.
Share this link.
Tutorials... That's your frame of reference? How can you expect to learn much when the quality of tutorials is well.. In the gutter.

Not only an extra arg, but dereferencing everywhere the arg is used.

The constant memory is quite easy to exceed, 64k is nothing. Still, you can't modify constant memory from in the kernel so it's really a different beast entirely. CUDA has clean persistence. Really, that's the big bonus for using it. Dynamic parallelism too on certain cards. And the cuFFT and various libs.

Really, I don't know what you expect when you talk shit on CUDA as if it's anti-trust and monopolistic. Recall that it came before OpenCL and much of OpenCL was based on it and the recommendations given by Nvidia to the committee. If you use fermi devices like the Titan and tesla, CUDA is going to give you more power in terms of both code and architecture output of nvcc to tune for performance. CUDA is awesome and so is OpenCL but don't shit on CUDA because open-source has your panties in a knot.
nerd-gasam!!!
I grew up hearing this man's name now and then, but it wasn't part of my culture. Is there a good explanation about why his ideas and engineering achievements are celebrated, in a particular context with his contributions to our lives today? I know about the geodesic domes obviously. His Wikipedia page is just facts that don't really help me understand his popularity.
None of this is about protesting modern technology.
Ask HN: need a bitcoin donation
Hi, i'm a programmer and i have been going through a rough month, i'm low on funds and i have to ask for anybody who is willing to give me a donation through bitcoin, this is the only community of hackers i know about, and i spend all my time here.How i found myself in this financial state is a long story, but please help, my bitcoin address is 17f6qMSiQvFXAxR4WqF6izygnbmbGPGrXL
Interestingly had Russia not seized and broken up Yukos, Khodorkovsky might very well be the richest man on earth today (and most certainly in the top 10). He was worth an estimated $15 billion in 2003 according to Forbes. The price of oil was about 30% what it is now, and it's very plausible Yukos' fortunes would have climbed with the recovery in Russia's economy (and assuming general business expansion).
This is why you want some people who are not primarily motivated by money. (Neither necessarily ascetics.)

In turn, why you want a society where a decent quality of life is not just obtainable but reliable without an all-consuming level of competition with others. (E.g. an independent researcher can actually gain access to and participate in a large and reasonably priced health insurance risk pool. And where money is not the overriding, if not sole, determination of judicial proceedings.)

Going very general in my comment, security is both a community effort and a personal responsibility. The more we "outsource" our own security ("Just trust us." -- Three Letter Agencies and private contractors), the more the price goes up while the quality of the results goes down.

You get the government you pay for, or... if you are more concerned about a quality, effective government, the government you participate in.

Hopefully, the pendulum is beginning to swing back from "pay for" to "participate in".
The title is pretty off.

The article does some pretty poor posturing though, "meteor more important than... bitcoin...." etc.
It's a chicken/egg problem - the reason most businesses stay away is that folks aren't already moving there - and "required infrastructure" i.e., coffee shops, trader joes, etc isn't present.

Those buseinsss and shops don't open there because the demographics aren't there.

The only thing that changes this is when a large organization decides to make things happen and move a significant base of people to that locale. City governments are generally not big enough to convince enough employers to move, and large companies only do this if they get massive tax breaks which can be unpopular with citizens and local businesses (i.e., it's a risky investment - which investors don't like).
How many times did you check your comment to make sure all grammar and punctuation is perfect? :)
It should be noted that this is just for the official extension listing, you can install any extension you want manually.
Do you know why psychopaths can't beat the test?